Welcoming the Vietnamese

This file is a short polemical policy essay. Its scope is a single controversy: the use of the Jones Act against Vietnamese-American fishermen in California. Rothbard’s central thesis is that an old maritime protectionist law, originally justified by citizenship and national-security claims, has been revived to protect inefficient domestic competitors and to punish productive immigrants who had sought refuge from communism.

Rothbard begins by placing the episode in a longer history of American exception-making. The United States, he argues, was “largely the land of the free,” but maritime protection was an early and durable violation of that principle. The Jones Act becomes, in his telling, a case study in how obsolete statutes remain available for renewed coercive use:

The Jones Act had long ago become a dead letter, but let a law remain on the books, and it can always be trotted out to be used as a club for protectionism.

The essay then moves from historical background to contemporary injustice. Vietnamese refugees, described as industrious and peaceful residents, have succeeded in commercial fishing by pooling resources and serving Asian food markets. Their success, rather than any real danger, is what draws state action. Rothbard’s conceptual move is to strip the legal issue of its official language and recast it as competitor-driven exclusion: inefficient “Anglo competitors” invoke the state against more productive immigrants.

Unfortunately, the latest victims of the Jones Act are Vietnamese immigrants who were welcomed as refugees from Communism, and who have proved to be thrifty, hard-working, and productive residents of the United States, working toward their citizenship.

The strongest irony in the essay is the government’s national-security rationale. Rothbard emphasizes that these fishermen are legal permanent residents, engaged in ordinary commerce, yet are treated as threats because they have not completed citizenship procedures. The contrast between peaceful livelihood and official suspicion sharpens his critique of immigration restriction, protectionism, and bureaucratic power:

The fact that these are peaceful, legal, permanent residents makes all the more ridiculous the U.S. government's contention that they "present a clear and present threat to the national security."

The argument’s structure is cumulative. First, Rothbard identifies the Jones Act as an outdated protectionist privilege; next, he shows how competitors use it; then he adds a second regulatory trap. The government’s answer—that the fishermen can use smaller boats closer to shore—is, for Rothbard, not a solution but a “Catch-22,” because environmental rules prohibit the gill-netting needed in those waters. His account thus links two kinds of state intervention: economic protectionism and environmental regulation.

Because here, in a classic governmental Catch-22 situation, our old friends the environmentalists have already been at work.

The essay’s rhetoric is characteristically Rothbardian: morally sharp, anti-statist, and suspicious of any public-interest rationale that benefits organized interests. Environmentalists are cast not as neutral protectors of nature but as another pressure group whose priorities override human enterprise. The concluding synthesis presents the Vietnamese fishermen as victims of collectivism twice over: first abroad, then in America through legal and regulatory restraints.

And so, seeking freedom and freedom of enterprise as victims of collectivism, the Vietnamese have been trapped by the U.S. government as pawns of inefficient competitors on the one hand and anti-human environmentalists on the other.

The relevance of the piece lies less in technical maritime law than in its broader libertarian argument about dormant statutes, regulatory layering, and the vulnerability of immigrants to politically connected incumbents. Rothbard treats the case as evidence that laws justified by security, conservation, or public order can become instruments of exclusion. His core conceptual moves are to reinterpret national security as protectionism, environmental regulation as anti-human constraint, and immigrant enterprise as the clearest test of whether America remains committed to freedom of enterprise.