Tag Archives: open borders advocacy

Conversation between Steve Teles and GiveWell

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Below are excerpts from a recent conversation between GiveWell staff (Holden Karnofsky and Timothy Telleen-Lawton) and Steve Teles, Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University about policy advocacy. I have included only the excerpts that directly discuss immigration, although the immigration section of the discussion includes a lot of general discussion of the policy advocacy “map” as Teles calls it.

Steve Teles: Within a year or two there will be a bill passed, and that is likely to exhaust Congress’s desire to legislate on immigration for about a decade. So it’s not worth investing a lot of money on the legislative lobbying side, at least as it’s currently defined: along the lines of numbers, regularization of status, internal enforcement.

It will be a very complicated bill, with a lot of responsibility passed on to regulatory agencies. There will be lots of litigating as well, so getting the optimal outcome from the law requires acting at the regulatory rulemaking side through the agencies, the litigation stage, and the actual implementation of the law in practice.

The process will be very long, maybe indefinite. The Clean Air Amendments of the 1970s are still being fought over. So it’s worth investing on the litigation and rulemaking side more than the legislative side.

Related material we’ve covered at Open Borders includes part 2 and part 3 of Fabio Rojas’ series on how to move in the direction of open borders.

Later in the conversation:

GiveWell: On the immigration reform bill, how do we figure out how much capacity is already there and how much room there is for funding? How would we decide how to get involved?

Steve Teles: You should talk to Min Hsu Chen, a professor at CU Boulder, who knows a lot about immigration, law, and civil rights.

It’s useful in these cases to do an advocacy map: who’s out there working on this, what are they working on, how stable is their funding. Since many of these issues are incredibly technical you often need people who have been doing this for a long time. The reputation of the people is normally the most important thing, and is inherently non transparent, since everyone has an interest in distorting how influential they are. The goal is to fund someone who has influence, which requires gaining the trust of people who can tell you who really has influence and who doesn’t. This makes it important to go deeply into an issue over time. Being a long term funder puts you into a multi iteration game with people you deal with, decreasing the probability of getting burned.

Back to opportunities on immigration: the regulatory side is the most elite dimension, involving lawyers, regulators, politicians, law review articles, etc. Another side would be immigrant self organizing, something funders rarely do. Funding tends to do things for immigrants, rather than increase their capacity to organize themselves. They’re a population that’s tough to organize, being transient and weakly settled, and are a group that politicians are rarely afraid of. The most important thing in politics is fear, and if they had organizational capacity politicians might fear them.

Organizing immigrants might impact employers or the media, eventually affecting people’s perception of what the nature of the issue is. Depending on the status of immigrants this could include electoral organizing. Ben Sachs (Harvard) writes about a potential role for organized labor in helping immigrants: casual immigrant workers are at risk of not getting paid or having regulations broken, and modern style labor organizations can help with these issues. Immigrant rights probably has more of a “funding arbitrage” opportunity than immigration as such.

Immigrants can be organized via worksites or at churches. The immigration bureaucracy is a mess and especially difficult for individuals who aren’t organized.

Related material on our website includes an optimistic blog post on the role of organizing by David Bennion, a post by Nathan Smith about Jose Antonio Vargas, and a more pessimistic and cynical take from me.

GiveWell: We’ve heard the claim that there aren’t many people interested in letting people from the
developing world into the US – either in support of it for humanitarian reasons, to improve the US, or for libertarian anti-border reasons.

Steve Teles: Admittedly immigration is not one of the topics I know much about, comparatively speaking. On this question, it’s partly a function of funding. It’s also the way people think about it – many people think of the humanitarian issue on an individual level, not as a numbers issue, or they think of it as letting family members in rather than letting in people from impoverished countries more broadly. The “trade not aid” argument is the same idea as immigration, but immigration doesn’t get discussed in that context generally – maybe it could be.

The most disruptive thing to a political environment is a new issue dimension. It tends to motivate and mobilize a new set of people who realize they have a stake, and it changes what people think the issue is about. So injecting a new issue dimension into immigration may be valuable. This could be accomplished either with a new, special purpose organization or an existing one. A new organization would start out with no branding, which is good and bad: you have neither the cachet nor the baggage of an existing group.

Philanthropists do create new things all the time. The NRDC was basically created by the Ford Foundation. They look for an opportunity that doesn’t already exist, find good people and give them some seed capital. These people might be ones who already work in a space but aren’t achieving their potential or want a new job. Finding them probably requires being embedded in a space, so that people trust you and tell you things like this.

Related material on our site: my blog post double world GDP versus scope insensitivity.

GiveWell: What about other countries? We would potentially see value in bringing about more open borders in any developed country, but that seems like a difficult field to survey.

Steve Teles: There are comparative immigration policy experts. In fact, the system at the moment is better in the US than many other countries, which are using human capital weighted systems to figure out who to bring in. Funding people in European countries would be very difficult, since we don’t know the landscape. The US system is more permeable, whereas the systems of bargaining and deep bureaucracy in European countries make them difficult to influence from an outside perspective.

Some good people to talk to: Antje Ellermann, at the University of British Columbia, who has written about deportation and knows a lot about German policy specifically. She’s a humanitarian, less of a nationalist. Peter Skerry of Boston College knows the INS bureaucracy really well. He’s more of a restrictionist but would be an interesting person to talk to. He knows something about the European bureaucracy as well. Rebecca Hamlin at Grinnell is working on a book comparing the immigration policies of the US, Britain, and Australia, looking at immigration processing at a deep regulatory level, and knows the intersection of regulation and courts really well. Many of the people at that intersection are former students of Robert Kagan of Berkeley.

A blog post by Carl Shulman is related.

From Blog to Book

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Post by Nathan Smith (regular blogger for the site, joined April 2012). See:

I’ve decided to try taking my contributions to Open Borders: The Case in a new direction. As I see it, Open Borders: The Case started out as an informational website, then turned into a blog, but never became exactly the running commentary on current events that is perhaps the most typical style of a successful blog. Its raison d’etre seemed to be rather the systematic working out of the case for open borders. Since that involves a certain amount of refutation of widespread fallacies and a certain amount of internal debate, it can drive an agenda of daily posting to a certain extent. But the blog style per se isn’t particularly conducive to cumulatively building a sustained case. I started feeling I’d largely covered the ground, at least in as much depth as the format permitted, and also, forgetting what I’d already written about.

So, my new idea is to spearhead a novel sort of book project. I have a tentative outline, which will doubtless change as I move forward, reflecting my own thoughts and the suggestions and contributions of others. Links will accumulate there to new content as it is written. I envision it as a collaborative project, amalgamating the writings of like-minded people: not a mere anthology– it will have more structure than that– but not quite having the character of a co-authored book, in which the authors bear equal responsibility for all parts and who wrote what is concealed. If other people do participate, we might end up with chapter-specific bylines. Like the Bible: multiple authors and styles, but a relatively unified message. (Obviously I don’t imagine the book will be remotely as important as the Bible, but I’m using it as an example of the kind of diverse authorship I’m thinking about.) My plan is to post new chapters here, as Open Borders: The Case blog posts, and at the same time, to create them as public Googledocs, to which there will be links both from the blog posts here and from the outline. The blog posts will stay as is; the Googledocs will be subject to revision. Fact-checking is for a later stage. For now, I’ll try to be accurate, but I won’t be as careful as I would be if I were intending immediate publication in a book or an academic journal article. Hopefully commenters will do some of the fact-checking for me (for us). At some point down the line, I might submit it to a prestigious university press, but it’s almost as attractive just to publish it through Kindle Direct Publishing, and use the blog itself for initial publicity. After that, the text might go on expanding, preparing the way for future editions. I’ve never heard of a book being written this way. We’ll see if it works.

If anyone wants to help with this project, feel free to just write chapters and link to them in the comments of this or future posts. I’ll take a look.  There is no need for posts to be written in the order they are planned in the (tentative) outline: feel free to start anywhere in the outline, or nowhere in it, writing whatever seems important to you even if I haven’t (yet) included it. I’ll think about where to work it in. No need to try to match my style, either, just relevant facts and valid arguments.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s how the argument may begin:

1.A. The world is, in theory, divided up into sovereign nation-states, separated by well-defined borders

The modern world, that is to say, the world as of 2013 and a few previous decades, is as a matter of official doctrine divided up into sovereign nation-states, with well-defined borders clarifying the scope of the jurisdiction of each state. “Sovereignty” is a concept rarely defined, though its modern sense can be traced to the absolutist political philosophy of Thomes Hobbes in the 17th century. It essentially means having the last word, not being able to be interfered with. For some purposes, it is synonymous with “independence,” but at a deep philosophical level the ideas of political independence and political sovereignty should probably not be equated. Sovereignty implies immunity to external interference. But it also implies a right of making laws, and usually implies an unlimited right of making laws, which is so broad as to include a right of acting coercively without the sanction of any publicly promulgated law. The belief of Thomas Aquinas and other medieval jurists that human laws are unjust and lacking in real authority unless they are based in the natural law and serve the “common good”– a notion hard to make sense of today but which to medieval jurists meant something objective– is inconsistent with the modern notion of sovereignty, and Thomas Hobbes had to do battle with the ideas of medieval churchmen in order to establish his idea of sovereignty. Modern national sovereignty was established, not only on behalf of nations as against dynastic or colonial empires, but on behalf of the secular authorities as against the church, and on behalf of the centralized state and its decrees as against local authorities, customs, and often individual conscience. At any rate, whatever “sovereignty” means, it is now by a global consensus imputed to about two hundred political entities, with relatively little disagreement about which political entities are included in the list, or what their boundaries are.

The establishment and maintenance of this world order depends on a high degree of legal and cartographical ingenuity. In past ages, mankind lacked the skill to draw such sophisticated maps. Some borders, such as the US-Canada border, correspond to lines of latitude or longitude, and could not have been drawn thus until mankind had sufficient knowledge to conceive and apply these spatial concepts. Older borders are sometimes marked by natural features of the landscape that are more readily discernible, such as rivers and mountain ranges, but by no means always. In other cases, territorial boundaries were physically marked. I have heard that there were in ancient times two stones located near one another in Greece. One of them said, “This is Athens. It is not Megara.” The other said, “This is Megara. It is not Athens.” Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall of China, though they were exceptional cases, may serve as vivid examples of physically marking a border. In other cases, territorial borders between states were vaguer. In any case, the concept of a “sovereign state” is a modern one. In past ages, it seems that “whose territory is this?” would not always have been felt to demand such a clear and unambiguous answer as it would be expected to evoke today. And while political entities resembling modern states and jealous of their territorial sovereignty sometimes existed, it was not the case that the entire territory of the earth was claimed by one or other of these entities, still less that the major powers agreed among themselves in recognizing each other’s territorial claims. To a naive modern person, it might seem that “the world is divided up into sovereign nation-states with well-defined borders” is a mere truism, one of the constant facts of political organization, arising, somehow, from human nature and/or from reason. But it is not. It is a peculiarity of our own modern civilization, which future ages may find odd and difficult to understand.

Cosmopolitanism: global redistribution versus open borders?

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As a personal project, I’ve embarked on a self-led course in the ethics of cosmopolitanism. I’ve been calling myself a cosmopolitan for a long time and I thought it was time to see what the professionals had to say on the matter. And of course I’ve been interested in learning more about the relationship between cosmopolitanism and open borders. In particular, to what extent does cosmopolitanism imply open borders and to what extent does the open borders position imply cosmopolitanism?

My initial venture into this field has been The Cosmopolitanism Reader, edited by Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held. I haven’t yet finished the book, which is a collection of essays by cosmopolitan political philosophers, but after a dozen essays I’ve tentatively concluded that self-described cosmopolitan philosophers are for the most part uninterested in open borders. The overwhelming focus is instead on global distributive justice. Issues like climate change are mentioned more often than immigration. And it doesn’t appear to be a peculiarity of this book. A couple other books I’ve glanced through or have lined up to read barely mention migration (or its derivatives) in their indices, if at all.

This isn’t because I misunderstood the definition of cosmopolitanism. From the introduction of the Cosmopolitan Reader:

In its most basic form, cosmopolitanism maintains that there are moral obligations owed to all human beings based solely on our humanity alone, without reference to race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, culture, religion, political affiliation, state citizenship, or other communal particularities. […] From this basic ethical orientation, cosmopolitanism as a political theory generally posits three corresponding moral and normative commitments. First, cosmopolitans believe that the primary units of moral concern are individual human beings, not states or other forms of communitarian or political association. Although this does not rule out localized obligations, or render states “meaningless,” cosmopolitanism does insist that there are universal commitments to respect the moral worth of individuals everywhere. Second, cosmopolitans maintain that this moral concern for individual should be equally applied, where “the status of ultimate concern attaches to every living human equally.” […] Third, as the etymology of the word suggests, cosmopolitanism is universal in its scope, maintaining that all humans are equal in their moral standing and that this moral standing applies to everyone everywhere, as if we are all citizens of the world.

Emphasis in original. Individualism, egalitarianism, and universalism. There might be some quibbling over what is supposed to be equal in “egalitarianism”, but this definition seems straightforwardly compatible with open borders, and given my beliefs about the real world economic and distributional effects of a liberal migration regime, I think the definition directly points to open borders. So perhaps the enthusiasm gap has something to do with differences of opinion about the real world effects. One of the few mentions of international migration exceeding a few sentences I have come across in the book (at ~50%) came from Onora O’Neill, who makes the case for cosmopolitanism and global distributive justice by way of Kantian obligations as opposed to appeals to human rights (think ethical supply side rather than demand side). In this section, O’Neill doesn’t come out against open borders so much as she just waves the notion aside. The context of the following is a critique of the limited libertarian view of human rights.

Despite there embargo on redistribution, libertarians could hold positions that have powerful and perhaps helpful implications for the poor of the Third World. Since they base their thought on respect for individuals and their rights, and judge any but minimal states unjust, libertarians view actual states, none of which is minimal, as exceeding their just powers. In particular, libertarian [sic] and other liberals may hold that all interferences with individuals’ movement, work and trade violate liberty. On an obvious reading this suggests that those who are willing to work for less have the right not to be excluded by residence and trades union restrictions and that protective trade polices violate liberties. Libertarians are known for advocating free trade, but not for advocating the dismantling of immigration laws. This may be because their stress on property rights entails an attrition of public space that eats into the freedom of movement and rights of abode of the unpropertied, even within national jurisdictions.

It is hard to see the global import of such radically cosmopolitan libertarianism. Presumably such policies would greatly weaken the position of the relatively poor within rich economies, by undercutting their bargaining power. Ostensibly “perfected” global markets might spread resources more and more evenly across the world’s population: in practice it is doubtful whether a removal of restrictions on movement, abode and trade would achieve this. In an era of automated production, the poor might no longer have anything marketable to sell: even their labour power may lack market value. Concentrations of economic power have been able to form and survive in relatively “free” internal markets: international economic powers could presumably ride the waves of wider competition equally successfully.

Emphases in original. O’Neill seems open to the possibility that free movement across borders could help the global poor in principle, but doubts this would occur in practice. I am on record as doubting how fruitful it is to keep banging on about the economic argument for open borders, suggesting instead that it’s not that people don’t understand the economics (whether they do or not), it’s that they morally disregard the foreigner. O’Neill appears to be a fairly stark counterexample.

I want to stress that I have only begun to get my feet wet in this literature, but if it is the case that self-described cosmopolitans are mostly unconcerned with the status quo regime of controlled migration, then it would be interesting to know why. There are a few possibilities, not necessarily mutually exclusive.

A cosmopolitan may be unaware of the potential distributional benefits associated with more liberal migration regimes. This reminds me of the Bloggingheads diavlog between the economist Tyler Cowen and the renowned utilitarian Peter Singer (to my knowledge not not a self-identified cosmopolitan, but easily a fellow traveler). In the diavlog, Singer appeared not to have given the matter of international migration much thought.

Cosmopolitans have considered the distributional impact of open borders to some extent but are unimpressed. The cosmopolitan/liberal egalitarian Thomas Pogge has acknowledged* that a global regime more permissive to migration would indeed help to alleviate global poverty, but that open borders could not on its own eliminate poverty and that international migration could only help the relatively better off among the global poor.

[O]ther things being equal, those who accept a weighty moral responsibility toward needy foreigners should devote their time, energy, and resources not to the struggle to get more of them admitted into the rich countries, but rather to the struggle to institute an effective programme of global poverty eradication.
[…]
[T]he admission of needy foreigners into the rich countries cannot possibly protect all who now live under dreadful conditions and would want to come. One reason for this is that the number of needy persons in the world […] is simply out of all proportion to the number of needy foreingers which the rich countries admit or could admit. […] For every person we can persuade some rich country to admit, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, left in desperate need.

Pogge’s emphases. This seems like a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good, though I should add I haven’t read the full piece due to its unavailability. It is unclear there should be a feeling of either/or between global redistribution and global free migration. In any case the principal difference between cosmopolitans of this flavor and those of us who advocate open borders for the sake of the global poor essentially reduces to an empirical question of which strategy will benefit the poor the most. The moral values of the two camps are aligned, at least on the question of borders (global institutions and redistribution schemes may be a different matter).

My own novice hypothesis is that there may be some ideological self-selection to cosmopolitan identification. Those modern philosophers committed to global wealth redistribution have called themselves cosmopolitans, while others equally committed to the three principles of cosmopolitanism described above but perhaps skeptical of redistribution schemes have avoided the moniker, possibly for that very reason. This could be as basic as a distinction between egalitarians and libertarians: two roads diverged in a wood and the egalitarian took the path of redistribution while the libertarian took the path of open borders.

It’s worth noting that many advocates of open borders discussed on this website have some form of libertarian worldview, as do many of the writers of this website. If there is any truth to this hypothesis, it invites the question of whether this divide is substantive or, more hopefully, permeable. That is, can egalitarian cosmopolitans be persuaded on the merits of open borders? Contrary to Pogge’s assessment, I think the egalitarian could well afford to advocate open borders, even while keeping a commitment to global redistribution. From the perspective of proponents of open borders, cosmopolitans favoring global redistribution should, in principle, be low-hanging fruit for conversion efforts. I maintain that the hardest part of selling open borders is acknowledging the moral worth of the foreigner as a full human being, and that economic arguments are often fig leaves for disregarding the legitimate demands of justice concerning the foreigner. With cosmopolitans, this hardest part of persuasion is already done.

*This argument appeared in an essay titled “Migration and Poverty” in an out-of-print book called “Citizenship and Exclusion“, edited by Veit Bader.

How Undocumented Organizers Can Lead the Way to Open Borders

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My perspective on open borders has been profoundly shaped by my work with undocumented organizers in the U.S. In this post, I make the argument that the people most directly affected by closed borders are best able to create the political conditions necessary for open borders because:

1. They have the most to lose and therefore work the hardest for change,

2. They can better analyze the issues and frame the arguments in support of open borders because they directly experience the consequences of closed borders, and

3. Because of 1 and 2, affected individuals are more persuasive messengers to the voting public than intermediaries.

Martin Luther King, Jr. argued that meaningful social change comes through the creation of tension in an untenable system. In a recent OB post, Paul Crider cited King:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. . . . I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. . . . The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.

King’s key insight found expression in the movement for Indian independence, the U.S. civil rights movement, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the Arab Spring.

Undocumented youth in the U.S. have created tension by engaging in direct action to force the fact of their oppression into the public consciousness. The two most significant political events relating to immigration in the U.S. in the past few years were the DREAM Act vote in December 2010 and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals initiative announced by President Obama in June 2012. Both resulted in large part from direct action by undocumented activists.

Undocumented Youth Push the DREAM Act to a Vote

Before 2010, immigrant rights barely registered with progressives, liberals, and libertarians who weren’t directly affected by the issue. In the 2009-2010 legislative session, with solid majorities in both houses of Congress and in possession of the White House, the Democrats didn’t even introduce a bona fide comprehensive immigration reform bill in either house of Congress until after it was clear it wouldn’t be voted on. Most Democrats preferred not to talk about immigration, much less push bills through Congress.

In early 2010, the debate around Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, started to change the conversation on the left. The vote on the DREAM Act in December 2010 further engaged mainstream progressives, who began to learn about immigration and started to pick a side. Even though the bill failed, undocumented youth emerged from the vote as the most visible and empowered segment of the immigrant rights movement.

It wasn’t preordained that the DREAM Act would be voted on at all. In early 2010, the national immigrant rights advocacy groups, then almost exclusively citizen-led, opposed bringing the DREAM Act up for a vote as a standalone bill. Their reasoning was that, having garnered solid bipartisan majorities in the past, the DREAM Act had to be bundled with comprehensive legislation as a sweetener so the larger bill could pass. They also believed that a failure on DREAM would doom any other immigration legislation for the foreseeable future. The advocacy groups told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to hold the DREAM Act in committee, and the CHC communicated the message to Democratic leadership in Congress. The White House was almost entirely disengaged from immigration reform efforts at this time.

By early 2010, some undocumented youth activists were fed up with the hesitance and dissimulation coming from those purporting to speak for them. Through a series of direct actions, including a sit-in in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office, Reid changed course and agreed to bring the DREAM Act up as a standalone bill. This account of Reid’s conversion from restrictionist to immigrant advocate appeared in the New York Times recently.

But this is what really happened during the run-up to the 2010 mid-term elections.

Even though Reid had been mobilized through electoral politics, most Democrats in Congress were still stuck in a reactive mode. Reid couldn’t bring the Democratic caucus into line on the DREAM Act vote, losing five Democratic votes, which killed the bill given overwhelming Republican opposition.

Rubio Challenges Obama on Immigration and Fails

June 2012 marked another turning point. The GOP presidential primaries were in full swing, with each candidate trying to outdo the next in declaiming immigrants. Obama had little to fear from the Republican candidates themselves. Latinos were not likely to vote for the GOP given the party’s hard turn against immigrants over the previous decade. The question was whether Latino voters would turn out for Obama in sufficient numbers to push him over the top in swing states like Nevada, Colorado, and Florida. Obama’s mass deportation campaign, then in its fourth year, was hurting him with Latino voters.

In the spring of 2012, Senator Marco Rubio floated a proposal for a Republican DREAM Act. Observers speculated that Romney might try to undo the damage he’d caused with Latino voters in the primary by selecting Rubio as his running mate, and Rubio seemed to be working towards that outcome with his DREAM Act proposal. Rubio consulted directly with undocumented youth activists about the bill, acknowledging that their support would be crucial to his effort.

The National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA), an undocumented youth group formed by the activists who led the first undocumented civil disobedience actions in 2010, came out early in favor of the Rubio proposal. United We Dream, the other, larger national undocumented youth organization, followed suit. Rubio had presented a way for the GOP to get out of the corner it had painted itself in with the Latino electorate. Obama was feeling pressure.

Then in early June, undocumented youth began staging sit-ins at Organizing for America offices in Oakland and Denver. Days later, President Obama announced the most significant immigration policy reform in over a decade: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The policy tracked the requirements of the DREAM Act, and offered formal protection from deportation to certain undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. With DACA, Obama neutralized whatever momentum for the GOP the Rubio proposal had sparked. The predictable backlash against DACA from Republicans, along with the ongoing public theater around Arizona SB 1070 and other anti-immigrant state bills, sealed a lopsided majority of the Latino vote for Obama in the 2012 presidential election.

Without the last several years of youth activism, there would have been no comprehensive immigration bill, as flawed as it is, passing last month in the Senate with a unified Democratic caucus and 17 Republican votes. There would be no generally-acknowledged connection between the future of the Republican Party and its position on immigration policy. Democrats would still be running from the issue or trying to out-enforce the Republicans. Obama likely wouldn’t have beaten Romney in the Latino and Asian-American vote by the margins that he did. Even had Obama won, the election results wouldn’t have been connected to a major immigration policy closely identified with the President–DACA–because the policy wouldn’t have existed without the organizing efforts that forced the President’s hand.

Documented and Afraid

Driving much of the change over the past few years has been a strategy developed by undocumented youth of publicly identifying themselves as undocumented and encouraging others to do so. The concept of “coming out” as undocumented and unafraid was adapted from the LGBT rights movement by LGBT undocumented activists. “Coming out” is an enormously effective strategy, but early adopters risk harsh penalties for challenging the dominant paradigm. As undocumented activists came out, they presented a different immigration narrative than the public had seen. Citizens came to realize that undocumented youth were not much different than their children or peers. Other undocumented youth saw those who had come out and were empowered to come out themselves. This had a ripple effect that rapidly changed the narrative about undocumented youth. The feared repercussions–deportation of those who exposed themselves as undocumented–never materialized.

Initially, most citizen advocates discouraged activists from being public about their undocumented status. “Know your rights” training sessions held by community organizations teach undocumented people never to disclose their immigration status to the police. Lawyers, advocates, and legislators have gone to great lengths to discourage undocumented activists from participating in civil disobedience actions, usually out of a misguided desire to protect the activists from themselves. Undocumented journalist Jose Antonio Vargas has talked about how most of the people he consulted before writing his seminal “coming out” piece in the New York Times in 2011 discouraged him from publishing it.

Not only did documented advocates fail to formulate effective organizing strategies, many actively tried to prevent undocumented activists from carrying out their own plans. While often based in good intentions, these efforts to suppress the political expression of oppressed people are patronizing and disempowering. This problem is caused by diverging incentives. Citizen advocates are not themselves at risk of harm, though some have loved ones who are at risk. Immigration lawyers like me–including those at legal services nonprofits–get paid whether we are fighting deportations or helping people apply for status; that is, whether immigration reform passes or not. Advocacy organizations can get funding for immigration work, whether to promote immigration reform or to implement it.

Undocumented activists were driven to riskier tactics out of desperation. Not long ago, ICE was routinely deporting all undocumented youth regardless of the balance of equities in individual cases. The risks the activists took in exposing themselves were real and extended to their families.

Citizen advocates are not only not the best immigrant rights analysts or strategists, but also not the best messengers. Over the past several years, I have appeared in my role as lawyer on panels or at interviews along with undocumented activists. Invariably, the interviewer’s or audience’s interest is drawn to the person who is herself affected, who herself risks imprisonment just by being there. For years, organizations and legislators have told the stories of clients or constituents to generate public support for immigration reform. On this, there is a fine line between empowerment and tokenism. Too often, advocates fail this test.

Leading the Way

Moving forward, affected people must continue to create the political conditions that will make better legislation possible. Momentum is on the side of the reformers. U.S. immigration laws are selectively and arbitrarily enforced. Counterintuitively, those who defy the immigration regime most publicly are the safest from deportation. This tells us that the legal system has become disconnected from the moral and political spheres. Citizen advocates and allies can play an important supporting role in reform efforts, but should not take the lead. If they do, they risk forestalling change yet again.

If Congress approves anything like the comprehensive bill passed by the Senate last month, opportunities for citizen civil disobedience will proliferate. For instance, citizens could unlawfully help deported immigrants re-enter the country or knowingly and publicly employ unauthorized workers. The more that citizen allies risk, the more moral authority they will wield. But few will have the incentive or resolve to risk long-term imprisonment–I know I don’t.

Most Americans are taught early on that U.S. democracy is principled, ordered, and fair. Opposing views on a topic are aired and consensus develops. Policymakers respond to and are held accountable by voters. While there were some hiccups in the past (slavery, Native American genocide) we’ve moved beyond those now.

The reality is that millions of noncitizens in the U.S. are exploited, targeted, and reviled with the sanction of the government and approval of the voting public. The U.S. political system not only produced and produces this result but is incapable of rectifying it. These problems are not unique to this time and place. Institutional systems of oppression are rarely overturned through sanctioned channels. Instead, oppressed people must themselves, through nonviolent direct action, create the political conditions necessary to reform the system.

The undocumented population in the U.S. and around the world is a small fraction of the total number of people profoundly harmed by closed borders. But undocumented organizers may present the best hope for reforming the global immigration and citizenship regime.

Undocumented youth in the U.S. are uniquely positioned to mobilize for legislative change because they are able to navigate U.S. culture while credibly speaking for the larger undocumented community. More than the citizens of most other countries, Americans claim to be willing to accept immigrants who make efforts to assimilate. This gives undocumented youth, who often pass as citizens, moral leverage they would not possess in most other countries.

As children, undocumented youth were promised the opportunities afforded to their citizen peers, finding those promises to be hollow only upon reaching adulthood. Straddling the line between global haves and have nots, undocumented youth in the U.S. personify the contradictions between the stated values of the political-economic order and the actual inequality and injustice that the order perpetuates. They blur that line and hint at the possibility of erasing it. If they are able to connect with victims of closed borders in other countries to organize transnationally, undocumented youth in the U.S. could point the way to achieving open borders on a much larger scale.

Open borders and religious freedom

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I am probably in the minority among Open Borders: The Case contributors in regarding the Supreme Court’s decision in United States vs. Windsor as legally absurd and ominous for liberty, and especially for religious freedom. Ben Domenech gives a good description of the threat to religious liberty from the gay marriage movement:

The problem with gay marriage is not about gay people getting married – they’ve already been doing that, or living that way. The problem with gay marriage is not that it will redefine marriage into a less valuable social institution in the eyes of the populace – that is already happening, has been for decades, and will continue regardless of whether gays are added to it or not. And the problem with gay marriage is not about the slippery slope of what comes next – though yes, the legal battle over polyamory and polygamy is inevitably coming, as the principle of marriage equality demands it does…

No, the real problem with gay marriage is that the nature of the marriage union is inherently entwined in the future of the first line of the Bill of Rights: our right to religious liberty. Orthodox believers of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faiths were slow to understand this. I’m talking about something much bigger here than the discrimination lawsuits brought across the country against bakers and photographers: I’m talking about whether churches will be able to function as public entities in an era where their views on sin, particularly sexual sin, are in direct conflict with not just opinion but the law – and proselytizing those views from the pulpit or in the public square will be viewed as using the protection of religious expression to protect hateful speech.

We saw this problem already in Illinois’ marriage law, where churches that do not allow same sex unions would essentially have to close their doors to full participation in civil society. We see it as a constant issue regarding Canada’s hate speech laws, where courts must discern whether quoting Bible verses amounts to “harming the public discourse.” We will see it more here. That obvious oncoming clash strikes me as the most troublesome aspect of this, and the one that has received the least attention in the rush to legalize. The argument has been more about benefits and social outcomes and “won’t somebody think of the children”, ignoring the core problem, which raises challenges to the freedom of speech and expression the likes of which led to the pilgrims crossing the sea in the first place.

The conflict between sexual liberty and religious liberty is unlikely to be one the religious will win, in large part because of the broad and increasing acceptance of an idea President Obama has espoused more than once in public: that the religious have a freedom to worship, and that’s where it ends. When you leave the pew, you must leave your faith there. Among the religious, this is absurd – their entire lives are defined by their faith, in ways large and small. For both Christianity and Islam, the core of their faith is built on a call to take the message to the world, spreading it through public witness and preaching. Yet this belief in the limited freedom to worship is what led Obama’s administration to argue that faith-based hiring and firing is a discriminatory act for religious entities…

In a litigious society, those conscience conflicts will multiply, with pressure on anyone who “refuses and refers” to be stripped of their government-provided license or memberships in professional society…

In a nation where fewer people truly practice religion, fewer people external to those communities will see any practical reason to protect the liberty of those who do. The world could in time come full circle to Mrs. Campbell’s old line: You are free to believe, as long as you don’t do it in the streets, so as not to frighten the horses.

Now, I won’t presume that you agree with Domenech here. Maybe you think his fears are overblown. Maybe you think he’s right that religious freedom will be curtailed in due course by the gay marriage movement, and it should be. In the interest of coalition politics, though, it’s worth sympathizing for a moment with people who see things this way. For open borders is connected to religious freedom, in several ways.

First, it’s a good bet that open borders would let in populations considerably less favorable to same-sex marriage, on average, than the US public currently is. Same-sex marriage and other recognition of legal status for same-sex couples is largely restricted to parts of the US and western Europe. With opinion having turned sharply against them in recent years, social conservatives might want to consider trying to elect a new people through open immigration, whom they have good reason to suppose would be more favorable to their point of view.

But even more fundamentally, it would be nice to have some place to go to if religious freedom in the United States does suffer a major setback in the years to come. A few months ago, I wrote a post about the Pilgrims. They fled from western Europe to the largely uncultivated wilderness of America. (Yes, there were Amerindian tribes here, but they were sparse and far below the carrying capacity of the country.) It took a great deal of courage to leave their native country that way, but of course it was crucially important that there were places where they could go, having procured a sort of vague royal approval gotten by backdoor methods (albeit not for the site where they actually landed), but basically without needing anyone’s permission.

I anticipate significant personal costs from the advent of gay marriage. Conscience does not permit me to refer to a gay relationship as a marriage, yet now, in law, that’s what it will be, and all sorts of anti-discrimination laws will tend to force me into situations where I will be obliged to violate my conscience in order to avoid seeming by my words or actions to condone gay marriage. Now, suppose I find that this strain is too much. I can’t stay. I can’t reconcile the demands of discrimination law with the demands of conscience. Or worse, my church is forbidden to operate because it refuses to perform gay marriage ceremonies. So I and many others like me want to emigrate. The Pilgrims went to America. Where could we go now?

It would be nice to have the IMPALA data in order to get a basic idea of what the emigration options are. Does anyone know, by the way? It would be no use emigrating to western Europe, where the threat to freedom of religion is if anything worse, but what about East Asia? Africa? Latin America? At any rate, for the moment, religious conservatives still have some influence in US politics, and one thing they could do with it might be to urge the US government to negotiate freedom of migration deals with other countries, so that if, at some point in the future, religious repression becomes intolerable, they’ll have someplace to go where they can live their religion freely. This is yet another reason why Christians should favor freedom of migration.

Incidentally, this post is relevant to Fabio Rojas’s post on social conservatism and attitudes to immigration. Rojas finds a significant positive correlation between support for gay rights and support for immigration. While that’s not too surprising, a quick look at the map of gay rights around the world suggests that opponents of gay marriage should, in principle, welcome hordes of immigrants from Asia and Africa, and to a lesser extent Latin America. See also Pew’s global snapshot of same-sex marriage. Immigrants to the US might assimilate to the prevailing views in the US, but I suspect that founder effects will be less important here, since while much of the institutional legacy of a country consists of procedures known to specialists to which the broader public conforms and in which new specialists are trained, gay marriage seems to be an issue on which the average person is more likely to have his own opinion and not to defer to the status quo. Of course, for opponents of gay marriage, the rest of the world’s lack of enlightenment might be an argument against opening the borders and jeopardizing the progress already made.