Abolition, Amnesty, Decriminalization, Open Borders

So, how’s the mass deportation going for you?

Republican politics has flirted with mass deportation since the Bush Administration largely closed the border after 9/11. This represented a shift from the pro-immigrant rhetoric (if not always policies) of Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. Yet, while mass deportation has been a Republican threat, anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy has been the purview of Democrats as well as Republicans.

Do you have a drink ready? I’m going to say the words: There is illiberalism on both sides.

Democrats and Republicans have embraced an expansive view of executive authority when it comes to border and immigration policy, and they have directed this authority not to liberalization, but to controlling and curtailing immigration. One of Kamala Harris’s spotlight moments came when President Biden sent her to the southern border to talk about the “border problem.”  "Do not come" was her point-blank message to the world, and to Latin America specifically. In Harris’s campaign she used “fentanyl” and “immigration” as synonyms. 

Biden himself proposed a hard border bill and asserted an unprecedented power to unilaterally shut down the border. Biden clutched Title 42—the Covid pandemic era policy that gave the administration power to remove anyone from the country who had recently been in a country where the disease had been present (which was everywhere)—closely long after it could be plausibly justified on public health grounds. 

President Obama came to be called the "Deporter-in-Chief" for his increase in border removals relative to previous administrations. Obama also expanded Secure Communities from a Bush era pilot program. This was the policy that erected a vast biometric surveillance apparatus and initiated the systematic sharing of information between local law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). When we talk about sanctuary cities, we’re referring to jurisdictions trying to shield their communities from Obama's deportation machinery. 

Democrats didn’t attempt to ban immigration from Muslim countries, or purposefully separate families. And again, they of course never attempted mass deportation. But even in the best of circumstances, restrictive immigration policies result in tragedy. Families are separated because only one parent or family member risks the dangerous border crossing. The border crossing itself is dangerous because it is illegal, and immigrants take perilous routes to evade apprehension. Or they pay some sum they can’t really afford to trust their fate to human smugglers. At the best of times in the best administrations, tightly controlled borders result in dead bodies in deserts and washed up on shores. A haunting number of these bodies belonged to children.

A closed border means violence and death.

The point is not that Democrats have been worse. They have not. But Democrats have been complicit. Liberals have placated and pandered to an image in their minds of the moderate, independent, working class voter, who has "concerns" about immigration. Democrats have validated these "concerns" and fed a narrative that immigrants are a menace, either by taking jobs, or not paying their fair share, or introducing cultural pathologies into American life.

But those working class voters never believed Democrats could possibly be serious about stemming the tide of immigration because Democrats simultaneously pull back. They support DREAMers, quietly ease restrictions on immigration for certain cases, and tend to oppose wanton cruelty to immigrants. Perhaps those independent voters don't trust Democrats on immigration because they know on some level that opposition to immigration is just racism, and Democrats are, of course, against racism.

Intrinsic racism

When deployed by Democrats, we like to think the methods of immigration enforcement will be used by scrupulously non-racist, dispassionate technocrats. But it’s also possible to use these tools with racist relish. The merciless machinery of immigration enforcement was always going to be used by fascists and white supremacists who aren’t dispassionate at all. They love the work. The tools of ICE and DHS were always deadly weapons lying on the table. MAGA just picked them up and loaded them. 

The cruelty really is the point for some part of the right. They are racists and they want to banish most brown people from America and resubjugate black people under conditions of servitude and, eventually, slavery. Other parts of the right are willing to go along for the ride as long as there's a viable coalition for it. This is true to the history of immigration restriction in our country, which began with the Chinese Exclusion Act and moved through such hits as the national quotas that limited Jewish refugees from Europe during the Nazi era, and the charmingly named Operation Wetback to remove Mexican immigrants in the 1950s. Why should it surprise us that white supremacy and the Great Replacement fantasy should animate immigration restrictions today? They make an exception for white South Africans; the racism is explicit. Sure, we can hypothesize a non-racist restrictive immigration regime in some political party’s whitepaper or philosopher’s treatise, but in the real world immigration controls have always leaned on racism.

You may not believe immigration restrictions are racist, but racists believe immigration restrictions are racist.

Our byzantine immigration system does us no favors here. Voters believe it's easy to become a citizen, and the "chaos at the border" and the 10 million plus undocumented immigrants in the country now are the result of devious foreigners cutting in line. The truth is that legal immigration is far from simple in the best of cases, and there is literally no path to citizenship for many kinds of people. Everyone hates chaos and uncertainty. It sounds bad that there are so many "illegals" in the country. And why is the border such a mess? Democrats flounder at all of this.

What must be done? We must abolish ICE and the entire DHS. We must proclaim a general amnesty to all undocumented immigrants currently residing in America. We must decriminalize unauthorized immigration. And we must enshrine freedom of movement in the constitution.

Abolish ICE and DHS

Abolish ICE and DHS. ICE is a knife at America's throat, an enemy army occupying and terrorizing American cities, a ruthless paramilitary answerable only to the usurper Trump, happy to be deployed for any fascist purpose, like intimidating voters at polling stations. ICE and DHS are less than a quarter century old. If you remember Neo warning the Machines that he was "going to show these people what you don't want them to see ... a world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible," then you remember a time before ICE.

We enforced immigration laws before ICE, and enforcement responsibilities deemed necessary can be shifted to other agencies. This is far from radical. ICE's presence is intolerable and they must go.

Amnesty

In 1986 the conservative Republican president Ronald Reagan issued an amnesty to undocumented immigrants. When the chaos and contradictions are too much, the best thing to do is wipe the slate clean. Congratulations, you're American now. Sorry about all the harassment. Nasty business, that.

We can couple a general amnesty with any number of alternative paths forward, depending on the make-up of our coalition and its electoral position.

Decriminalize immigration

Decriminalize unauthorized immigration. Even if we maintain almost completely closed borders, we don't have to be cruel about it. A visitor is in the country without crossing all their t's and dotting all their i's. They've overstayed a visa. They've missed an appointment with an immigration judge. Alright, that warrants a slap on the wrist, a wagging disapproving finger, and perhaps a small fine for the bureaucratic burden. These are administrative violations, not crimes like murder, theft, or even disorderly conduct. The idea of decriminalizing unauthorized border crossing, visa overstays, and other immigration violations is already within the mainstream Democratic discourse. Representative Julián Castro proposed this in the 2020 Democratic presidential contest.

Proportionality demands we treat immigration violations humanely. Detention in jail, let alone in a concentration camp, is hardly proportional. And deportation is an outrageously disproportionate response. Perhaps we imagine deportation of recent arrivals, where an immigrant hasn’t formed deep attachments or fully embedded themselves in a community. Even then, deportation callously tears someone away from their chosen life and projects with no greater justification than that some powerful figures a continent away have ordained only persons who have checked the right boxes are permitted to cross an arbitrary line on a political map.

But it doesn't take long for a person to belong to a community, and in the case of an attempted mass deportation of millions of people, most deportations will involve ripping someone away from family, friends, lovers, colleagues, and ongoing social commitments. This is a devastating punishment for a victimless crime. And this is without even considering the common case of deportation to dangerous or oppressive conditions. Absent extraordinary circumstances, such as legitimate extradition, no one should be subjected to deportation when administrative penalties are more than adequate to keep most people fulfilling their legal obligations most of the time.

Open borders

Let’s just open our borders. 

What does it mean to have open borders? Open borders means we respect the individual’s presumptive freedom of movement. Every human being deserves the right to choose where to live. "Presumptive" means that extraordinary or extenuating circumstances may justify barring entry to some people some of the time. Known criminals or terrorists may be blocked from entering the country, for example. (On the other hand, why not just capture such criminals and terrorists and put them on trial?) Epidemic or natural disasters could justify temporary border controls. Actual invading armies (not "migrant caravans") should obviously be halted. But absent these rare cases, we should welcome everyone.

Open borders further means citizenship is open to all persons following a clearly defined and easy naturalization process. This will usually involve some extended period of residency, and various forms and fees. It may involve oaths of allegiance. The details aren't important, so long as there is a clear path for any given person to achieve citizenship, and that this path isn't particularly onerous. There must be a genuine, actualizable capability to join the new nation as a citizen.

I could defend open borders by appealing to economics, pointing to trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk. We need immigrants to fill jobs native-born Americans cannot or will no longer perform. Or I could talk about how immigrants contribute to economic growth and contribute more over time to the public fisc than they take out. 

I could fixate on the terrible plight of refugees, and how it's a humanitarian imperative to take in the needy stranger. The oft-maligned "economic migrant" is also escaping poverty and seeking a better life. There's a reason every major religious tradition commands us to welcome the stranger and treat them as we would like to be treated.

Powerful geopolitical benefits come with being an immigration magnet. We can fill our industries and universities with the world's best and the brightest while enjoying the soft power that flows from immigration networks. Immigrants stay connected with their communities of origin and spread American ideas and a sense of American goodwill. Perhaps this is why the Wall Street Journal for a time proposed a constitutional amendment: "There shall be open borders.”

Only open borders for labor can prevent the exploitation of workers by employers who can, implicitly or explicitly, use the threat of expulsion to keep wages low and cut corners with working conditions. Closed borders enshrine inequality, both for tiered castes within a nation and gated community effects between rich and poor nations.

These are all true, and they are solid reasons to favor liberal immigration. But for my part, we should welcome the foreigner, and embrace them as a friend and potential American for the simple reason that migration is the pursuit of freedom and happiness by one's own lights. People move for all sorts of reasons that don't reduce to economic betterment, nor to desperate flight from violence or oppression. 

People move to be with family, or to join a lover. They move for school or work, on temporary assignments or on a permanent basis. Young people move for adventure and to discover themselves, while retirees seek simpler homes in gentler climes. In every case, shifting and contingent circumstances can alter our life plans on a moment's notice, turning temporary moves into permanent ones, or vice versa. 

This is just life. We know this from our own lives. Everyone knows someone who left their hometown, and someone who stayed; someone who moved across state lines with every intention of coming back, but who remained in a distant land. There is no difference between state lines and national borders when it comes to the basic motivations to move or stay. These are the exact same, and should be respected as such.

Migration is an exercise of freedom. A free society respects exercises of freedom without suspicion or hostility. Freedom of movement is a freedom as basic as other core human freedoms like freedom of speech, freedom of faith, or freedom to choose one's occupation. We don’t make free speech conditional on the content of the speech, or detail conditions and stipulations for when and how a person may practice their faith, nor do we reserve particular careers only for those born with the right genes, ancestry, or place of birth. We trust people to speak, commune, and find their calling without suspicion and without permission. We should be just as accepting of freedom of movement. Let people be free to choose where they want to live.

MAGA fascists believe they can close the border and purify the nation to make America White again. Even nonfascists have an implicit belief that the border can be closed with some simple policy tweaks, dialing a few nobs and expending some resources. I’m thinking of mainstream Democratic politicians like Biden, Harris, and Obama; or the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders who is concerned about the native worker; or moderate voters who have a vague sense that there’s too much immigration despite getting on fine with the immigrants they know personally. 

Amid our present civil unrest, we can at least enjoy a moment of clarity. We now know that “getting serious about immigration” involves massive violence and regimes of social control and intimidation. It requires enlisting the services of those who want ethnic cleansing. Who else has the stomach to cut out upwards of 10 million men, women, and children from their communities? Only those who relish a little cruelty and salivate over racial purification will ever do what is actually required to remove all illegal immigrants and keep them out. There’s a reason why ICE recruitment posters use Nazi references.

The Battle for Minneapolis, and the smaller skirmishes in cities across the country have revealed that Americans will defend their immigrant neighbors. Maybe a lot of normie Americans tell pollsters there should be less immigration, but when masked reprobates kidnap people off the street, those same Americans perk up. When agents of the state arrest children and use them as bait to abduct their parents, those same Americans protest in righteous fury. 

When those same Americans see fascist thugs kill a lesbian mom—the kind of friendly lesbian auntie they recognize from their own lives—shooting her in the face three times—they organize to defend their communities. By then it's clear that immigrants were always their community, and these inhuman monsters from ICE, CBP, and DHS are a malevolent occupying force, bent on destroying their community. 

And when a nurse for veterans in the process of protecting an innocent woman is gunned down in rage by one of these evil men … well, now we can say the blood of martyrs has consecrated the citizenship of our immigrant brethren more than any government documentation ever could.

An American tradition

We can have open borders. When we take America back from the white supremacists we will open the borders in a third Reconstruction. This will be radical but necessary, for we have seen that the closed border and deportation machinery are the favorite weapons of MAGA. Open borders are fully in line with the radicalism of the American experiment in liberal self-governance. Indeed, the obstruction of immigration and naturalization was one of the very grievances that animated the Declaration of Independence.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

The Founders viewed this as an example of tyranny against a free people serious enough to include for the consideration of a “candid world.” It must be noted that several other Founding grievances have been given new life for the foul purpose of ethnic cleansing. Among them:

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures …

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us …

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States …

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.

Trump’s threats to end birthright citizenship have rightly provoked a lot of patriotic opposition. But it’s rarely noted that, at the time of the Reconstruction Amendments, when Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment established citizenship for those “born or naturalized in the United States,” America had functionally open borders. What does it mean to establish birthright citizenship when the land of the free was open and welcoming to all the world? Unless we imagine a systematic severing of children from parents, birthright citizenship in the historical context of free immigration implies a constitutional regime of open borders. A new Reconstruction, like the original, must include open borders.

Frederick Douglass enlivens the philosophy of open American borders.

I submit that this question of Chinese immigration should be settled upon higher principles than those of a cold and selfish expediency. There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are eternal, universal and indestructible.

Among these is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all and to all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here. It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and the Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go the side of humanity.

It’s worth stressing that the immediate follow-up to this statement draws attention to the white supremacist interest in closed borders.

I have great respect for the blue-eyed and light-haired races of America. They are a mighty people. In any struggle for the good things of this world, they need have no fear, they have no need to doubt that they will get their full share.

But I reject the arrogant and scornful theory by which they would limit migratory rights, or any other essential human rights, to themselves, and which would make them the owners of this great continent to the exclusion of all other races of men.

The radicalism of open borders is just back to the future. We have always been at war with white supremacy, with the Slave Power. We can have open borders. We will have open borders. We must open our borders to vanquish the Slave Power once and for all.

Featured image is Open the borders demonstration Berlin, by Leonhard Lenz