Donald Trump waves his hands and proclaims, “America first!” His supporters cheer. Around the world, people recoil in horror, even though most of them support [Insert their home country here] First! politics.

The underlying idea here seems to be that co-nationals, in virtue of being co-nationals, owe each other more than than they owe foreigners. Just as I owe my wife and kids more than I owe strangers, or I owe Georgetown students more than I owe George Mason students, so Americans owe each other more than they owe Canadians or Iranians. On this view, common citizenship gives rise to special obligations.

Somehow this is supposed to lead to a principled defense of protectionism and immigration restrictions.

This is not a distinctly right-wing position. Or, even if it is a right-wing position, many leftists share it. We saw similar arguments from Bernie Sanders. Philosopher Stephen Macedo similarly argues,

…if high levels of immigration have a detrimental impact on our least well-off citizens, that is reason to limit immigration, even if those who seek admission seem to be poorer that our own poor whose condition is worsened by their entry. Citizens have special obligations to one another: we have special reason to be concerned with the distribution of wealth and opportunities among citizens. The comparative standing of citizens matters in some ways that the comparative standing of citizens and non-citizens does not.

After saying this, Macedo insists that his theory is “politically liberal” and that he is a “philosopher on the Left”.

In the quotation above, Macedo gives us a conditional. If immigration reduces the wages of our least well-off citizens, then we may limit immigration. In the paper, he makes it clear that he thinks the antecedent is met (though he does not provide much evidence for it). He makes it clear that this is not just a reason to limit immigration, but a sufficient, decisive reason. I’m sure Macedo is horrified at Trump’s recent executive orders, but as of 2007 Macedo seems to be on board with Trump’s basic anti-immigration, America First! stance.

There’s something deeply puzzling about these kinds of arguments, though. Even if grant for the sake of argument that common citizenship leads to special obligations, it’s not clear how this would lead to or justify the view that we may impose economic protectionism or immigration restrictions.

I have special obligations to my children. This means I have positive duties towards them that I don’t have towards strangers. But it doesn’t mean that in virtue of acquiring my special obligations towards my kids, I lose my pre-existing negative duties towards strangers.

For example, “Aiden and Keaton first!” means I can buy my kids birthday presents even as I fail to celebrate strangers’ birthdays. But it doesn’t justify me in stealing toys from strangers to give to my kids. “Aiden and Keaton first!” means I can splurge at getting them front row tickets at Cirque du Soleil. But it doesn’t justify me beating up a family already sitting in the front row in order to get the seats for my kids. It means I should drive my kids to fencing practice. But it doesn’t justify me hobbling the other fencers to give my kids a better shot at winning the tournament. It means I should give them relationship advice when they’re older. But it doesn’t justify me maiming would-be competitors to ensure my kids get to date the person of their choice. It means I will pay for their college to help them get the careers of their choosing. But it doesn’t allow me to poison competitors for the same jobs or for admissions to the colleges they wish to attend. In short, our positive obligations require us to do more for the people we have special obligations towards, but they do not permit us to violate other people’s rights, nor do they strip us of our pre-existing negative obligations towards others.

Further, “Aiden and Keaton first!” means I owe more to my kids than I do to strangers, not less. When I acquire special obligations toward them, I acquire additional duties. But it’s not like I also lose any negative obligations. I can’t, e.g., smash my older son’s knee to help my younger son beat him in a game of tag.

So, Rawlsian-style arguments might succeed in explaining why fellow citizens owe each other certain positive obligations. But they would not justify permitting citizens of one country from violating foreigner’s rights, nor would they justify permitting citizens from violating the rights of their fellows citizens in the same country. That isn’t how special obligations work.

So, the quick response to America First! goes as follows:

Okay, let me grant for the sake of argument that Americans owe other Americans more than they owe strangers. We have special duties to provide for each others’ welfare. But you’re not just saying America First! You’re also saying that Americans have the right to use violence and threats of violence to stop their fellow Americans from buying Bolivian coffee or hiring Haitian workers. You also saying that Americans have a right to use violence  and threats to violence to stop Bolivians from selling coffee to Americans or to stop Haitians from taking jobs from willing American employers. I don’t see how that follows from the claim that we Americans should do more for each other than we do for strangers.

Let’s take this to Macedo’s argument. In response, Bas van der Vossen and I say,

We could see how this would justify denying immigrants access to the state’s redistributive schemes and transfer payments. If Macedo is right, it may be the case that a poor person in rural Tennessee has a claim on a share of our income, but a much, much poorer person in rural Bolivia does not. But there’s a crucial difference between saying (a) that we can deny poor Bolivians certain benefits that we cannot deny poor Americans, and (b) that we ought to give poor Americans a benefit by coercively interfering with the freedom of poor Bolivians. While Macedo’s argument may support the former of these options, he is proposing the latter.

…when a first-world country restricts immigration, it does not simply prioritize the domestic “poor” over the global poor when distributing resources. Rather, as we have seen before, these restrictions actively and coercively interfere with others’ liberty, and actively and coercively impose harm. 

I put the last sentence in bold because this is the crux of the issue. Bas and I argue there is a presumption of freedom of movement. We presume, by default, that people are free to rent apartments or sell houses to whomever they want, or to hire whomever they want. (Obviously I haven’t argued for these claims here, in this post.) In the first instance, when the state restricts immigration, it uses violence and threats of violence to prevent its own citizens from forming mutually beneficial, voluntary relationships with others. Immigration restrictions are by default presumed an unjust rights violation, unless we have good reasons to impose them. Macedo’s kind of argument doesn’t do the trick. Macedo’s argument “works” only if presume that protectionist measures do not count as prima facie rights violations.

Protectionist policies use coercion not only against foreigners, but also against citizens as well. An immigration restriction does not simply interfere with a would-be immigrant; it also prohibits citizens from hiring her, befriending her, etc.

Note that Macedo would (we think) consider internal mobility restrictions unjust.

Suppose (contrary to fact) that it turned out that internal restrictions on labor mobility somehow tended to maximize the welfare of the least advantaged workers. Suppose that forbidding citizens who live in rural areas from taking jobs in cities or more populous states within the same country would somehow stop some (imaginary) race to the bottom. We doubt that anyone would think that this would justify laws preventing people from moving from a town to the city. If we really had to choose between liberty and distributive justice in this way, plainly the right conclusion would be that liberty takes priority over distributive justice. People have a right to move where they want, even if that comes at the expense of promoting certain goals of distributive justice.

Macedo fashions himself a Rawlsian. As such, we think, he would agree that we cannot restrict internal migration to promote the welfare of the least advantaged citizens. Doing so, after all, would violate people’s basic rights, and this violates Rawls’s theory of justice, which gives those rights lexical priority over goals of distributive justice. But if that is so, the proponent of this argument needs to provide some kind of principled argument for why restricting migration across national borders is different from restricting migration within them.

As a Rawlsian, Macedo would not support internal restrictions on immigration in order to promote the welfare of the least advantaged. He would agree that such restrictions violate people’s rights. So why do internal restrictions violate rights but external restrictions do not?

As a Rawlsian, one might say that nation-states owe a guarantee of freedom only to their own citizens. This line of thought has been suggested by Michael Blake, for instance. According to Blake, the difference between the freedom of movement of citizens and foreigners is that the former, but not the latter, is part of a bundle of rights and protections the state must offer its subjects in order to be legitimate. Any legitimate state must offer its citizens the freedom to move. But this does not mean it must offer non-citizens the same freedom. Since they are not subject to its rule, they need not be accorded the same kind of concern.

But this argument doesn’t work.

The view is, quite frankly, bizarre. For one, the argument confuses a sufficient condition for a necessary condition. What is plausible about the Rawlsian position is that in order for the state to justifiably subject people to its coercive power, the state must guarantee those people certain liberties. But Blake suggests a quite different position: that people must be guaranteed certain liberties only if they are subjected to the state. But this latter idea, the idea that our rights and freedoms need to be given to us, things to be earned by first being coerced by some state institution, is highly implausible.

Indeed, this  line of thinking may threaten the very starting point of the kind of Rawlsian theory it desires to express. This though here is that basic rights and freedoms are afforded to people as a condition of the legitimacy of the state that governs over them, not fundamental moral requirements that one might claim against the state. But if that is true, it becomes obscure why state coercion needs to be justified (by offering these protections) in the first place. If there is no fundamental presumption against coercion, a presumption that precedes the creation and coercion by the state, then why would the creation and coercion of the state require any justification at all? The argument only gets going if we stipulate that people – being autonomous, free and equal, or what have you – cannot without justification be subjected to this kind of coercion. But that stipulation, of course, is just to assert that there’s exactly the kind of presumption against coercion that makes immigration restrictions morally problematic. If the state as such needs justification, then, it follows that closing its borders for outsiders needs justification, too.

And for the knock-out blow:

Coercion as such does not distinguish between citizens and outsiders, then. And of course, this should be obvious. When the government of one nation restricts people from entering that nation, it thereby plainly does exercise coercion against them. We might say that, to this extent, it rules over them. Certainly, they are required to comply (and made to comply) with its laws. Border controls subject immigrants to significant levels of coercion. If, as Blake says, a necessary condition for a state imposing coercion upon certain people is that it must respect and guarantee certain basic liberties, then on its face this should apply to everyone the state coerces, including would-be immigrants whom it turns away by force, as well as its own citizens, whom it coercively prevents from making voluntary and mutually beneficial trades with would-be immigrants.

Again, what we need is an account that shows the (supposedly unprotected) freedom to immigrate into a particular country is categorically different from other (clearly protected) freedoms. The argument from priority for co-nationals works only if we already presume that immigration restrictions do not count as coercive infringement of people’s liberty or as coercively-imposed harms. There is no reason to grant this assumption, and so Macedo’s argument fails.

Supposedly the reason the state owe citizens more is because it coerces them. But when the state prohibits a foreigner from immigrating or forbids a foreigner from selling his products inside the state, the state also coerces the foreigner. So that’s not the difference.