In November 2014, Barack Obama took executive action on immigration, offering relief from deportation for some (though not all) undocumented immigrants. It was a step in the right direction that will help millions of people, although many had hoped for more. Of course, many had also hoped for less—conservatives derided the plan, and even called it an unconstitutional abuse of power.
It is ironic that the “abuse of power” in question rests in not deporting people. One would think that the real abuse of power might lie in tearing parents from their children. And yet apparently, that is not the political landscape we live in. This landscape is certainly malleable; there are powerful arguments for Americans to take the rights of immigrants seriously, grant amnesty and even open borders. These arguments can be rooted in basic human empathy, or the right to free movement, or the principle of equality of opportunity, and they deserve to prevail.
However, the odds are unfairly stacked against immigrants from the start. Noncitizens, practically by definition, have no means of representation. Politicians do not answer to them; employers can get away with violating labor regulations.
While winning full citizenship is a worthy goal for those who have made it across the border and established lives for themselves in the US, what about those who lack the resources to do so, or were caught along the way? Democracy rests upon self-governance, under the principle that people should direct the state, and not vice versa. So one would think that those most affected by the laws in question—the victims of armed border patrols, detainments, and forced deportations—should at least have a say. Yet potential immigrants and undocumented Americans have no say in America’s violent border regime.
At first glance, it may sound absurd and impractical to suggest that the undocumented should vote in elections, or even just on measures related to immigration. Yet it is equally absurd that millions of people are held accountable to laws they had no say in, subject to violence from a state of which they aren’t allowed to be members. If the former radically challenges our conception of state sovereignty, the latter violates individual autonomy and democratic ideals. In truth, a fundamental realignment of our system of nation-states is probably necessary. But until that day comes, our current paradigm can be at least partially reconciled to democratic values by opening borders.
Democracy is about giving people control over their own affairs. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy to decide who are “the people,” and which affairs count as their own. Historically, these boundaries were almost never set through mutual agreement between neighbors, but through war and colonization—through violence that would be illegal under international law today. Even in supposedly democratic regimes, women, people of color, and the poor were (and still are) regularly excluded.
For example, take the current US- Mexico border. It was largely set in the aftermath of an imperialistic war in the 1840s, one of many injustices that a slave-owning nation ruled by white settlers perpetrated in the name of Manifest Destiny. Crossing that border may disrespect the “rule of law,” but it’s unclear how worthy of respect that rule is.
Or imagine a more ideal scenario: a group of geographically isolated humans has unanimously instituted some organized system—a government—through which to run their own affairs. There still are troubling questions. It is likely that the group’s decisions, from border control to trade policy to environmental pollution, will fundamentally affect the affairs of those excluded from the system. Even if the society strives for limited interaction with the outside world, the potential for immigrants means they will have to make a choice. Should someone wander in, will she be admitted as a citizen, forcibly turned away, or something in between? Under any situation but the first, the immigrant would be subject to state coercion under laws she had no say in, and has no means to challenge. Were a native-born adult human put in the same position, no one could call the state a democracy. (Though of course, that is precisely how the US treats millions of people convicted of felonies.) What could be morally significant about being born on the wrong side of the border?
So far I have been guided by the work of McGill political philosopher Arash Abizadeh, who argues that the act of coercion, or even the threat of coercion, is necessarily a violation of autonomy. The threat of state coercion, according to Abizadeh, can only be legitimized through the democratic process.
Border security, incarceration, and deportation are threats to which states subject outsiders, goes the argument, so according to democratic principles these outsiders should have a right to contribute to immigration policies. (The same might go for some military action and aggressive economic sanctions.) While a people may have some right to self-determination, the effects of border control are felt most heavily by non-citizens: more than these policies are self-determination, they are forcefully determining the futures of others.
Others argue for a still broader principle, calling to enfranchise everyone affected by a policy, not just coerced. Yes, direct threats of state violence—if they can ever be legitimated—require democratic consent, but other, less direct effects can be just as important. There is violence in the government-sponsored fossil fuel projects that drown low-lying islands and cause droughts across the world, even if it is less visible than the violence of a prison or a border agent.
Implementing Abizadeh’s ideas would dramatically enlarge the voting body and require a profound reframing of present borders; some of the other ideas go further still, and may seem impractical. But just because something seems impractical does not mean it is wrong. The present border system is an outdated relic of a wildly different geopolitical era.
Many of our social, environmental, and economic realities do not fit within the old model. Some parts of the American Southwest share more in common with parts of Mexico than they do with their own capital in Washington DC. Greenhouse gases seem to mock the concept of national sovereignty as they flit from industrial countries to ravage low-emitting regions. The rapid exchange of ideas allowed by the Internet can pave the way to a truly global community.
On the other hand, some issues truly are local, and subsuming them to some larger global government could pave the way to exploitation. Differences in geography, climate, culture, and history make local residents much better suited to govern their own communities. This is one (though not the only) reason why indigenous groups in the Americas find it so important to retain sovereignty and self-determination, and nearly half of Scotland wanted to leave the United Kingdom. There are elements of this embedded in US federalism: our own local mayor and council have (with community input) banned fracking in Princeton. Other Americans may have wanted cheap energy from the gas reserves beneath Princeton, but intuitively they should not have the right to sacrifice our environment for those perceived needs.
So some concerns are local, some are global, others may be regional—what exactly does this tell us? Only that the world is messy, and doesn’t fit well within the lines drawn by kings and colonialists of the past. If and when those lines are redrawn democratically, then there may (or may not) be an argument that border control is justified.
After all, participating in the creation and adoption of policies does not prevent those policies from being implemented. The wealthy should not be disallowed from voting on tax laws, but they should still be taxed. Perhaps there should also be safeguards to prevent the wealthy from gentrifying foreign cities the way they have gentrified their own (though I’d prefer to see this accomplished through economic reforms rather than immigration restraints). The point stands: under democracy, potential immigrants, arguably, need not be given immediate citizenship—but they should at least have a say. Until there is a means for cross-border democracy, it seems at the very least we must remove noncitizens from state coercion.
Does that necessarily mean open borders? For an attempt at non-coercive border control, imagine that the wall along the US-Mexico border is complete. It runs coast-to-coast over land and water; it is indestructible, too sheer and high to climb with even the best equipment. But there is no direct threat of coercive state violence: no guards, and those immigrants who make it to the US (by boat, by air, or from the north) are neither detained nor deported.
Were the US to unilaterally construct this wall, ludicrous and improbable as it may be, it is not obvious that it would violate Abizadeh’s coercion-based principle. But this also shows that this principle may be incomplete. Families would be forever separated, and the money many migrant workers send home would never get there. Many who struggle with poverty and conflict throughout Latin America would have their dreams of a better future shut off to them. The US economy, too, would flounder without a regular supply of migrant farm labor. (And this doesn’t even mention the disastrous environmental effects such a wall would have, particularly on the several endangered species that live along the border.)
Even if there were neither walls nor deportations, but instead only the withholding of citizenship, there would still be permanent residents with no representation in the making of the laws that govern them. We may accept that tourists are subject to our laws without a vote, but to deny such a right to a long-term resident with social ties to this country is unconscionable. Most crimes are subject to a statute of limitations, after which the offense is no longer prosecutable; surely the debatable “wrong” of crossing a border should not haunt an immigrant forever.
It is clear that any and all border control, directly coercive or not, is a form of direct or indirect state violence on individuals all over the world. The principles of self-government mean these individuals must be given some autonomy over their own lives, by playing a role in the allocation of national boundaries and the development of border control all over the world. Until then, the deportations and detainments are necessarily authoritarian and oppressive.
Those of you who have attended a political rally or march—a much higher number, I suspect, than would have been the case a year ago—probably know the call-and-response chant: “Show me what democracy looks like,” “This is what democracy looks like!” Embedded in this chant is the conviction that democracy is about more than letting politicians decide our fate; instead, it is an ongoing process in which we are active participants. It is a reminder that the state should be subject to the people, and not vice versa. And thus it cannot be the state’s role to force people out—democracy does not and cannot look like armed border patrol taking aim at people who never asked for a wall to begin with. It is the voice of the undocumented activist, the voice of the poor family from Tijuana, the voice of the Cambodian refugee. And when they speak, there is no excuse not to listen.