Yes, Border Control Is Absolutely Moral

A depressing amount of plain nonsense too often pollutes public discourse because of, as George Orwell said, “the fact that the average human being never bothers to examine catchwords”. On few topics more notably than on borders.

A great deal of the problem is that few people are truly neutral on the topic of borders and migration. Which is a great impediment to thinking rationally on the subject. As David Hume said, “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”. Meaning that we are not rational creatures by nature, but driven by our ‘passions’. Reasoning becomes post-facto justification for what has already been decided by gut passions.

Which is not to say that reason is worthless. As American Revolutionary Ethan Allen wrote:

“Those who invalidate reason, ought seriously to consider, 'whether they argue against reason, with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle, that they are laboring to dethrone; but if they argue without reason, (which, in order to be consistent with themselves, they must do,) they are out of the reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.”

So, the challenge is to try and use reason as dispassionately as possible, to overcome the purely irrational impulses of our passions. A difficult, though not insurmountable, task. Unfortunately, too many, even of the philosophers, fail to do so when it comes to the impassioned topic of borders. For instance, Harvard philosopher Edward Hall, who passionately defends ‘pro-Palestine’ campus protests, academics who host pro-Hamas speakers and the genocidal Hamas slogan, ‘From the River to the Sea’.

Readers may perhaps have some inkling of the passions to which Hall is a slave.

Unsurprisingly, then, in a recent issue of Philosophy Now magazine, Hall sought to attack border control advocates – with the usual humbug and unexamined catchwords. For instance, Hall repeatedly uses the phrase unauthorised migrants. This is the sort of tiresome euphemism that too often goes unchallenged.

Correctly call “unauthorised migrants” illegal immigrants or unlawful entries and the issue becomes much clearer.

Because that’s what “unauthorised migrants” are: illegal. Despite Hall’s insinuations to the contrary – questioning ‘whether or not states have a unilateral right to exclude would-be migrants from their territory’ – that is the very essence of a state. Indeed, when we drill down through the unexamined words in Hall’s argument, the issue becomes ever more crystal clear.

What, for instance, is a ‘state'? A state is a political entity that regulates society and the population within a defined territory. Sovereignty is the defining characteristic of a state. What is ‘sovereignty’? The sole, supreme and indivisible law-making power within a defined territory.

A defined territory.

Borders are, then, what define states. As Belgian philosopher-politician Thierry Baudet argued in his doctoral thesis-turned-book, borders matter. Borders are the essence of a state. Without borders, a state disappears. Controlling its borders, then, is a base principle of a state. Unless a state has the right to exclude would-be migrants (legal or illegal) from its borders, it is no longer a sovereign state.

Having skated over this absolute bedrock challenge to his pro-open borders stance, Hall tries to argue that the real issue is the “real-world practices of immigration control”. Which it isn’t: either states have the right to control their borders, or they don’t.

In fact, to turn the argument back on him, the real issue is, by what means do ‘would-be migrants’ have to cross the borders of a state? At root, there are two means: legal or illegal. This is entirely in the ‘would-be migrant’s hands. A ‘would-be migrant’ is no less culpable for their actions than a would-be thief. If a person chooses to break the law, then they render themselves subject to the lawful penalties imposed by a state.

Many rich democracies in the Global North have made it very difficult for foreigners to apply for asylum from abroad, while simultaneously attempting to discourage them from reaching their territory to claim asylum there. For example, some states limit access to asylum procedures by declaring that refugees who have travelled through a ‘safe’ country en route are unable to lodge a claim for asylum in the subsequent state. Some practice measures that aim to prevent migrants from physically accessing their territories, such as maritime interdiction. Several states now practice offshore asylum processing, and support the relocation of refugees to third countries. Many have also criminalized unauthorized migration and human smuggling. Taken together, these policies make it very difficult for unauthorized migrants to reach their desired states. It is also common for states to adopt indirect measures which intend to make their lands less attractive for refugees, by, for example, instituting detention policies on arrival, or limits on family reunification.

Alright – and?

Note, again, that such measures are entirely the purview of the state whose borders are, or at risk of being, breached.

What bothers Hall, though, is, of course, the ‘morals’ of how a state controls its borders, which might have some merit, were it not for his apparently inability to stop muddling terms and mixing catchwords. Migrants, ‘would-be migrants’, ‘unauthorised migrants’, refugees, asylum seekers: these are none of them the same thing, yet Hall constantly conflates them as if they are. To call such argumentation ‘mendacious’ is to call Vlad the Impaler ‘a bit sadistic’.

It’s impossible to construct a genuinely rational argument on such shifting sands, which, I suspect, is Hall’s deliberate tactic. It appears that he doesn’t want to bother examining his catchwords, or his readers to do the same. Because the fundamental hollowness of his arguments would thereby be exposed.

Still, it is indeed worth considering the morality of the means of border control – so long as it’s done honestly.

Certainly not by such empty statements as that many states “have also criminalised unauthorized migration and human smuggling”. This is a nonsense argument: illegal migration and human smuggling are, by definition, criminal activities. Hall might as well wring his hands that states have criminalised theft or murder.

Still, lawbreaking by one party isn’t a license for the law-enforcing party to exact any punishment whatsoever. Even for crimes like murder, we rightly regard cruel and unusual punishments as unacceptable, even unlawful. This is Hall’s real argument: that states (rightly) controlling their borders “inflict much cruelty and suffering”.

This is an argument indeed worth considering: that doesn’t make it correct, though.

Hall distinguishes between what he calls “remote cruelty” – measures aimed to deter would-be illegal immigrants and people smugglers – and “proximate cruelty”, the punishments meted out to those who successful illegally enter a state.

With regard to the first, it is more true to say that would-be illegal immigrants and people smugglers impose any ‘cruelty and suffering’ on themselves. They, after all, choose to attempt to break the law of their would-be destination state. Quite often, in fact, the laws of their departure states. People smuggling is as illegal in Indonesia, a point-of-departure state, as it is in Australia, the destination state.

Successful illegal immigrants and people smugglers too are, Hall says, “detained in state-run facilities: prisons, immigration removal centres, or temporary processing centres”. “Conditions are often grim; mould and vermin thrive, and disease is rife.” This is, quite frankly, utter bunkum.

Firstly, illegal migrants in most of Hall’s “rich democracies in the Global North” are more likely to be ‘detained’ in hotels of varying luxury, or, in Britain, private homes, acquired at the taxpayers’ expense. Far from ‘detained’, as well, these illegal immigrants are granted more-or-less free movement, often again at taxpayers’ expense. The Biden administration spent a small fortune on passenger jets and buses ferrying illegal immigrants from the southern border to cities and towns across the US.

The illegal migrants are also often showered with luxuries like (once more, taxpayer-funded) mobile phones, food, new clothes and food and cash benefits. They are also (in the UK) granted priority access to free NHS medical treatment, ahead of the law-abiding UK citizens whose taxes have funded the roster of gifts and rewards for illegal immigrants.

Hall is on no less shaky ground when he claims that “the most notorious example is the earlier Trump regime’s family separation policy, introduced in 2018, which forcibly removed migrant children from the adults with whom they were travelling – usually their parents or other family members”.

This is almost entirely untrue. Most of these children were, in fact, ‘travelling’ with adults unrelated to them: a known tactic by Mexican cartel-run people smuggling syndicates to attempt to gain favourable treatment by border authorities. Just a handful of children were in fact separated from their genuine parents. More importantly, by the time of the Trump administration, the numbers of so-called ‘kids in cages’ had almost vanished. Hence the infamous sight of politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez staging a photo-op, conspicuously weeping…at an empty compound.

Resorting to such mendacious arguments does little to bolster Hall’s credibility on the topic. More, it makes him look like a stunning hypocrite when he berates Oxford Professor of Political Theory David Miller’s pro-border control arguments as “shady” and “damning”. (Miller correctly argued that border walls, for instance, are not coercive, because they simply prevent illegal entry.) As Hall admits, “philosophers generally accept [… that] acts of prevention” are not coercive.

Finally, what Hall doesn’t consider, in his handwringing about the ‘cruelty’ of border control measures, is the greater cruelty of open borders.

Consider war, for instance. Many acts that would be immoral in other circumstances – killing, for instance – are made moral by the fact of war. Especially on behalf of the non-instigating party. While it was immoral for Hitler’s armies to kill in an unprovoked war, it was absolutely not immoral for the Allies to kill in order to defend themselves.

Certainly, we place moral limits on the methods and types of killing in war – outlawing poison gas, for instance, or wanton killing of non-combatants without a legitimate military goal – the fact remains that otherwise immoral acts are justified in war, in order to prevent even greater cruelty and suffering. It was clearly cruel to bomb German cities, for instance, but leaving the German arms-making capability untouched in those cities would have unleashed immeasurably greater suffering on Germany’s victims. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unleashed great suffering, but certainly averted untold suffering that would otherwise have eventuated.

Border control is no different. Open borders in Europe have unleashed a wave of human suffering on innocent Europeans: the undeniable rise in rape, robbery and murder perpetrated by illegal immigrants. Most infamously, the well-co-ordinated mass-rape attacks by illegal immigrants in multiple European cities on the New Year’s Eve of 2015–16. In the US, as well, illegally migrated criminals and brutal crime gangs have perpetrated similarly horrific crimes, such as the rape-murders of mothers, young women and underage girls.

Unchecked illegal immigration and people-smuggling also imposes much greater suffering and cruelty on the illegal immigrants and would-be illegal immigrants than anything border control authorities could conceive. The rape of women by other “unauthorised migrants” is endemic, as attested to by multiple NGOs. ‘You have to pay with your body,’ people smugglers gloat. Their fellow “unauthorised migrants” grotesquely brag of the suffering and cruelty they impose with so-called ‘rape trees’, where the underwear of raped women are hung as horrific trophies. Tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of women and children are trafficked as sex slaves across borders.

When the Rudd-Gillard ended mandatory detention for illegal immigrations, illegal boat arrivals surged, culminating in a horrifying shipwreck and the loss of thousands of lives. Open European borders have also directly resulted in the deaths of thousands of ‘would-be migrants’, particularly children.

To blithely ignore all of this, as Hall does, brings into serious question, not just his status as an agent of reason, but his near-parodic assumptions of moral superiority.