All posts by John Lee

John Lee is an administrator of the Open Borders website. Liberal immigration laws are a personal passion for him. See all blog posts by John.

Are immigration restrictionists pirates?

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Restrictionists frequently criticise unauthorised immigration by insisting on respect for the rule of the law. Dodging questions about the justness or reasonableness of immigration law, they continue to insist the law must be respected, independent of any concerns one might have about ethics or practicality. I wonder, then, if these same people have never illegally downloaded anything in their lives.

The parallels between intellectual property theft and immigration are rather interesting. As currently structured, both intellectual property and immigration laws are:

  • Difficult to enforce
  • Rarely consistently enforced except in extremely totalitarian states
  • When enforced, enforced quite arbitrarily
  • Considered unreasonable and/or unethical by many
  • Routinely disregarded by many, both in the developed and developing worlds

All the arguments for rounding up all “illegal immigrants” in the world and deporting them, as well as “tightening” border controls, are equally applicable to intellectual property laws. Governments should more seriously pursue those who illegally download MP3s, books, games, and software. They should take strong punitive action to ensure previous offenders don’t enjoy the fruit of their offenses, and strong preventive action to ensure nobody can offend these laws again. Consider the enforcement parallels:

  • Deport them all
    • Wipe all their hard drives
  • Build a wall
    • Shut down every filesharing website, including YouTube, Facebook, Google, etc.

You may think I’m kidding, but these enforcement parallels exist: when my alma mater finds a student has been using their wireless internet to illegally download or share files, they make them bring in their computer for a scan to ensure all offending material has been deleted. Automated copyright enforcement schemes even took out NASA’s live video feed, when a false positive led YouTube to declare NASA’s live video had violated the copyright of Scripps Local News.

My personal views of intellectual property law are irrelevant to the parallels I’ve drawn here (though if you’re curious, it’s somewhat close to my view of immigration law: quite clearly inadequate and unjust, but some restrictions will remain administratively necessary for the foreseeable future). Whether you support or oppose the current intellectual property legal regime, the parallels are clear to see. What I want to know is, have restrictionists never downloaded something illegally? Never watched a video on YouTube that wasn’t the uploader’s to upload? Never viewed a webcomic or read a PDF that wasn’t the sharer’s to share?

If restrictionists take their own arguments about the rule of law seriously, they should scrupulously avoid benefiting from the flagrant violations of the law entailed by what we consider day-to-day usage of the internet. It doesn’t matter how unreasonable or unenforceable the law is — the law is the law. Sure, piracy isn’t physically stealing from anyone — and neither is crossing an imaginary line some people drew on a map, for that matter. Besides, it’s not like you’re giving up the job that can pull you out of poverty, or giving up all hope of living with your family — all you’re giving up are movies, TV shows, books, and music which you can and should be paying for already. If restrictionists defending the “rule of law” want to be taken seriously, they can start by showing us the way forward in respecting the world’s copyright laws.

Immigration, a worse crime than child sex exploitation

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I want you to read this story about the families — the American families — who have been separated by US immigration laws. It is heart-wrenching. Most offenses, civil or criminal, have statutes of limitation. Not so for illegal immigration. Most courts offer leniency for offenders who co-operate with law enforcement. Not so for illegal immigration. Most courts have discretion in varying punishment for offenders. Not so for illegal immigration.

Somehow, we see immigrating illegally as beyond the pale — as something that merits the toughest, most inflexible, inhumane punishment possible short of physical harm. The mandatory sentence for people who have been unlawfully present in the US for over 1 year is deportation for 10 years. Those who have crossed the border unlawfully more than once can be barred for life.

To put things in perspective, the median prison term for someone convicted of child sex exploitation in the US is a little over 5 years. The median prison term for molesting a child is half the mandatory deportation term for an “illegal immigrant”! The average sentence for those convicted of “alien smuggling” is a little under 2 years (see the US Sentencing Commission’s 2012 report). In other words, “illegal immigrants” are given a sentence over 5 times longer than the smugglers who aid them!

People blithely say “The law is the law; it must be enforced.” But in what world does it make sense to treat immigrants worse than child rapists? In what world does it make sense to punish people for choosing to be with their families, when the law gives them no lawful option to do so? There are some legal immigrants who have been waiting outside the US for their family reunification visas since 1989 (see the State Department’s latest visa bulletin).

Let’s not play dumb here. Immigrants and their families are no idiots; they know they’re being treated worse than child molesters:

“When they give out these bars, they’re not just giving them to one person. They’re giving them to a family,” Anita said. “It’s actually worse than a prison sentence. People in prison can do a lot less time, and do a whole lot worse things.”

If the law prevents people from being with their families, and then punishes them for following the most fundamental human instinct, it’s not the immigrants who are wrong — it’s the immoral, barbaric legal system which tears families apart. This is not a radical position; this is the official United Nations interpretation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty signed and ratified by most of the world (dark green states have signed and ratified; light green have signed but not ratified; grey have done neither):

This is not a question of theory; as a question of practice, the UN has ruled that under the Covenant long-time residents of a country, even if they do not hold citizenship, have the right to be treated as such — especially if they have long-standing family ties to that country. In Nystrom v Australia, the UN ruled that Stefan Nystrom — a Swedish citizen who until his deportation had only spent 27 days of his entire life in Sweden — had the right to live in the only country he had called home his entire life, and the country where his entire family lives.

It is unequivocally clear that modern deportation laws in most countries violate international laws and norms on human rights. Nystrom’s case is an unusual one because he is a convicted sex offender and possibly mentally ill — but if he had been born 27 days later as an Australian national, nobody would suggest that Australia ought to deport him instead of jailing him for his crimes. How can one justify deportation laws which tear apart families where no crime has been committed, except the “crime” of illegally crossing a border to be with one’s family? American Senator Marco Rubio once said:

If my kids went to sleep hungry every night and my country didn’t give me an opportunity to feed them, there isn’t a law, no matter how restrictive, that would prevent me from coming here.

If my kids went to sleep without me every night and my country didn’t give me an opportunity to be with them, there isn’t a law, no matter how restrictive, that would prevent me from joining them. Under any reasonable sense of morals or ethics — and under international law — there is no possible way to fault the families of “illegal immigrants” for being “illegal”. The only blame lies with the immoral legal systems of the world that violate every human being’s right to be with their family.

“I couldn’t accept that aging rulers simply decreed: “‘You can’t leave the country; you have to stay home in the small cage!'”

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Der Spiegel has an interesting story on how one East German couple plotted to emigrate “legally” to West Germany. It’s an interesting read, and it calls to mind one of the most fundamental moral arguments for open borders:

“I wanted to live, I wanted to discover the world,” says Jens. “I couldn’t accept that aging rulers simply decreed: “‘You can’t leave the country; you have to stay home in the small cage!'”

Today, Jens writes independent biological assessments on nature conservation projects. He hasn’t seen Marion for 20 years. But he has cherished the memories of their forbidden journey, along with photos taken at the time. It was his children who started to ask him what happened back then. “If you want something, pursue it with all your heart,” he tells them.

It takes a special kind of person to believe that 9,000 kilometers is not too far to travel to go from East to West Berlin. Perhaps this is the kind of thing you can only come up with if you’re 24 years old and in love; if you can put up with not knowing in the morning where you will sleep that night; if the end of the forbidden journey is open; and if you see the dangers along the way as the challenge of a lifetime. And if you seize your freedom, instead of asking for it.

Indeed. Jens’s story resonates with us, and rightly so: every human being identifies with questing for freedom. Seeking one’s fortune is an ancient story-telling trope. Who are the people today simply decreeing “You can’t leave the country; you have to stay home in the small cage”? East Germany no longer exists, but the modern closed borders-regime is barely one step more progressive than East Germany’s.

Wage discrimination’s elephant in the room

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Besides illuminating the horror of both candidates’ immigration policies, the 2nd US presidential debate this year was noteworthy for other reasons, such as Mitt Romney’s by-now infamous “binders full of women” remark. Romney was responding to a question about what he would do to erase the wage gap between men and women. The questioner specifically asserted that women make “only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn.”

The Atlantic has an interesting interview with labour economist Francine Blau on this; it seems clear from the data that some statistically-inexplicable wage gap exists between male and female workers, although the difference is closer to 9% than the 28% suggested at the debate. What didn’t come up in the debate, and what Blau failed to highlight, is that these wage gaps, appalling as they are, are the tip of the iceberg. I refer, of course, to the horrifying place premium. Continue reading Wage discrimination’s elephant in the room →

Closed borders kill people

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Open borders advocates have long seized philosophical hypotheticals to argue that open borders would, quite literally, save lives. Restrictionists tend to jump through all kinds of hoops to argue that preventing someone from earning an honest living isn’t economically equivalent to robbing that person of some of their income — which, in extreme cases, can obviously cause death. But it isn’t hard, at all, to find cases where closing the borders quite literally kills people.

Historically, developed countries have welcomed political refugees, knowing that to turn someone away would likely lead to their death. We regret and condemn cases where the civilised world has failed to do this, such as when the 1940s US denied visas to European Jews (perhaps the most famous victim of American oppression here being Anne Frank). West Germany welcoming East German escapees or the US welcoming Vietnamese refugees come to mind; even today, the US near-automatically grants residency to Cuban refugees.

While reading an article in the New York Times today about the corner of the world where the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran meet, all I could think about was the power of open borders to transform people’s lives. I don’t know many people who would find it appealing to live in Iran, yet there are literally people willing to run the risk of death just to get into Iran (over 2 million of them, by one estimate from the article). That’s the immense power of the place premium.

I don’t have extremely strong views on Iran, but after reading the article, I don’t think I had a very positive impression of the country — to put it mildly. The way it treats undocumented Afghan workers, literally murdering people for crossing a line someone drew on a map, is unconscionable. Yet almost everything about Iranian immigration policy, short of murdering immigrants, resembles immigration policy in almost every country of the world. What makes Iranian immigration policy barbaric, but US or European immigration policy civilised?

Something else to chew on: Australia’s policy of jailing immigrants has backfired, because Indonesians are willing to risk death on the open seas to immigrate to Australian jails. The place premium’s existence and power are undeniable: people risk life and limb to get into Iran. They risk life and limb to get into an Australian jail, because that’s still a better life than what they had before. If closing the borders isn’t equivalent to taking food away from a starving man, it’s pretty damn close — especially when you need to literally kill some people to keep the borders closed.