Deportation by Proxy Is Not Justice but Evasion

One detail of the present controversy is worth dwelling on before it vanishes amid the usual noise of accusation and defence. We are told that in the opening months of the current administration there was an initial wave of deportations, and that in August the practice spiked again: sixteen flights in a single month, bearing people to thirteen different countries that were not their own. Some twenty thousand persons have been bussed to Mexico; more than five thousand have been flown to countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and central Asia, to which they had no connection, and often from which they are swiftly returned to the very dangers that American judges had already acknowledged. Here the cruelty is not merely incidental; it is the mechanism.

In my inquiry into moral sentiments, I argued that we judge conduct by placing ourselves, as it were, in the situation of a well-informed and disinterested spectator, and asking what he would feel. That spectator may indeed approve the removal of those who have no right to remain and who threaten the security of their neighbours; the impartial eye is not blind to public order. But he cannot approve the sending of a man or woman, whom the state’s own tribunals have pronounced in danger, first to an unfamiliar country and then, by a kind of bureaucratic ricochet, back toward the very persecution already recognized. To treat the judicial finding of risk as an obstacle to be circumvented rather than a duty to be honoured is to prefer the appearance of law to its substance.

When I wrote of the sovereign’s duties in the Wealth of Nations, I placed foremost the exact administration of justice. Justice is not served by the mere motion of vehicles and the stamping of papers, but by a steady regard to the security of every innocent person under the law’s power, native or foreigner, beloved or unpopular. A state may with propriety regulate the entry of strangers, as a householder may shut his door at night; but if, having once opened that door and admitted the suitor to its tribunals, it then drags him half across the globe to rid itself of embarrassment, it does not so much enforce its jurisdiction as escape it. This is not the firmness of government; it is its bad faith.

Every public measure has its visible beneficiaries and its unseen payers. The benefit that is paraded here is plain enough: a ministry may point to the number of flights, the thousands bussed, the count of third countries engaged, and claim energy, resolution, a certain harsh orderliness at the border. The cost is more obscure. It is borne first by the deported themselves, whose lives or liberty have already been judged at risk; then by their families scattered across frontiers; and finally by the broader society, which grows accustomed to the idea that a legal promise is a negotiable instrument, that a finding of danger is a problem for logistics, not conscience. To cheapen rights for the least protected is to debase the coinage for all.

I have long counselled the most suspicious attention whenever a powerful interest comes forward in the patriotic dress of necessity. Here the interest is not that of merchants seeking a monopoly, but of political actors seeking a spectacle. To appear harsh is cheaper than to govern wisely; a flight to a distant land is more easily counted than a quiet, laborious reform of the asylum system. Those who administer such policies are not, for that reason, monsters; they respond, as butchers and bakers do, to the incentives before them. Yet when applause is granted for numbers moved rather than for justice done, we should not marvel that officials pursue the former. A policy that pays them in praise for evading their own courts’ judgments invites precisely this evasion.

The defenders of these measures will say that a state must control its frontier, that indulgence invites further irregular arrivals, that firmness today prevents ships and buses tomorrow. The impartial spectator grants the premise and rejects the conclusion. For the question is not whether the state may remove, but how. It is one thing to insist that those without claim depart to their home, with as much decency as circumstances allow; it is another to construct a carousel of third countries where the person has no tie, no prospect, and often no safety, merely to break the chain between the act of removal and the moral responsibility for its outcome. To separate power from responsibility in this fashion is the oldest trick of injustice.

A government faithful to its proper duties would begin from the sober recognition that on the great chess-board of human society, every migrant is a piece with a principle of motion of his own, not a counter to be shifted from Mexico to Ghana to a forgotten danger-zone to satisfy a monthly statistic. It would align its deportation policy with the judgments of its own tribunals, not treat those judgments as inconveniences. It would prize praise-worthiness above applause, and remember that the natural progress of opulence rests ultimately on the security and self-command of the labouring poor, wherever they were born. A state that learns to expel the vulnerable by proxy will find, sooner than it expects, that it has exiled something in itself that cannot so easily be recalled.