A popular argument among advocates of immigration controls is that a
nation has a “right” to control its borders. The argument is based on
the supposed “right” of the U.S. government to station gendarmes along
its international borders, including on privately owned land, to
prevent people from coming into the country illegally.
What the
advocates of control never address, however, is a related situation: If
the government has the “right” to prevent people from coming into the
country, why doesn’t it have the correlative “right” to prevent people
from leaving the country? Doesn’t control over the borders connote
control in both directions?
In fact, isn’t that the true
rationale for prohibiting Americans, on pain of fine and imprisonment,
from traveling to Cuba? While the feds actually prohibit Americans from
spending dollars in Cuba, we all know that that’s simply a sham to
cover up what they are actually doing — preventing Americans from
traveling from the United States to Cuba. If the federal government has
the power to prevent Americans from traveling to Cuba, doesn’t it have
the power to prevent Americans from traveling everywhere else? Isn’t
this what comes with the government’s “right” to control its borders?
That,
of course, brings us to the Berlin Wall, a border control that seems to
make American proponents of immigration controls uncomfortable.
One
of the principal arguments that advocates of immigration controls make
is, “The law is the law and people should obey the law.” Under East
German law, it was a criminal act to cross the border into West Berlin
without permission from East German officials. Even if people disagreed
with the law, the East German authorities expected everyone to obey it.
After all, they believed, “The law is the law and people should obey
the law.”
Once American immigration-control proponents accept
that principle as immutable, it would seem that they have no choice but
to defend East Germany’s enforcement of its law. Yet most American
immigration controllers would never do that, at least not publicly. To
defend the shooting of East Germans illegally crossing into West Berlin
is not exactly a popular position. Once the advocates of immigration
controls take the position that the East German law was immoral and,
therefore, that it was morally okay for East Germans to violate it, an
important principle emerges: People have a fundamental and inherent
right to disobey an immoral law.
If a law that prevents people
from leaving a country is immoral, then why isn’t a law that prevents
people from entering a country equally immoral? Suppose West Berlin had
constructed its own wall that ran parallel to the East Berlin wall.
Would advocates of immigration controls have condemned the killing of
an East German for illegally crossing the East German wall and praised
his killing for illegally crossing the West German wall?
The
immigration controllers often use collectivist rhetoric to justify
immigration controls. They say that “we” have a right to keep people
from “breaking into” our national “home” and trespassing on farms and
ranches along the border.
But the only reason that immigrants
are illegally hiking across people’s farms and ranches when they enter
the United States is that it’s illegal for them to travel normally by
bus or car. Moreover, America isn’t Cuba or North Korea, where the
government owns the nation and everything and everybody within the
nation. Instead, America includes a myriad of private properties,
homes, and businesses owned and operated by millions of private
individuals and companies. It’s obvious that the millions of immigrants
who have crossed the U.S. border illegally have found their way into
these private residences and businesses with the consent of the owners.
When the controllers call on U.S. officials to “lock” our national
door, what they really want to do is empower federal officials to lock
the doors of millions of private homes and businesses without the
consent of the owners.
The ultimate issue in the immigration
debate is a moral one: Are freedom to move, freedom to associate,
freedom of contract, and private ownership fundamental, inherent rights
or not? If so, then the federal government has no legitimate authority
to interfere with them. If not, then the immigration controllers have
the burden of showing how their position conflicts, in principle, with
that of the East Germans, Cubans, and, for that matter, the North
Koreans, who, not surprisingly, tightly control the movements of people
into and out of their nation.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
