Comments Elsewhere

Jason,

Three things.

First, while you probably do have a right to use force to defend yourself against certain kinds of known criminals, even by forcing your way onto my property against my will in order to take her into custody, it’s quite another thing to claim that you have a right to force your way onto my property in order to do ex ante screening of everyone who passes through it, in order to find out whether they are criminals or not. But of course that’ latter is precisely what the border patrol and internal immigration cops need to do in order to enforce an immigration policy. Do you think that your right to self-defense extends to commandeering my property for ex-ante screening? If not, where will your immigration cops even find a place to stand?

Second, to confine criminals in prisons the burden is on the government to demonstrate guilt. As you note, domestic cops have no power to make you stop at checkpoints and do ex ante screening without probable cause. (Actually, they do get away with this on the roads, but that’s low-intensity occasional screening rather than systematic.)

But if your argument in favor of ex ante screening is that you have a right to keep criminals away from you, why doesn’t that give you an even stronger right to have the government do the same thing at state lines, or just randomly search other people’s houses whenever they feel like it? They have no less probable cause for people crossing state borders, than they do for people crossing international borders. And whatever microscopic contribution to your safety you think it makes to stop a criminal from moving from one city a thousand miles away from you to another city a thousand miles away from you, you surely make yourself more safe by stopping a criminal from moving into your state, city, or neighborhood.

It’s true that limiting checkpoints to the border crossings would be less inconvenient (since it means fewer checkpoints) than an extensive internal checkpoint system. But precisely because it’s less disruptive the actual meaningful contribution that it makes to anyone’s safety is correspondingly microscopic. As you remove the defeating condition, the supposedly justifying condition also evaporates.

Third, if the moral justification for confining and exiling immigrant criminals is the same as the moral justification for arresting and confining domestic criminals, why treat them differently at all? Why not throw both in prison, or exile both, rather than adopting different responses depending on the nationality of the person who’s allegedly posing a threat to your safety?

Thanks for your patience, by the way. I realize this is a pretty long pile-on and a lot of questions being fired your way over a disagreement that, from the standpoint of policy results, no doubt seems quite small when fully considered. (I’m just of the opinion that similarities or differences in moral principle are much more worth spending time on than similarities or differences in concrete policy outcomes.)