Tag Archives: attitudes to immigration

Rand Paul, Hans Hermann Hoppe, and Immigration Policy

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This post is the first part of a new series of posts dealing with the upcoming U.S. Presidential Election.

 

Rand Paul officially announced his candidacy for the 2016 U.S. Presidential election on April 7th, 2015. Unofficially Rand Paul has been preparing to run for the Presidency ever since he first came onto the spotlight as an electable messenger of his father’s, Ron Paul’s, libertarian ideals. There has been much discussion in the libertarian movement whether Rand Paul is a ‘true’ libertarian or if he is a ‘beltarian’ more concerned with getting elected to the White House. Those who argue the latter point out that he diverges from his father on several policy issues.

One issue in which both father and son remain near identical in is in immigration. Unfortunately immigration is one of the few policy areas where Ron Paul is at odds with libertarian principles. To his credit Ron Paul isn’t in favor of building a fence across the Mexican-US border, but his opposition to such a fence is that it could be used to restrict the freedom of travel of US citizens.  Rand Paul in turn might be against open borders, but focuses his attacks using second-order arguments (e.g. Migrants increase the welfare state).

To understand why Ron Paul, and ultimately his son Rand Paul, are not proponents of open borders we must discuss the wider libertarian movement.

Libertarianism has historically been sympathetic to, if not necessarily open borders, minimal immigration restrictions. This is of no surprise given that most founders of the modern libertarian movement were migrants fleeing tyranny in Europe. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek were both Austrian migrants. The infamous Ayn Rand, for whom Rand Paul is not named after, was a Russian migrant. Ayn Rand was also the libertarian movement’s best known illegal alien and one of its strongest proponents of open borders.

It was a strange incident then when a faction of libertarian intellectuals came out in favor of migration restrictions in the late 20th century. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a German migrant himself, convinced Murray Rothbard on the legitimacy of migration restrictions. Hoppe, who remains one of the few major libertarian intellectuals in favor of migration restrictions, argued that open borders were tantamount to forced integration. Hoppe often points out that in an anarcho-capitalist society home owners would be free to refuse to associate with whomever they please and that open borders would violate them of this right. As my co-blogger, Nathan Smith, often points out though it is possible for open borders to exist with private discrimination and thus Hoppe’s argument do not serve as a case for migration restrictions.

Hans Hermann Hoppe did not manage to win the debate on migration and the libertarian movement remains largely sympathetic to open borders, but he nonetheless managed to convince some libertarians, most importantly the Lew Rockwell – Murray Rothbard circle. This circle included Ron Paul who was a friend of Murray Rothbard. Ron Paul in turn influenced his son’s political views. In short Hans Hermann Hoppe’s views on migration have culminated in Rand Paul having negative views towards open borders. One wonders how things might turned up if Walter Block, also a member of the Rothbard-Rockwell circle, had dominated discussions on immigration instead of Hans Hermann Hoppe!

There are those in the libertarian movement who believe that Rand Paul is not as much of an immigration hawk as I have outlined above. To be fair, Rand is not as hostile to open borders as Hans Hermann Hoppe himself but he is no friend to open borders. During the 2013 debate on Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) Rand voted against the passage of the bill. He voted against CIR arguing that it did not grant enough congressional oversight to ensure that the border was secured. The problem with this argument is that immigration creates constant political gridlock and that by increasing the role of Congress it would become increasingly unlikely that immigration liberalization would ever take place. It is difficult enough to get Congress to address immigration once every few decades; the last major overhaul was in the 80s. It is unthinkable to imagine Congress repeatedly addressing immigration as Rand desires. It is partly due to these political difficulties in immigration policy that federalizing immigration policy is an attractive option.

Rand Paul, who is often seen as being more politically savy than his father, surely understands this. If so, why does he insist on a poison pill that would kill any meaningful immigration reform?

As a recent interview with Rand Paul by Andy Hallman showcased, Rand is willing to make the Friedman argument that open borders are incompatible with the welfare state. However Friedman’s argument wasn’t against open borders; Friedman’s argument was that as long as we had a welfare state it would be preferable to promote illegal immigration.

By no means should this post be taken to mean that Rand Paul should not be supported by libertarians in the upcoming 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Immigration, while important, is not the sole policy issue of relevance.


Further reading:

Andy Hallman | Interview with Rand Paul on Immigration

Nathan Smith v. Hans Hermann Hoppe

Nathan Smith | Private Discrimination is Morally Fine & Should Be Legal

Vipul Naik | Open borders and the libertarian priority list (part 1)

Vipul Naik | Open borders and the libertarian priority list (part 2)

Hans Hermann Hoppe | On Immigration & Forced Integration (offsite link)

Murray Rothard | Nations by Consent (offsite link)

Walter Block | Hoppe, Kinsella, and Rothbard on Immigration, A Critique (offsite link)

Open Borders: The Case | Anarcho-Capitalist Counterfactual 

 

I don’t care about immigration sob stories. This is about justice, not compassion

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To many, even those sympathetic towards it, I imagine liberalising immigration policy is just another pet bleeding heart cause — similar to saving the environment, helping battered women, aiding the homeless, etc. It can seem arrogant of open borders advocates to compare our cause to historical antecedents such as the abolition of slavery or apartheid. And I get these sentiments — in fact, I quite agree with them on a very fundamental level.

In the daily news, it’s rare to not come across a photograph or story of some activists fighting for an immigration-related cause. Sometimes it’s for the cause of allowing immigrants in the US to get in-state university tuition benefits; other times, it’s protesting the detention of asylum-seekers (whether in the US, UK, Australia, or elsewhere); most commonly, it’s a protest, somewhere in the US, demanding the cessation of deportations. Recently, the cause celebre has been, of course, the problem of children migrating to the US. Now, to be fully honest with you, I often look at these pictures and read these stories, and feel that I just don’t care.

Now, of course I do care very much about the issues at stake here: I spend a lot of time writing about open borders, for pete’s sake! So why do I read about immigration in the news and just go “meh”?

To add to the puzzle, this is actually a very personal and emotional issue for me. It’s impossible, actually, for me to understand migration without reference to emotion and personal experience. As a child, I lived for years knowing that my mother could be deported if she and my father were to separate, or even if she were to be widowed, thanks to my country’s immigration laws. As a student in the US, I wondered whether I’d ever be able to get a job here, with visa laws effectively banning me from taking a job outside investment banking or management consulting. And now as a US resident, I’ve seen my friends — and even my girlfriend — be forced to leave this country, thanks to its patently ridiculous laws.

So why then my disconnect from all these stories? My epiphany came when I read a story in the Washington Post about an American woman bidding her Bangladeshi husband farewell before his impending deportation. I’ve felt the same fears and worries they do and lived through similar frustration and farewells thanks to arbitrary immigration controls. I could put myself in their shoes.

Now this actually made me despair further: how can advocates of liberal migration laws win people’s hearts and minds with sob stories like these? Hardly any citizens will ever face the violent force of their own governments’ exclusionary immigration policies. How can citizens begin to care about the effects of their immigration laws, let alone be moved to support changing them? How, when even someone like me — one who deeply cares about immigration and demands open borders — can only be affected by a story that’s personally connected to my own?

Then, I read this comment on the Washington Post article:

Sorry, but she is making a choice here and it is not for her husband. If she is placing all these things before him, then it cannot be helped. If I were in her shoes there would be no way that I would not be on that plane with my spouse. I might miss Kansas, but I would make the necessary arrangements and I would be at his side.

Our actions reveal where are loyalties lie, and this lady appears to be more concerned with living in Kansas and the job she loves and all the rest, than in being with the man whom she married.

My reaction to this was anger. I fumed. To restate the cold logic here: “If the government forces your husband to live in a strange country where there are no jobs for you or him, and you choose to keep your job and the home you’ve both shared for decades, you clearly just love money and comfort more than your husband.” Pretty easy to say this when you’ve never had the government kick your partner out of the country — as has actually happened to me and to many of my friends.

After I calmed down, I asked myself why a commenter might react to the story in this manner. As a general rule, people are not randomly vindictive. So why the harsh reaction aimed at this woman and her husband? The obvious answer is that the commenter did not think to question the justice system’s decision to exclude someone; if the system has decided, the decision must be correct. Justice must be served.

But why is it that we don’t think to question the justice of this system? Why does this story not move us to ponder whether the law here was just? Why do the journalists and activists putting these stories out there not explicitly question the justice of an immigration system which arbitrarily excludes innocent people purely because of their condition of birth?

I’ve come to think that the reason I don’t care when I see pictures of hunger strikers protesting deportations, or picketers demanding immigrant access to certain benefits, and so on, is because these stories have always been framed in terms of compassion — not justice.

This is not to say I consider myself heartless or lacking compassion, although I am not in any place to judge myself. Rather, it is that when I read about stories which don’t directly affect me, it is simply difficult to relate to them on an emotional level. And when these stories try to engage me by asking me to feel compassion for those affected, I only feel a sense of weariness.

There are a million causes in the world, and almost all of them seem to be asking for my compassion when I open the daily papers. Today it’s genocide in Darfur; tomorrow it’s children being kidnapped in Nigeria; next week, it might be people rendered homeless in the wake of a natural disaster (tsunami? hurricane? earthquake?); next month, perhaps another school shooting. I don’t have the time or energy to be emotionally invested in every single one of these issues.

And to the degree that I might choose to invest my emotions, there’s no particularly compelling reason to choose immigration as my humanitarian cause du jour over, say, victims of domestic violence or poaching endangered animals. You can tell me all the reasons why I ought to care more about immigration, but if you have to give me a 21-point list of reasons why I ought to care — if your sob story cannot speak for itself — then you’re not likely to win me over.

It may strike one as galling to so baldly rank and prioritise humanitarian or compassionate causes, but this is exactly what all of us as citizens and individuals do all the time. Virtually every one of these activism stories pulls at the humanitarian, compassionate angle, but none of us has the time to devote to more than a handful of such issues.

Now, the compassionate angle I think actually works especially well for many causes. But I think for migration it seems singularly unlikely to work; if anything, it can easily become counter-productive. Unlike with a cause like animal rights or famine relief — almost everyone’s played with a pet or felt the pangs of hunger before — few of us have experienced the feeling of being persecuted by the state under the aegis of arbitrary immigration laws. You can’t count on your audience to share the emotional experiences you might have as a migrant, activist, or journalist who has personally seen the horror of arbitrary immigration laws.

When you play up the compassionate angle in the story of a victim of deportation, what are you asking for? Unlike with many humanitarian causes, you are not asking for charitable donations. Rather, you are asking people to demand a change or an exception to settled law.

Now, we can certainly demand that laws be changed on compassionate or humanitarian grounds. But how convincing is this? If people believe the justice system has found someone guilty of a crime, are they going to believe the criminal ought to get clemency simply because we ought to have compassion for the criminal? In an ideal world, this could perhaps be true. But in the real world, people believe that if you’re a criminal, you ought to pay the price set by the justice system.

As a result, the constant framing of immigration as a question of compassion perplexes me. This is like asking for a slave to be set free, not because laws permitting slavery are barbaric and need to be repealed, but because poor Uncle Tom really needs to be free, and oh isn’t it such a shame that in this case the law is irrationally separating him from his family?

I mean, yes, the law is inhumane and barbaric and evil — but that’s the whole point! Asking for compassionate special pleading on purely humanitarian grounds, without ever questioning the barbaric law that is in place, simply throws your entire case away. Somehow, this is the modus operandi in how immigration activists campaign for liberal reforms!

Put more bluntly, the case for more liberal migration laws, and yes, open borders, cannot rest on compassionate grounds. Yes, one can make such a compassionate case. But there are a million things needing our compassion. What makes immigrants so special?

The point is not that immigrants are special. No, the point is that immigrants are just like you and me. The point is that our law owes them justice, same as the law owes any and all of us. We cannot use the force of law to exclude people from society in an unjust manner. We cannot allow our government to perpetrate injustice and oppression in our name.

That’s what makes immigration and open borders so compelling to me. I don’t see immigrants as some group in need of special pleading or special compassion from me or the government. I see migrants as ordinary people who, same as anyone else, need to be treated justly. The reason I care so much about this issue is not because I feel immigrants need my special attention — although I think there is a case for more compassion towards those who are strangers in our land. I simply believe that immigrants, like all of us, are entitled to just treatment under the law.

Rohingya being deported from Bangladesh

Immigration reform and open borders are not about making life better for a special, deserving class of people. They are about abolishing systems of injustice which unjustly oppress ordinary people. The woman who loses her deported husband does not need our compassion; she does not need a special exemption from our irrational laws. What she needs, what millions of others like her need, is justice.

Partisan politics is holding immigrants’ lives and liberty hostage

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In the midst of the ongoing US government shutdown that took effect earlier today, people have been accusing politicians on one side or another of holding the nation and its people hostage to partisan politics. The shutdown will have tragic effects for many lives, no doubt — wage earners are forced to stay home from work, needy people are forced to go without the benefits their government promised to them. But let’s not forget the entire class of innocent people whose lives and freedom have been held hostage to partisan politics for years, if not decades: the innocents, citizens or not, who have fallen prey to the US government’s War on Immigrants.

Some months ago, the National Journal ran an article on the current US immigration debate titled What Undocumented Workers Really Want, with the subtitle: It’s not always citizenship. They just want to do their jobs, cash their paychecks, and be left alone. The article mostly focuses on the lives of restaurant owners and their immigrant employees. It illustrates that the political concerns driving the current US immigration debate are extremely remote from the lives of the people who immigration reform is supposed to help. And one takeaway from this is that Republicans may well be right when they accuse Democrats of cynically caring more about the votes of immigrants than the lives of those immigrants.

The article makes a number of observations about the lives of the unauthorised immigrants in US society:

  • They save substantial amounts of money (sometimes in the thousands of dollars) to pay for smuggling them into the US
  • They lose contact with their family, because they cannot leave the US: one woman in the story had to send condolences for the death of her father by mail
  • They fear any contact with the law, because a simple traffic stop could put them away for life
  • They can easily find employment despite their lack of legal documentation, but always live in fear of losing their job should their legal status be discovered
  • Many employers love their unauthorised workers — not because their labour is cheap, but because they value their employees (to the point that one employer in the story told their unauthorised worker upfront who disclosed her unauthorised status to them that they would worry about it only if the government actually went after them)

The article is obviously only one side of the story. But I think this side of the story is one that the larger empirics back up: immigrants in the US, both authorised and unauthorised, have fantastic labour force participation rates. They have lower rates of detention or incarceration. Most immigrants, whether they are legal or not, are ordinary and innocent people.

The law at the present forces these people to live like criminals. They are on the run from the law for a “crime” that, if it can be called a crime at all, occurred years ago in most cases. There is an easy way to fix this: grant legal residency to these people. Lift the sword of Damocles that threatens to deport and separate them from their homes, families, and careers.

Yet as the article observes, this is not what the current debate about US immigration reform turns on. Rather, the Democratic politicians pushing for “reform” want to make these immigrants into full-fledged citizens — whether today, or some point in the future. Democrats are especially fearful that some immigrants never be able to naturalise.

The article hints that Democrats are motivated by the prospect of these immigrants’ votes. Certainly, Republicans are motivated by the prospect of stopping the addition of these new voters. But what excuse does either party have to hold these people’s liberty and the interests of society hostage to their own partisan interests?

On any other issue, we would be appalled if a political party blatantly blocked or supported an initiative, not because they thought it was a good or bad idea, but because they were afraid of its implications for their partisan strength. The ongoing debate about voter identification rules in the US is surely driven in large part by partisan motivations. Yet you will barely find any Democrats protesting stricter voter ID laws because “It prevents Democrats from voting”. Neither will you find Republicans supporting stricter laws for the same reason. Both cite policy reasons for their position, not partisan politics. But politicians and ordinary people think nothing of baldly citing “It will add more Democratic voters to the rolls” as reason enough to support or oppose the regularisation of the 11 million+ unauthorised immigrants in the US.

It’s galling enough that Republicans are blocking immigration policy reforms on the basis that this is harmful to them. But one oft-overlooked point is that Democrats are similarly likely to overlook potential compromises on the basis that this doesn’t generously enough grant citizenship to unauthorised immigrants. In other words, when given the choice between ending the War on Immigrants (but with less-than-ideal citizenship provisions) or continuing it, Democratic politicians have often chosen to stick with the status quo.

The article obliquely agrees with the Democratic spiel that not granting immigrants citizenship makes them a vulnerable subclass of the community. But how would they be any less vulnerable than they are now? The government’s War on Immigrants makes these people vulnerable to deportation at any time that would take them from their jobs, families, and homes. Even if they do not face deportation, they cannot progress in their career because they can lose their job at any time. The government literally has the power to stop all this with the stroke of a pen, and make this entire class of people much less vulnerable to the oppression of harsh employers or overbearing bureaucrats — all this without the politically explosive granting of citizenship.

Why should we hold protection for these people hostage to the partisan interests of any party, Democratic or Republican? For the Democrats, is holding out for citizenship for these immigrants worth allowing the government to continue spending its scarce resources on terrorising them and their communities? Is it truly humane to support continuing government-sponsored terrorism of innocent families and employers simply for the sake of shutting down any chance of a guest-worker programme?

In fairness to the Democrats, they have not been the primary roadblocks in the current US immigration policy debate. The Republican members of the US House of Representatives may be the ones standing in the way of further movement on amnesty for the 11 million unauthorised immigrants like those in the article. But there are still plenty — by one count, 84 — who believe in ending or at least tamping down the War on Immigrants. It should be incumbent on the Democrats in the House to do all they can to work with these Republicans to find an acceptable compromise and move forward. If we can somehow obtain Republican support by tightening provisions in the law for citizenship in return for ending the War on Immigrants, we should seriously consider this option. We can’t just take it off the table.

Immigrants are no different from anyone else. They want to live in peace with their families and earn honest wages. It makes a mockery of the Republicans’ and Democrats’ supposed commitments to the family and to the hard worker when they prefer to keep the War on Immigrants going instead of offering these people a path to legal residency. It’s one thing to play political games about infrastructure projects. It’s a completely different thing to play political games about bringing the entire armed force of the state to bear on people who just want to earn an honest living and live with their families. Keeping the war on these people going, whether for the sake of a broader naturalisation policy or purely playing a partisan game, is absolutely unacceptable.

Uphold the rule of law, and let your illegal immigrants stay

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A common restrictionist trope is that allowing people who have settled unlawfully to regularise their legal status would be an intolerable departure from legal tradition and the rule of law. But in his recent book Immigrants and the Right to Stay, philosopher Joseph Carens demonstrates that the opposite is true: our legal and moral traditions demand a rules-based system for regularising the unauthorised. Justice and the rule of law are perverted when they deny people due process and instead offer them justice so delayed that to call it anything but denied would make the term “delay” a mockery.

Carens’s basic contention: anyone who has lived in a community for a certain period of time can be reasonably considered a member of that community and should be afforded similar rights as other members of that community. This sounds rather abstract, so let me put this to you: someone is a pillar of your community. Attends your religious services, well, religiously. Always ready to lend a helping hand when a neighbour could use it. Always the first to chip in a donation for someone in need. Never in trouble with the law. One day, the authorities raid his home and evict him, on the grounds that a long, long time ago, he didn’t fill out the right form allowing him to join this community. Not that he murdered someone; not that he trafficked drugs; he filled out the wrong forms, and that makes him “illegal”.

Carens’s contention, which makes eminent sense, is that your status as part of a community of people does not flow from a piece of paper. It flows from your contributions to and standing with your peers. We do not gain our humanity, our family, our friends, our neighbours from the law. We learn about and make our families, friends, and neighbours long before the law ever got or gets involved. In his book, Carens notes that the British immigration authorities once tried to deport an 80-year-old woman who had lived in the United Kingdom her entire adult life, and only public outrage stopped them. If living somewhere for 60 years makes you a member of the community, Carens notes, then might not a shorter time period still grant you similar standing? He ultimately proposes a waiting period of 5 to 7 years. Irrespective of what the right period should be, the principle is clear: living somewhere in peace with your fellow man eventually makes you a part of that community. The law cannot tear that community apart without tearing up basic morality.

Carens notes that tradition is on his side: that even countries like the US, where today any amnesty is seen as taboo by many, have a long history of allowing people who have lived there for a certain period of time to regularise. Even today, many countries have ongoing rules-based regularisation regimes: simply identify yourself to the authorities, present proof you’ve lived peacefully in the community long enough, and the sword of Damocles over your head is lifted.

Basic legal principles are on Carens’s side too: typically, the statute of limitations on most crimes isn’t more than a few decades, and for many crimes it’s under a decade. (The statute of limitations refers to the period of time after a crime after which the state can no longer prosecute you for it.) In most jurisdictions, only the worst crimes, such as murder, don’t have a statute of limitations. As I’ve written before, the US legal system treats crossing an imaginary line (which harms nobody) as a crime worse than exploiting children for sex. US law essentially sends the message that crossing a border illegally is worse than filming child pornography or committing murder!

And regardless of what harm may inherently occur from crossing an invisible and arbitrary line, I certainly don’t think you can reasonably compare it to filming child pornography or murder. The primary “harm” of non-violent border crossing is economic competition between foreigners and natives. But how is Josef “stealing” a job from Joe supposed to be harming Joe, while John taking a job Joe could have taken isn’t any harm at all? Why do we criminalise Josef from earning an honest living because it might “harm” someone, while we allow Johns to steal jobs from Joes every day? Competing on a level playing field is not an infringement of anyone’s legal rights, unless you believe some people are less human than others.

And yet dehumanisation of the foreign-born is yet another message which the legal system sends: we give inanimate objects more rights than people. The robot that “steals” your society’s jobs has an easier time getting into the country than a foreign-born person who might be able to do that robot’s job for even cheaper. And what does that robot contribute to your society? Maybe it creates jobs for robotics maintenance crews, but that’s about it. The human being is a living, organic part of our community — he or she creates jobs for and immeasurably enriches the lives of landlords, restauranteurs, hairdressers, community organisers. Despite this, most countries’ laws look more kindly on importing inanimate objects that “destroy” jobs than they do on allowing free people to come in and “create” service jobs. And we have somehow deluded ourselves into thinking that this legal system makes moral sense: I once asked a free trade advocate why he opposes liberalisation of immigration laws. He proudly told me that it was because he believes, I quote, “people are not commodities.”

Sure, you can pretend your legal system humanely does allow immigrants to come. But most people consider waiting a year for any government document a rather intolerable delay. For many immigrants — on occasion, even the spouses and children of citizens — a year’s wait is far better than anything they got. Some immigrants to the US are getting their visas today after waiting in the “queue” for over two decades. Many of the “queues” for US visas are backlogged by decades — 80 years in some cases. And the US has one of the better immigration systems out there! Is it even right to speak of a queue for immigration to the UK, when the government’s avowed goal is to cut net immigration essentially to 0 — and it has every intention of accomplishing this by hook or by crook, regardless of how many families and communities and jobs it must destroy? If the phrase “justice delayed is justice denied” was not coined to describe the world’s immigration laws, it seems remarkably apt.

The world’s numerous legal systems have tried to ban many things in the past. They have experimented with banning various sexual acts among consenting adults, banning alcohol production/distribution, banning interracial families. They have tried and they have failed. What we find is that pretending to enforce the unenforceable only engenders disrespect for the law. It makes a mockery of the rule of law when we concoct laws that cannot be enforced. Now, these are not laws that many people were willing to risk their lives to violate — yet these laws could not stand. Meanwhile, every single day, innocent people around the world risk death in deserts or on the high seas to get into countries that offer them no legal way to enter. What hope have we of ever enforcing a law that bans innocent, hardworking people from supporting themselves and taking care of their families?

Moralists and conservatives often worry about what message the law is sending. I have to agree: what message does the law send when it deports a mother for caring for her children? When it denies the husband a visa to live with his wife? When it tells the hardworking wage-earner, “Sorry — the queue is 50 years long, don’t even dare send an employer your CV”? We are making a mockery of fundamental morality when we criminalise the family and we criminalise honest wages. As Carens says, the law is violating social reality.

Yes, the message is supposed to be: when crossing made-up lines on the map, identify yourself to the proper authorities. Somehow this is a crime worse than exploiting children for sex, and at least as bad as murder. If that is the message the law wants to send, ok. But if our message really is that innocent people identify themselves properly, why not allow them to do so? If this really is your concern, what do you have against allowing people to identify themselves after they have entered — or simply allowing people to enter and identify themselves at regular ports of entry, instead of making them wait in a queue that’s so long, it shouldn’t be called a queue at all?

There are a lot of things we could do to move to a more just legal system, one offering all people the due process they deserve. But Carens’s moral and philosophical case for ongoing regularisations intrigues me, precisely because it so neatly reconciles many of the moral absurdities of arbitrary immigration restrictions with the rule of law. Offering people a transparent legal process to acknowledge their standing as contributors to our society and community resonates with the principles of justice. The punishment fits the crime, if you can call crossing a made-up line a crime at all.

We wouldn’t send people to jail 40 years after the fact for a speeding ticket. So why would we wreck families and communities years or decades after the fact? When we are presented with such absurdities, as shown in the case of the grandmother facing deportation from Britain, we recoil because we recognise that the law is destroying the community and imposing a punishment all out of proportion to the offense. A legal mechanism for regularising “illegals” should be essential for any civilised society. If we can’t have truly open borders, we should at least have an immigration regime that doesn’t make a mockery of the rule of law. Only barbarians believe the law should send the message that the just reward for doing our job or taking care of our family is deportation and exile from the place we call home.

Immigration restrictions are a threat to liberty everywhere

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In the civil libertarian world today, two issues rule the roost: surveillance and drones. Ordinarily civil rights issues like these find it difficult to gain traction, but increasingly it looks like even the mainstream media can’t ignore these issues. Spying on the behaviour of millions of innocent people, and murdering innocent people (AKA “collateral damage”) from a remote-controlled airplane, are difficult things to readily reconcile with modern ideas of human rights and freedoms. These issues make me think: how long before civil libertarians begin to comprehend the danger of similar totalitarian disregard for liberty in immigration policy?

Drones are primarily a concern for people burdened by the welfare of innocent people in war zones. Innocents in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan live daily in fear of an errant missile strike, meant for another, but still deadly to all innocents in its path. The policy for deploying drones, and launching their weaponry, until recently has been near-entirely opaque (some would argue it is still entirely opaque). What due process do we have to ensure that drones won’t recklessly murder dozens, hundreds, of guiltless people, in search of taking out one terrorist? What assurances can we give innocents that an overzealous government bureaucrat can’t use his discretion to murder innocent human beings?

The rationale for the US government’s National Security Agency surveillance programmes has always been: we spy on foreigners’ data, not our own. The NSA still maintains it protects US citizens’ data rigorously, though there are many reasonable doubts that this is true. Edward Snowden’s revelations, even if reconciled with the NSA’s claims about protecting US nationals’ data, still ring alarm bells for American civil libertarians: how easy might it be for the NSA to turn the same lens it has trained on foreigners onto us instead? In 1975, US Senator Frank Church warned of such surveillance:

That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.

Since I blog for Open Borders, you would be wise to surmise that neither drones nor NSA surveillance are issues I think about much. But like millions of others, these are issues that weigh on me nonetheless. It worries me that innocent people are subject to murder by the state without due process. It worries me that innocent people are subject to surveillance by the state, again, without due process. And I know these worries all too well, for as an immigrant and someone who enjoys reading stories of immigration, I have seen just how utterly the modern state throws due process in the garbage the moment an immigrant crosses the threshold.

I’ve written before about how perplexed I am that civil libertarians devote a disproportionate amount of energy to criticising allegedly dehumanising air travel procedures. I’m glad to see that deserving due process issues are taking up more attention than ever before. But civil libertarians need to add another issue to complete their trifecta of due process concerns: drone murder, arbitrary surveillance, and arbitrary restriction of human movement. The simplicity and fairness of open borders is not just a nice-to-have; it is critical for a just and fair legal process.

I and others have written time and time again about how modern immigration procedures recklessly abandon due process. Ask yourself: did the refugees whose files were wheeled past a UK Minister so civil servants could “truthfully” tell Parliament that a Minister had duly reviewed their applications get justice? Did they get due process? How about the Brazilians whose visa applications were rejected because a US consulate decided that black visa applicants must be poor? Did they get due process?

Any US consular officer is entitled to reject most visa applications for any reason they like. This “consular nonreviewability” discretion, by US law, cannot be challenged in court or overruled by senior officials — not even the President. Since 1990, the American Bar Association has persistently asked the US government every year to  “establish increased due process in consular visa adjudications and a system for administrative review of certain visa denials, including specified principles” — a request that has consistently fallen on deaf ears. In 2005, the US State Department issued a report recommending further reductions in existing due process and more discretion for consular officials.

It would be one thing if this due process brouhaha focused on police officers arbitrarily writing speeding tickets (as they often seem to be doing in many jurisdictions). But this lack of due process tears families apart. It destroys jobs. Imagine if you lost your job because your employer claimed you were a drug smuggler (based on your name resembling someone else’s, who actually is a drug smuggler) — and you had no right to challenge that claim in court. That actually happened to one unlucky immigrant in the US. A lack of legal due process harms real human beings; it breaks hearts and homes.

It is no consolation that the government is only empowered to take your spouse and children away from you, or fire you from your job, if you’re a foreigner. As Senator Church warned in 1975:

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return. (emphasis added)

A government powerful enough to arbitrarily evict your neighbour from his home, take him away from his family, and take his livelihood away from him, is powerful enough to do that to you too. One remarkable thing I’ve found about the debate surrounding drones and surveillance is that the people criticising them often also implicitly criticise a focus solely on the well-being of citizens, urging us to account for these policies in the totality of their effects on innocent human beings, regardless of nationality. I do not think this criticism of citizenism has struck that much of a chord with the masses — Glenn Greenwald may worry about the innocent Afghan victims of drones, or innocent British victims of surveillance, but the median news media consumer probably does not.

However, these issues resonate, because people appreciate the risk of giving government too much power — the power to kill and the power to spy without the process of law or supervision. Perhaps people need a similar awakening about the power of government to keep you alive while taking away everything you hold dear — your home, your job, your family. That the victims are mere foreigners should be little consolation. A government powerful enough to do anything without due process is powerful enough to make a victim of you too.

The photograph featured at the top of this post is of striking miners being deported from Bisbee, Arizona in 1917. Scanned by the Arizona Historical Society; original photographer unknown.