Harsh Borders, Weak Foundations

A government that sends thousands of people to countries they do not know is not confused about its intentions. Here we have buses carrying about 20,000 to Mexico, and flights sending more than 5,000 to Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and central Asia, even when judges in that same state had ruled their lives or liberty were at risk. Then a ruling throws this practice into question, and the rulers rush to the supreme court to save it. The princes of my time also tried to push their enemies into distant lands; the Romans did it with conquered peoples. The difference is whether the harshness is tied to public safety, or merely to spectacle and the ruler’s insecurity.

When I wrote in The Prince, following the translation of W. K. Marriott, that men must be judged by the “effectual truth” of what they do, I meant exactly such a case. The effect here is clear: tens of thousands physically removed, some to lands that will not keep them and so push them elsewhere again. The government calls this border control. Its opponents call it cruelty. I ask a simpler question: does this policy truly reduce danger or disorder within the state, or does it merely move human bodies like counters to prove that someone is in command?

Every ruler’s first incentive is to maintain the state. I never blame a prince for thinking first of security; I blame him when he confuses his image of firmness with the substance of safety. Appealing desperately to the supreme court shows that these deportations are not just an administrative habit but a core design, so vital that, when judges halt them, the rulers treat it as a crisis. In my language, the law becomes an arm, as important as soldiers: a reform without judicial protection is as naked as an unarmed prophet. But if you must beg your own arms to defend you, it is a sign of weak foundations.

Severity in government is not in itself a vice. In The Prince I argued that severity, well used, is deployed once for all, justified by necessity, and then not repeated; it wounds a few to save the many from greater harms that flow from disorder. Here, however, we see waves: an initial deportation surge in the opening months, then another spike with a record sixteen flights to thirteen foreign countries in August. Repetition is a bad sign. It means either that earlier blows did not achieve their stated end, or that the true end is not order but a permanent spectacle of rigor, which is the corruption of severity.

I also wrote that most people judge by the eyes rather than the hands. These rulers are not blind to appearances; they count on them. Flights to faraway places, secret deportation deals, public quarrels with courts: these are theater as much as policy. The message to the home audience is that the rulers are lions, not lambs. But a lion that roars at the weak and then must plead before robed magistrates each time he acts teaches his people a different lesson: that strength is a costume worn for rallies, not a discipline bound by laws. Reputation won by overacting is soon lost in the backstage quarrels.

Some will praise this strategy precisely because it rejects the middle course. They will say: here is decisiveness; here is a prince who does not hesitate. I do prefer a clear stroke to endless dithering, but only when the stroke answers a real necessity. To take foreigners with no violent record, ship them to thirteen countries that never knew them, and sometimes see them sent back again, looks less like a surgical cut than like flinging stones into a crowd. It breeds hatred abroad, division at home, and habituates officials to disregard their own judges. Thus a bold policy, if not prudently bounded, becomes the education of a corrupt people.

A free republic, if it wishes to remain free, must be severe in defending its borders and still more severe in defending its own laws. If the courts find that sending people where their lives are at risk violates those laws, then the rulers face a real choice: they can adjust the policy, or they can seek to bend the laws. To rush always for the second path is to teach citizens that legality is an obstacle to be leapt, not a dike that protects everyone. States do not fall at once; they erode when each conflict between necessity and law is settled in favor of naked necessity. The true art is to make the laws themselves your strongest arms.