When the Cheerleader for Deportation Meets the Deportation Officer

A government office, not a battlefield, supplied the present drama. Immigration officials in the United States have arrested a British commentator in New Orleans. The Department of Homeland Security reports that he entered the country legally some years ago, overstayed, was summoned to an immigration hearing, failed to appear, and was therefore issued a final order of removal on 22 July. He is now held in custody, in Louisiana, pending deportation. No novel despotism is here unveiled; this is the unfashionable routine of law—summons, absence, judgment, execution—that usually proceeds without cameras, hashtags, or outraged pamphleteers.

What distinguishes this case, and gives it a certain grim entertainment, is not the procedure but the prisoner. The individual is described in your newspapers as a far‑right provocateur, once an incendiary writer for a partisan outlet, who has made a career of taunting opponents and celebrating severe measures against migrants. He has, we are told, publicly cheered raids by the very immigration agency that now detains him, and called for the deportation of multitudes. It is an old theatrical device that the actor be made to drink his own potion; modern politics, it seems, has learned at least that much from the stage.

Yet if we are to be guided, not by party glee, but by that impartial spectator whose authority I defended in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, we must ask a cooler question. What, exactly, has the state done? According to the official account, it has enforced a rule announced in advance; it has summoned a resident to justify his stay; on his non‑appearance it has issued a removal order; and it now detains him to carry that order into effect. Here is neither the man of system, rearranging lives upon a great chess‑board to suit some visionary pattern, nor the secret cabal of merchants I once accused of conspiring against the public. It is merely the magistrate performing the dull, necessary office of saying that a law is not a suggestion.

In The Wealth of Nations I assigned to the sovereign three principal duties: defence, the exact administration of justice, and certain public works that private undertakers would not supply. The administration of justice includes the steady execution of those rules by which strangers may be admitted, tolerated, or dismissed. A commercial society depends for its prosperity upon the security of property and the predictability of contracts; foreigners trade and settle where they can trust that written rules will be honoured in practice. A country that will not execute its own immigration laws soon acquires, not a reputation for mercy, but a reputation for caprice, in which the favoured are indulged and the unfashionable expelled, and in which the higgling and bargaining of the market must always give way to the whisper at the minister’s door.

There is, to be sure, a subtler objection. May not such enforcement be turned into a weapon of faction, wielded more eagerly against those whose opinions the ruling party dislikes? Might not the noisy commentator, whose writings on college tours and social media have enraged many, be singled out for a zeal that anonymous offenders escape? This is a danger so obvious that only a philosopher could miss it, and I am no such philosopher. The impartial spectator would demand to see whether like cases are treated alike; whether those who overstay and ignore summonses are ordinarily pursued to the same conclusion; whether the rules bite only the enemy or also the friend. Without that comparison, indignation is mere conjecture disguised as virtue.

But the conjecture cuts both ways. Those who now discover in immigration detention an outrage against liberty were, some of them, content enough when the same machinery descended upon nameless labourers. The commentator in question is reported to have urged “total legal immunity” for officers of this agency when on duty, and to have called for the deportation of “millions and millions.” If words are to be taken at anything like their face value, he demanded a system in which error, excess, and even injustice on the part of enforcers would be sheltered from redress. When such a man finds himself at the mercy of the discretion he wished to shield from scrutiny, the spectator may feel pity for the person while withholding sympathy for the principle. To desire unanswerable power, and then to complain that it answers to no one, is to be both author and victim of one’s misfortune.

We must also remember that every policy has both a visible theatre and an invisible ledger. The public sees the handcuffed figure at the airport, the triumphant press release, the furious or exultant commentary. Less seen are the costs: the resources diverted from pursuing serious criminals to chasing administrative defaulters; the uncertainty among lawful residents who fear, rightly or not, that a missed letter may end in a cell; the distrust sown when enforcement appears arbitrary, even if in this instance it is not. In judging such measures, the wise legislator does not ask only whether this person deserved this outcome, but whether, on balance and over time, such a pattern of enforcement increases or diminishes the security and industry of the great body of the people.

Looking only at the facts before us, I see a state acting within its acknowledged province, enforcing a rule that the offender himself praised in harsher forms when it fell upon others. I see no proof that merchants have procured this arrest for gain, nor that the magistrate has attempted some grand re‑ordering of society. I see, more prosaically, one man learning that the laws of a commercial republic are not a comedy in which he forever plays the mocker, but a drama in which he, too, is subject to the script. If that lesson were more generally learnt, both by rulers and by their jesters, the annual produce of the land and labour would be safer, and the jokes, if fewer, would be better.