The Rightward Drift on Border Control

history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce

I can’t help but notice that the current state of America’s immigration debate is starkly reminiscent of Australia’s immigration discourse in the 2000s and 2010s. We began with a right-wing leader that pushed through a harsher approach to unauthorised border crossings (Howard, 2016 Trump). A centre-left government replaced them while promising to thread the needle on border control (Rudd, Biden), only to end up pushing for a border security crackdown in response to voter backlash.

The first Rudd government ended the ‘Pacific solution’ policy of intercepting refugee boats and detaining refugees on Pacific island nations. Gillard, Rudd’s immediate successor and predecessor, reintroduced a similar program in 2012 before Rudd declared that “asylum seekers who come here by boat without a visa will never be settled in Australia” during his second term in 2013. Similarly, Biden started off portraying himself as a supporter of undocumented migrants before trying to pass a bill to crack down on them in 2024.

Both Australia’s 2013 federal election and the US 2024 presidential election became referenda on who voters trust to control the border and stop unlawful arrivals. In both cases, tailing the right was not enough to save the centre-left incumbents. The Australian Labor Party took home the lesson that it was too little too late – they spent the next decade building up their credentials as bipartisan border hawks by endorsing their opponent’s Operation Sovereign Borders. The American Democrats are grappling with this issue right now, but they seem to be heading in the same direction.

Something I find incredibly frustrating is how frequently people, whether they are advocating for early Biden/Rudd era policy or for a shift to the right, refuse to seriously engage with the real world issue of border control. Both of these options suck.

The Bad Compromise

Early Biden and Rudd border control policy was clunky and half-assed. Centre-left governments presided over a system of moderate immigration controls and not a system of open borders or one where the supply of humanitarian visas met demand. At the same time, they adopted (comparatively) less harsh policies towards those who successfully crossed the border. The first Rudd Government promised to move some asylum seekers out of mandatory detention facilities and into community-based detention while processing their asylum claims. The Biden administration deported a smaller share of asylum seekers than Trump, weakened harsh family separation policies and introduced a few new avenues for undocumented asylum seekers to gain citizenship. You could hardly describe Rudd and Biden as supporting open borders, but they were certainly presenting themselves as kinder, gentler restrictionists.

Refugees took this all to mean that they would find asylum if they could successfully make the difficult and treacherous journey across the border. Predictably, this meant the number of unauthorised border crossings shot up. The right then spent several years pointing this out, claiming that the government had lost control of its borders and was letting in undesirable ‘illegals’.

It’s easy to see why this approach is unpopular, especially when centre-left politicians wanted to have their cake and eat it too by claiming that their policies wouldn’t result in increased border crossings. Rightly or wrongly, people feel cheated and bewildered by border control policies that result in more people illegally (by the state’s own definition!) crossing the border and potentially acquiring the right to stay.

It’s frustrating how much time the left has spent playing defence here. A system where asylum seekers are incentivised to take incredible risks in order to gain permanent residency is a bad system. Immigration restrictionists are often insincere when they point this out, but they have a point. The real world practices of centre-left border control are less proximately cruel but still remotely cruel. Asylum seekers are presented with an awful dilemma: risk things by waiting it out in a refugee camp or risk their lives by making a treacherous journey across borders. If they do the latter well enough and survive, then they might – just might – win asylum. It’s pretty messed up. That being said, the real world practices of right-wing border control are even more messed up.

Cruelty Maxxing

There are three ways to significantly reduce unlawful border crossings:

1. Massively expanding humanitarian refugee intake and making migration a quick and easy process. (Deter border crossings by making legal immigration easier)

2. Massively improving overall well-being, civil and political rights etc. in countries with high levels of refugee emigration. (Deter border crossings by eliminating the need to seek asylum)

3. Introducing stringent and punitive border control policies which make crossing the border more difficult and less desirable (Deter border crossings by intercepting migrants, banning them from ever legally settling and subjecting them to deportations and/or detaining them indefinitely)

The first option would work, but would provoke anti-immigrant backlash. I don’t know whether it’d be more or less popular then the early Biden/Rudd approach, but at least it could avoid the worry that you’re losing control or refusing to enforce the law. Carl Beijer seems to support something like the second option, but this would take a long time to work even if if we pretend that it’s feasible. Foreign aid can improve living standards in the third world but you can’t wave a magic wand to get rid of the world’s dictators and repressive regimes. Anti-immigrant voters, and probably a sizable portion of pro-immigrant voters, would not get on board with an unprecedented expansion in foreign aid either. And even if we did start spending more on foreign aid, we would still have to address the question of what to do with people who cross the border. The third option works, but it’s deeply immoral. Naturally it’s the popular choice.

Edward Hall points out that supporters stringent and punitive border control policies in theory fail to adequately address the cruelty involved in its practice. He’s talking about political philosophers who support an abstract ‘right to exclude’, but much of what he says can be generalised to politicians and pundits. It’s all well and good to insist that controlling your borders and refusing to let unlawful arrivals settle in your country is a sovereign right, but you should consider whether the following is morally permissible:

Rich democracies in the Global North employ various ‘remote control’ techniques to limit the number of migrants who reach their territories. This is an umbrella term for “practices, physical structures, and institutions whose goal is to control the mobility of individuals while they are outside the territory of their intended destination state” (Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers, David Scott FitzGerald, 2019, p.9). This is done so that these states can select which migrants they want to admit, while identifying, monitoring, detaining, or deterring those they want to repel. Most saliently, states from the Global North fund detention and border security initiatives in the Global South, ‘train’ local law enforcement agencies, and engage in joint interception activities. Rich democracies hope this will both prevent unauthorized migrants from arriving on their land, while also deterring others from attempting the journey. States hope to avoid legal responsibility for the ways that migrants are treated in this situation just because the deterrence takes place abroad, through complicated chains of authorisation involving many different state actors and private corporations. Several prominent scholars (for instance, David Scott FitzGerald and Didier Fassin) also insist that rich democracies want these harsh methods of deterrence to take place overseas because it renders the cruelty they involve invisible to electorates at home, who may object to it on humanitarian grounds. Remote control policies thus subject some of the most vulnerable people on the planet to horrendous cruelty and suffering. For instance, systematic fear is employed in the hope of achieving a form of social control. In many respects, this practice mirrors older patterns of colonial domination, where native leaders were incentivised to oppress their own people at the behest of the colonisers.

If unauthorized migrants manage to reach rich democracies, they can face further cruelty. On arrival, many are 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. Adequate medical treatment is often lacking. Moreover, detained migrants can be subject to verbal and physical abuse from underpaid and undertrained staff. States also have a persistent record of inflicting cruelty on unauthorized migrants before they are detained. There are credible reports of police and border patrol officials engaging in violent border pushbacks in many European states. In the US, immigration officials stand accused of holding manipulative ‘credible fear’ interviews instead of sincerely assessing whether unauthorized migrants have a compelling asylum claim (see Illegal, Elizabeth Cohen, 2020, p.61). Advocacy organizations have reported many examples of US agents falsely telling unauthorized migrants that they require the prior approval of Mexican authorities to lodge asylum claims (Refuge Beyond Reach, p.123). There have also been numerous reports of agents pressurising and intimidating unauthorized migrants to sign false statements that undermine their asylum applications (Illegal, pp.61-62).

State agents can also perpetrate dreadful cruelty by enforcing policies decided on by political decision-makers. 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. - Edward Hall, ‘Philosophers & Immigration Control’

It’s clear and obvious to me that these policies are wrong.

Avoiding Obligations

I don’t think that you can get around the obvious immorality of these policies by doing good somewhere else. If someone shows up at your door asking you to hide them from a crazed murderer, then I don’t believe you can reasonably turn them away and insist that it’s okay because you donate to the ‘Stop Murderers Fund’ or you sometimes invite people to your house. You owe something to that specific person – exactly how much you owe I don’t know – but you can’t just treat them with extreme cruelty and buy some malaria net indulgences to make up for it. Maybe I’m too idealistic, maybe I don’t understand the sacrifices you need to make to govern to the left of the possible, maybe there is no other way. But at the very least, the idiocy of the early Biden/Rudd approach and the cruelty of extreme border control measures should keep you up at night.