A humane immigration policy would consider these people

Editor’s Note: The following are selections from a paper that was originally prepared for and presented by NumbersUSA’s founder Roy Beck to the 1997 Annual Conference on Applied Ethics at California State University at Long Beach. With Pope Leo XIV’s views on U.S. immigration policy subject to recent public interest, we are reposting these in hope that they will contribute to the public understanding of different approaches to a humane policy.

A humane policy would consider four primary classes of people:

1. those seeking to immigrate,
2. needful people left behind in the sending country,
3. disadvantaged citizens of the receiving country, and
4. the general citizenry of the receiving country.

Interests of those four classes inevitably will clash, and so will interests of sub-groups within each class. The effort to create an ethically humane policy requires decision-makers to assign different moral weight to the needs of each of those classes and sub- groups so that priorities can be set.

Writing immigration policy is an act of favoring one group over another. Which group wins? Which loses? How does a country maximize benefits and minimize harm? Those are the questions that any immigration policy must answer.

Three Philosophies of Immigration:

A. Open-Immigration Philosophy

The first ethical issue of immigration is whether any community – – especially a nation or country — has a right to place the needs of its own residents ahead of the needs of people outside the community. Open-immigration advocates answer in the negative. In the United States, most advocates of the open-immigration philosophy can be found in two groups:

A-1. Free-Market Libertarians on the Right

Their emphasis on the individual suggests that everybody in the world should have the opportunity to rise as high as their talents and energy allow, without the restriction of borders.

It is not right, in this view, to deny consumers the opportunity for lower-cost goods that might arise from the free flow of lower-cost goods and labor from other countries. Neither is it right to restrict the owners of capital from the additional profits that might be gained from cross-border movements of goods and labor. And, thus, it is not right to protect the workers of one country from wage and job losses due to competition of foreign workers through either trade or immigration barriers.

A-2. Religious and Secular Globalists on the Left

In general, these believe that the needs of people in the Third World have priority over the needs of people in more advanced nations when it comes to questions of whether migrants should cross borders. Underlying this is the assessment that most would-be immigrants come from conditions that are worse than those for the Americans who may be hurt by their entry.

The open-immigration philosophy challenges — but doesn’t necessarily call for the elimination of – – the nation-state and its borders. Powerful appeals for a version of open borders have come in recent years from some high-profile religious leaders who say that although a country has a right to control its borders, workers without jobs have a higher right to cross the borders in search of work. That would qualify hundreds of millions of people around the world to immigrate.

B. Closed-Immigration Philosophy

The ethics of closed-immigration are based primarily on the belief that a country’s ethical priority is to its own citizens. To the extent it has ethical obligations to other people, a country should help those people where they reside, not by bringing them into the country and posing harm to its own citizens. Some closed-immigration advocates feel little obligation to helping impoverished peoples in other countries, while other closed-immigration advocates are extremely active in international religious ministries and relief and development efforts in poor countries.

Most nations today essentially bar all immigration except for emergency refugee movements and persons considered to be “returning home.” Although critics often call these people “closed-border types,” many advocate vigorous international trade. And most would not close borders to the millions of foreigners who come each year for business, education and tourism. They would close the borders only to permanent relocation.

Supporters of closed borders point to what they see as substantial agreement among history’s philosophers that a person’s moral obligations are greatest for those persons who are closest to them, and to their own descendants. Vanderbilt University philosopher John Lachs has noted that, “Throughout history, acting in self-interest for one’s own people generally has not been considered morally selfish.”

He cited a number of religious and ethical philosophers:

(Roman: Cicero) “The union and fellowship of men will be best preserved if each receives from us the more kindness in proportion as he is more closely connected with us. … Nature produces a special love of offspring…To live according to Nature is the supreme good.”

(Greek: Homer) “…every good man, who is right-minded, loves and cherishes his own.”

(Christian: Paul) “If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith.”

(Jewish: Teachings from the Middle Ages) “The general rule is that the poor of your town come before the poor of any other town…. As between relatives and poor strangers, relatives come first.”

(Hindu: Janet) “For him who fails to honor them (father and mother), every work of piety is in vain. This is the first duty.”

(Socialism: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) “If all the world is my brother, then I have no brother.”

That last quote may be as important as any in the minds of the ethical advocates of closed borders. In the U.S., for example, why bring more needy people into the country when there already are millions of Americans who are ill-fed and unable to secure decent housing, tens of millions of children growing up in poverty and overcrowded schools, and even larger numbers of adults who are illiterate?

Some who hold this closed-immigration philosophy place heavy emphasis on the protection of natural resources inside a country for the future inhabitants of a land. Because immigration can cause enormous population growth — as is the case in the United States today — they see immigration as an environmental threat.

C. Restricted-Immigration Philosophy

Restricted-immigration has been the standard for the United States since 1924 and guides the policies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the few other countries that still allow a significant flow of new immigrants. Polls suggest that the majority of Americans hold to this philosophy. A great deal of the most heated debate in this country occurs between people who share this same viewpoint but disagree on whether one million, two million or something more like 200,000 to 500,000 best fulfills their criteria. The restricted-immigration philosophy usually is characterized by four beliefs:

1. A country has an ethical obligation to open its borders to at least some of the world’s most needy migrants, especially those who may face starvation or persecution if not given refuge.
2. The needs of a country’s own citizens usually have moral priority over the needs of others.
3. At low enough flows, it is possible to help migrants by letting them in without harming a country’s own citizens.
4. The majority of migrants who might want to come into a country must be barred because their entrance would lead to great injustices to a country’s own citizens.

Adherents of the restricted-immigration philosophy tend to view the closed-immigration adherents as tipping the scales too far in favor of a country’s own inhabitants. In varying degrees, they believe a country should take enough immigration to hurt –at least a little bit. However, the restricted-immigration adherents tend to agree that the nation-state is a superior way of organizing people and of creating incentives for behavior that will benefit the most people.

In the view of the restricted-immigration philosophy, mass immigration has the power to do what open-border supporters say it will do: reduce disparities among nations. But the growing equality does not come by greatly improving the conditions of the poor countries. Henry Simons, a pioneer advocate of free-market economics at the University of Chicago, argued that free trade among nations would raise living standards in all participating nations. But he said that major cross border movements of workers would level standards everywhere, perhaps without raising them anywhere. Another noted pioneer free-market economist, Melvin Reder, in 1963 advised President Kennedy that free immigration would cause per capita incomes between nations to equalize (the goal of open-border globalists), mainly by leveling the incomes of workers in industrialized countries down toward the low wages in the Third World. (Kennedy backed immigration numbers that were approximately one-third of today’s.)

The dilemma for those who endorse restricted immigration is

1. to find what level of immigration is low enough not to hurt the citizens of a country,
2. to determine under what circumstances there is an ethical obligation to cause some domestic harm by bringing in a higher level of migrants, and
3. to decide to whom the immigration slots should be allotted.