Authorities Treat Unaccompanied Minors as Regular Migrants in Ceuta Crisis
On Ceuta, Europe Forgets What Borders Are For
When unaccompanied children are pushed back over a line in the sand like contraband, the power that does it has forgotten that it was trusted with force only to secure human beings, not to dispose of them.
I begin where the reports begin: with chaos at Ceuta, tens of thousands crossing from Morocco in a short span, dozens dead on the way, and an anonymous soldier saying that the standing order is to treat unaccompanied minors as ordinary migrants and return them at once. Around this, I see high talk of territorial integrity, letters praising “swift handling,” and plans for floating barriers to strengthen the border. I also see another voice remarking that political games are being played with the lives of those who hope for a better life and those who are taught to fear an “invasion.” Here, then, is the scene: great movements of desperate people, and great movements of administrative pens.
When I wrote in the Second Treatise that to understand political power we must first consider men in a state of nature, I did not mean that such a state was everywhere in fact, but that it marks the measure of right. Men and women, as the workmanship of one Maker, are by nature free, equal, and independent. They may for their greater security erect governments, trustees with power to make and execute laws for the public good. But that power, however dressed in uniforms or European phrases, extends only to the preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates. It never includes a right to treat any person, much less a child, as a mere inconvenience to be removed from sight.
The Spanish authorities and their European confederates claim a right to secure their borders, to resist what is called a violation of territorial integrity and even an “atrocity” of mass crossing. I do not deny that societies may mark out their territory and regulate entrance, for without some settled rule there would soon be confusion in the enjoyment of property and in the ordering of civil life. Yet the question is not whether they may regulate, but how. A power to decide who may enter does not carry with it an unlimited discretion how to treat those who in fact stand before you, wet, hungry, and often deceived. The law of nature does not end at the shoreline.
By that law of nature, which is only reason rightly hearkened to, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. To seize a man, or a boy travelling without his kin, and return him at once into a condition where his very life or freedom is in peril, without any hearing, without an impartial judge, and merely because a protocol says he is a “regular migrant,” is to exercise arbitrary power. Here is the danger: the same hand that frames the protocol executes it, is its own interpreter, and is judge in its own case. Such arrangements ask us to trust that those wielding force will always see the human being before them, when the machinery is built to see only a category.
Some may answer that what is done at Ceuta is done under prerogative, that is, extraordinary power to act swiftly for the public good where the laws are silent or too slow. I allowed such prerogative, in that same Treatise, only on two conditions: that the public visibly benefit, and that the people retain a power to call the magistrate to account. If, on the contrary, the border becomes a place where children are turned back by rote, where offshore centres risk becoming what your own critics call “human rights black holes,” and where every fresh death in the water is answered only by fresh barriers, then prerogative has hardened into custom, and custom into something very like a claim of absolute power over strangers’ lives.
I must also note how fear is here employed. We are told of an “invasion,” of hundreds of thousands already regularised in Spain, and of the need for stronger Schengen borders, as if walls could hold back not only bodies but also the questions that drive them: hunger, unemployment, the hope of recovering a life once had in Spain, as one man in Ceuta testifies. When rulers speak this way, and when neighbouring states are accused of “orchestrating” crossings as instruments of diplomacy, I do indeed see political games being played. The more such language recurs, the more closely one must watch for that long train of abuses which, taken together, show that the end is not security under known laws, but the convenience of disposing of troublesome people.
Because my information is imperfect, I cannot pronounce on each individual expulsion at Ceuta; yet the principles stand plain enough. Any border regime is legitimate only so far as free and equal persons could be supposed to consent to it as a means of securing everyone’s life and liberty better than the uncertain state of nature. A system that swallows up minors into summary returns, that offers no impartial judge to those whose very lives may hang upon the decision, that turns human desperation into material for domestic posturing and diplomatic retaliation, does not improve upon that baseline. It approaches instead that absolute, arbitrary power which I once wrote is worse than any state of nature, and against which oppressed peoples have always, in the last resort, an appeal to heaven.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The state of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — Prerogative as revocable emergency discretion — legitimate exactly as long as the public visibly benefits and no longer.