Most general theories or theoretical approaches in political philosophy—liberal egalitarianism, contractarianism, utilitarianism, and so on—are too controversial to form a secure basis for reasoning. It is not known which, if any, of those theories are correct. Instead, I aim to rest conclusions on widely-shared ethical intuitions about relatively specific cases. The method is to describe a case in which nearly everyone will share a particular, clear intuitive evaluation of some action, and then to draw a parallel from the case described to some controversial case of interest. This issue should therefore be judged on the basis of a person's prima facie, negative right, not to be subjected to seriously harmful coercion.
P1: If an action is seriously harmful and coercive without relevant extenuating circumstances, then it is a wrongful rights-violation.
P2: Immigration restrictions are seriously harmful and coercive without relevant extenuating circumstances.
C1: Therefore, immigration restrictions are a wrongful rights-violation.
Consider the following scenario. Marvin is in desperate need of food. Perhaps someone has stolen his food, or perhaps a natural disaster destroyed his crops; whatever the reason, Marvin is in danger of starvation. Fortunately, he has a plan to remedy the problem: he will walk to the local marketplace, where he will buy bread. Assume that in the absence of outside interference, this plan would succeed: the marketplace is open, and there are people there who are willing to trade food to Marvin in exchange for something he has.
Another individual, Sam, is aware of all this and is watching Marvin. For some reason, Sam decides to detain Marvin on his way to the marketplace, forcibly preventing him from reaching it. As a result, Marvin returns home empty-handed, where he dies of starvation.
Sam’s behavior in this scenario was both extremely harmful to Marvin and a severe violation of Marvin’s rights. When an action is seriously harmful and coercive, it tends for that reason to be a rights-violation, other things being equal—that is, it is a prima facie rights violation. Sam’s behavior in the scenario described violates Marvin’s rights, because it is an act of extremely harmful coercion, and there are no relevant extenuating circumstances.
A. The Presence of Harmful Coercion
How does all this relate to U.S. immigration policy? The role of Marvin is played by those potential immigrants who seek escape from oppression or economic hardship. The marketplace is the United States: were they allowed in, most immigrants would succeed in meeting their needs (to a greater extent, at least, than they will if they are not allowed in).
The role of Sam is played by the government of the United States, which has adopted severe restrictions on entry. These restrictions are imposed by coercion: armed guards are hired to patrol the borders, physically barring unauthorized entry, and armed officers of the state forcibly detain and expel immigrants who are found residing in the country illegally. As in the case of Sam’s detention of Marvin, the U.S. government’s exclusion of undocumented immigrants is also very harmful to most of those excluded: many suffer from oppression or poverty that could and would be remedied, if only they were able to enter the country of their choice.
In view of this, the actions of the U.S. government, prima facie, constitute serious violations of the rights of potential immigrants—specifically, the government violates their prima facie right not to be harmfully coerced. To prove there are no relevant extenuating circumstances, we must evaluate the proposed justifications for restriction.
B. Refuting Extenuating Circumstances: Employment and Economic Disadvantage
Does the following constitute a valid justification for harmful coercion: that the coercive action is necessary to prevent someone else from suffering slight to moderate economic disadvantage through marketplace competition? It seems to me that it does not.
The mere fact that Bob is competing with me for a job that I desire, or that Bob is willing to accept a lower salary than I could obtain if I did not have to compete with him, does not invalidate or suspend Bob’s right not to be subjected to harmful coercion. Nor does my interest in having less economic competition outweigh Bob’s right not to be coercively harmed. The prospect of a modest lowering of American wages and narrowing of employment opportunities is taken to either suspend or outweigh the rights of needy foreigners. The implausibility of this principle is shown by the examples.
C. Refuting Extenuating Circumstances: The State’s Fiscal Duty to its Citizens
The government’s duty to give special consideration to its own citizens’ interests cannot be taken to imply that the government is entitled to coercively impose grave harms on non-citizens for the sake of securing small economic benefits for citizens.
Furthermore, the state has at least one available strategy, apart from immigration restriction, for protecting its financial interests. This is to make a grant of legal residency or citizenship to potential immigrants contingent on the immigrants’ agreement to waive their right to receive certain social services. Even if the Priority View is generally correct, a plausible account of why these applications of the Priority View are not valid is that the Priority View must be understood as operating under an implicit constraint: the state should promote the interests of its poorest citizens, but without violating the rights of others. The fact that a particular action would promote the interests of the poorest Americans does not make what would otherwise be a violation of the rights of foreigners cease to be such.
D. Refuting Extenuating Circumstances: Cultural Preservation
Can one be justified in harmfully coercing others, solely because doing so is necessary to prevent those others from altering the culture of one’s society? Suppose that a number of your neighbors have been converting to Buddhism or selling their homes to Buddhists. Because of this, your neighborhood is in danger of being changed from a Christian to a Buddhist community.
Are you ethically entitled to use force to stop your neighborhood from becoming Buddhist? All of these actions seem unacceptable. Hardly anyone would accept the suggestion that your interest in preserving a Christian neighborhood either negates or outweighs your neighbors’ rights not to be harmfully coerced by you. The protection of one’s interest in cultural preservation is not a sufficient justification for harmful coercion against others.
E. Refuting Extenuating Circumstances: The Club Analogy
In the case of states, everyone is compelled to be a citizen of at least one—no one has the option of simply not joining any country. In addition, these states provide extremely important services, but some states are much better than others, such that individuals who belong to the worse states are likely to suffer severe and lifelong deprivation or oppression. Finally, exclusion from a country generally also entails exclusion from any of a vast array of interactions with the citizens of a given country. None of these things are typically true of private clubs.
If the private club analogy succeeds in showing that foreign individuals have no right to immigrate to the United States and that states have the right to control their membership, then similar arguments can also be used to establish that individuals have hardly any rights at all. The state does not have a right to require citizens to cut off their arms, or to prohibit women from voting, or to prohibit the expression of political opinions. The fact that states do not have the same freedom in setting citizenship conditions that private clubs have in setting membership conditions undermines the argument for the claim that the state has a right to restrict immigration.
F. Refuting Extenuating Circumstances: Societal Collapse
The one concern that plausibly would, if well-founded, serve to justify immigration restriction is the worry that enormous numbers of immigrants would cause a virtual collapse of American society. No one knows what the full effects of a policy of open borders would be, since it has been a very long time since U.S. borders have been open. Nevertheless, if the worry is valid, it would justify imposing some limits on the rate of immigration, albeit much higher limits than those currently in place. Advocates of restriction have failed to satisfy the burden of justification created by the harmful, coercive nature of their favored policy, and a far more liberal immigration policy is demanded by respect for individual rights.
Individuals have a prima facie right to immigrate (that is, a right not to be prevented from immigrating). This is because individuals have a prima facie right to be free from harmful coercion, and immigration restrictions are harmful and coercive. The prima facie right to immigrate is not overridden because of immigrants’ effects on the labor market, the fiscal burden of providing social services to immigrants, the state’s special obligations to its citizens, nor the threat immigrants pose to the nation’s culture. Therefore, immigration restrictions are wrongful rights-violations.
The affirmative states that most general theories are too controversial to form a secure basis for reasoning, and instead grounds his assertion in ethical intuitionism regarding prima facie rights. However, he hasn't justified immigration as a right or made clear what kind of right it would be. Ethics is ideology. He uses terminology that is typically only used by a very specific ideology. Prima facie is merely a different way of saying natural in this context. Those prima facie rights that he espouses are not codified anywhere in law; instead, he insists they exist because they are an inherent and natural facet of humanity. If he is arguing natural rights, his position is a pretty contentious claim and arguably circular. You need a little more meat than intuition to justify rights. He's essentially asking you to fill in the blanks. If he's talking about legal rights, then his position is completely absurd.
This issue should therefore be judged on the basis of the Lockean social contract and practical, real-world consequences.
P1: If a policy enforces a nation's social contract, protects democratic self-determination, and prevents the plunder of progressively scarce resources, then it is a morally justified policy.
P2: Immigration restrictions enforce a nation's social contract, protect democratic self-determination, and prevent the plunder of progressively scarce resources.
C1: Therefore, immigration restrictions are a morally justified policy.
Most modern governments are based off the concept of the Lockean social contract. Citizens of a nation are part of that nation’s social contract, and therefore cannot be barred from their home country. However, foreign nations have the right to bar them because they are not part of that nation’s social contract. The idea that you have a right to enter any country you like runs against centuries of tradition, which recognizes the right of sovereign states to regulate who may enter their territory. No international treaty asserts a general human right to immigrate to a country of one’s choosing. As far as I can see, the idea of a general right to migrate into a country of one's choosing runs counter to the entire history of the modern state and all established national and international legal principles.
The affirmative's "Sam and Marvin" analogy between entering a country and going down the street to a store to buy food is wrong. Did you catch the sleight of hand? In the story, Sam is completely separate from the market as opposed to the US and its government. Let's fix this analogy. Now Sam is working for the market and one of the things he has been told to do is to keep certain people, including Marvin, from entering. That's the hole in the reasoning: it's not a case of actively harming foreigners but rather the United States, through the actions of its duly appointed officials, passively refusing to take responsibility for said foreigners.
Moreover, the going-to-the-store-to-buy-food analogy is also wrong because it trivializes immigration. Any sensible country will regulate immigration, taking into account things like the absorption capacity of public schools or the health care system. If the situation in Marvin's country has deteriorated to the point that there is not one functioning grocery store left, that is a fucking disaster of monumental proportions. There had better be a whole army of Sams to keep the ensuing waves of Marvins out of the country.
The affirmative argues there are no extenuating circumstances to justify restrictions, but there are several realistic and severe extenuating circumstances that validate immigration restrictions.
First, an argument for a right to migrate into a country is fundamentally anti-democratic because citizens in every country favor some form of restriction. If a people cannot limit who enters their country, then they do not have a democracy because it means they have no self-determination. Self-determination means there is an identifiable people which has a right to control its own destiny and this must include the right to regulate who enters its lands. Public spaces in the U.S. are owned by the American people. And if the American people, through the laws enacted by their elected representatives, decide to keep people out who are not part of our country, that is our right.
Second, it ignores the fiscal burden. As Milton Friedman pointed out, you can't have open immigration and a welfare state. It is entirely impractical to have an open immigration that ignores their existence. Adding lots of low-wage workers means there will be enormous pressure to deal with this reality by including these individuals in existing social welfare programs. Education levels are the key determinant of the net fiscal costs. 54 percent of households headed by an immigrant without a high school education used at least one major welfare program. If all selection criteria were removed it seems certain this situation would become much worse.
Third, the affirmative's position comes primarily at the expense of the low-income population in the United States. He implicitly rejects the idea of concentric circles of obligation. Most Americans feel we have a much greater obligation to our fellow Americans than we do the poor in other countries. Immigration lowers the wages and employment opportunities for the least-educated and poorest Americans. It also strains public services, particularly schools and health care, often in low-income areas where the services are most needed. Thus I find the position morally problematic, because a well-educated relatively high-income person claims to take the moral high ground, but does so at the expense of his fellow Americans who are generally much worse off than he.
Fourth, the affirmative thinks about the issue from a static perspective, but the sociological literature is clear that the social networks of immigrants build on themselves. In an open system, immigration would be lower at first and then it would rise over time. Once immigrants arrive, more people in the home country learn from their friends and relatives about the benefit of migrating here. The new immigrants show the next wave of immigrants the ropes in America. This process builds on itself. Thus it is entirely wrong to think that there is a fixed number of people who want to come and we can just accommodate that number.
Open immigration is also impractical because it ignores the national security implications of the issue. It is certainly legitimate to think about treating immigration from certain parts of the world differently in terms of how applicants are screened and who is allowed to enter the country. But if there is a right to migrate into our country, it seems very hard to justify having significant restrictions.
Individuals have a prima facie right to live in a place without suffering from overpopulation and overcrowding. The rights of inhabitants of a place can not be arbitrarily displaced by people flocking in to a region - that is tantamount to plunder of progressively scarce resources. Unfettered migration is harmful and destructive. It creates exploitation, dehumanization, poverty, disparity, crime, squalor. We know how much immigrants cost to get into the country, and can use a basic understanding of economics to know that it would be disastrous if a country like the USA accepted all immigrants ever.
In the long run, rather than having a small minority of the world have the good life and the rest be living in poverty, most of the world along with all of the first world countries would be living in poverty. A right to migrate into a country of one's choosing is outside our tradition and that of the entire Western world. The policy it implies is fundamentally undemocratic, is clearly rejected by an enormous majority of the American people, and violates the social contract. Therefore, immigration restrictions are a justified policy.
This methodology follows a well-established tradition in applied ethics; I propose that the approach be applied to the issue of immigration. The approach can, of course, be subjected to criticism, particularly for the weight placed on common ethical intuitions, but this is not the place for a general discussion of the value of ethical intuition. In any event, the intuitive premises I shall rely on are, I hope, much less controversial than the broad philosophical theories of the sort mentioned above, and much less initially controversial than the immigration issue itself.
P1: If an action coercively imposes grave harms on innocent individuals and there is an alternative method of achieving the state's goals that is less coercive and less harmful, then the action is an unjustified rights violation.
P2: Immigration restrictions coercively impose grave harms on innocent individuals and there are alternative methods of achieving the state's goals (protecting financial interests, etc.) that are less coercive and less harmful.
C1: Therefore, immigration restrictions are an unjustified rights violation.
In response to the point that the United States passively refuses to take responsibility, note that the agent to whom I am ascribing a wrong is not the United States (the society as a whole) but rather the U.S. government. The government does not merely refuse to give goods to the potential immigrants, nor does it merely refuse, itself, to trade with them. It expends great effort and resources on actively stopping Americans from trading with or employing them in the relevant ways. When Sam actively stops Marvin from trading with anyone in the marketplace, when there are merchants present who would be glad to trade with Marvin, Sam thereby harms Marvin. He does not merely fail to benefit Marvin.
The negative relies on a social contract theory to justify this coercion. If the justification for official coercion must derive from a hypothetical social contract among all parties subject to the state’s coercion, then foreigners must be included in this contract. Foreigners are subjected to U.S. immigration law, which prohibits most of them from migrating to the United States. If legal systems require justification, perhaps because of the way in which they impose coercive restrictions on persons, and if, as a rule, they must be justifiable to all those on whom the laws are imposed, then the most natural view to take is that even limited bodies of law must be justifiable to all those on whom those limited bodies of law are imposed. Thus, immigration law should be justifiable to all those who are subjected to it, which is to say, to all potential immigrants. It seems unlikely that potential immigrants, if included in the hypothetical social contract, would agree in principle to being excluded from the country for the benefit of native-born citizens.
The negative argues that citizens own public spaces and nations are like private clubs with democratic self-determination. We might devise another scenario that provides a closer analogy to governmental control over citizenship. Suppose there is an island, on which each individual belongs to one of several “water clubs.” The water clubs procure water for their members, and all water on the island (including rain) is controlled by the clubs. Everyone is forced to belong to at least one club, and no one can obtain water except through a water club. Furthermore, some clubs are much better at managing their water, or simply have control of more and better quality water, than others. As a result, many individuals on the island suffer from chronic thirst and water-borne illnesses. Many of these individuals attempt to join better water clubs, but the privileged members of the latter clubs refuse to admit them. These privileged water clubs pass rules prohibiting any of their members from sharing water with thirsty people who do not belong to the club, and even from socializing with or doing business with such thirsty people. These rules are enforced through threats of violence. In the water club story, the clubs in question have control over vital goods that everyone needs, everyone is compelled to belong to one, those who belong to inferior clubs thereby suffer serious deprivation, and those who are excluded from a club are also excluded from a wide array of business and social relations with any of that club’s members. It seems to me much more doubtful that the high-quality water clubs in the example are ethically permitted to exclude thirsty, less-fortunate people.
Assume that immigrants impose a net fiscal burden on government. Would this fact justify forcibly preventing a large number of potential immigrants from entering the country? Suppose that Sam runs a charity organization. He has made a policy of offering free food to all poor people who enter the local marketplace. Unfortunately, the organization is running short on cash, so Sam is looking for ways to cut costs. When he learns that Marvin is heading to the market to buy some food, he decides to save money by forcibly preventing Marvin from reaching the market. Marvin would be better off being allowed into the marketplace, even without free food, since he could still buy some inexpensive food with his limited funds. But Sam has already made a policy of offering free food to all poor people in the marketplace, so he would in fact offer free food to Marvin, were Marvin to make it there. Is it permissible for Sam to coercively inflict a serious harm on Marvin, in order to avoid having to either break his policy or give free food to Marvin? Surely not. Surely Sam cannot justify barring Marvin from the opportunity to buy food from others, merely on the grounds that if Sam permits him to do so, then Sam will also voluntarily give him some food.
The state therefore has at least one available strategy, apart from immigration restriction, for protecting its financial interests. This is to make a grant of legal residency or citizenship to potential immigrants contingent on the immigrants’ agreement to waive their right to receive certain social services. Alternately, the state could require new immigrants to agree to pay a higher tax rate, sufficient to cover the government’s expected costs. The availability of these alternatives undercuts any justification the state could plausibly be claimed to have, in virtue of its fiscal interests, for excluding most potential immigrants from the country. I claim only that the state ought not to prohibit potential immigrants from entering the country, given that there is an alternative method of achieving the same goal, and that this alternative is less coercive and less harmful. In any event, the unnecessarily coercive alternative is not permissible.
The negative argues that the social networks of immigrants build on themselves and open immigration would lead to the plunder of resources. In my view, speculations about the effects of open immigration are overly alarmist. In practice, however, most people are much more reluctant to move. Even though migration among U.S. cities and states is legally unconstrained, 57% of Americans have never lived outside their current state of residence, and 37% have never lived outside the city in which they were born. For foreigners, these same reasons would apply. In the case of people considering movement from one country to another, however, family considerations would be even more weighty than for people considering movement within the United States. Foreigners also have additional reasons for not moving to America, deriving from language and other cultural barriers, as well as the sense of loyalty that most people feel to their native country. The 9.1 million applicants for the Diversity Visa Lottery constituted approximately 0.3% of the total population of the eligible countries. As a percentage of total population, the U.S. has coped with immigration rates far higher than the current rate.
The best explanation for why the majority of citizens continue to support very restrictive immigration policies is that most of us suffer from a bias that makes it easy for us to forget about the rights and interests of foreigners. Among these privileged prejudices is nationalist bias, the prejudice that causes us to view our countrymen as more important than citizens of other countries, and to ignore the rights of the foreign-born. Today’s Americans do not cringe when we hear the statement that America is the greatest country on Earth, any more than white people a century ago would have cringed to hear that whites were the best race. We have no right to feel ashamed of our ancestors, and our descendants may feel about us the way we feel about our ancestors.
