The tactics of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda have shifted from time to time, but the broader objective has remained consistent: to deport as many people as possible and, more broadly, to transform the restrictions and reach of America’s immigration system.
President Trump and members of his administration believe they have a democratic mandate to do this. Their ultimate fear is that outsiders pose a danger to American values — the threat of not just taking our jobs or becoming welfare scroungers but also transforming our society into something different. “America First” means not so much putting Americans first as putting a distinct idea of America and American values first.
Yet the danger to those American values comes not from immigration itself but from immigration control. You cannot control outsiders (immigrants or would-be immigrants) without controlling insiders (citizens). The more vigorously you try to control immigration, the more you end up limiting the freedom of your citizens and violating equality and the rule of law.
This isn’t hypothetical. As Hiroshi Motomura and others have noted, during the Great Depression and in the years following World War II, an estimated two million people were forced to leave the United States. Astonishingly, more than half were American citizens, mostly people who were (or were suspected of being) Mexican. They were blamed for taking jobs and public resources and were deported or self-deported under intense pressure from authorities after targeted raids on neighborhoods.
This number does not include the many others who were wrongfully arrested, detained or incarcerated, often for days and weeks and sometimes for months or years, by the U.S. government. Nor does it include the many immigrants who were legal residents and were wrongly deported.
These statistics do not tell the whole story. To understand how immigration control undermines freedom — and the fundamental values not just of America but of most Western democracies — we need to look deeper.
The popular image of immigration control is border security, but there is more to immigration control than that. Governments everywhere encourage people to cross their borders and enter their countries. The U.S. National Travel and Tourism Office strategy aims to have 90 million annual international visitors — tourists, students, athletes, business travelers, transport workers — by 2027.
Immigration control is not necessarily about restricting entry but about controlling what those who enter do: determining whether they can work, study, reside, buy property, open bank accounts, set up businesses or marry. This is a challenge because many citizens are all too ready to employ outsiders, admit them to schools and universities, sell to them, buy from them or fall in love with them — in short, welcome them.
The only way for a government to prevent this from happening is to control its citizens by limiting their freedom to live as they choose. This means citizens must be controlled with penalties or punishments: fines, imprisonment or violence. They must be inspected, monitored, scolded, threatened and made to be fearful of finding themselves in violation of the law and at risk of being punished.
Citizens will challenge the laws, find ways around them or even violate them if the law limits their freedom to hire, teach, befriend or welcome whomever they choose.
To overpower citizens, governments will have to spend more money — on courts, judges, lawyers, prisons, the police and compensation payments — or find ways around their laws (or both).
In 2016 Denmark criminalized any act that could be viewed as helping asylum seekers, leading to hundreds of Danes being prosecuted for giving strangers a lift or buying them a cup of coffee.
The British government decided over a decade ago that to control movement, it needed to create a hostile environment for immigrants. But what this did was create a climate of fear for citizens, most notably for those who might be mistaken for immigrants. When “Go home” vans began touring selected places in Britain in 2013, many citizens had to ask themselves: How do I prove I am a citizen in my own country?
The question applies to everyone: To control immigration, how much control over our lives should we be ready to accept?
The evidence we have suggests that the number of people affected by such controls is not trivial. For example, British law required any citizen wanting to sponsor a spouse or partner to immigrate to have a minimum annual income of 18,600 pounds, or about $25,000. In 2015 roughly 40 percent of employed British citizens did not earn enough to reunite with their families.
Initially, somewhere around 15,000 citizens might have been unable to reunite with their families each year. The law was changed in 2024, raising the threshold to $39,000, probably making it even harder for poorer citizens who want to come home or bring in their spouses. In only a decade, at least 150,000 citizens were burdened by just this one regulation aimed at curbing immigration.
In the European Union, billions of euros are spent each year on immigration enforcement and the detention of suspected violators in more than 200 centers. And each year thousands of European citizens are caught and detained, some for days and many for longer, including those who struggle to establish their credentials.
Citizens are affected by immigration controls because of the costs they must bear not just in the taxes they have to pay but also in the services that they must forgo as government funds are redirected. Already, the U.S. immigration and border enforcement budget is several times higher than all other law enforcement budgets for the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Justice Department, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and similar agencies combined.
The “big, beautiful bill” under consideration by Republicans in Congress would add $175 billion to immigration enforcement. Mr. Trump’s deportation efforts have moved thousands of law enforcement staff members at the Department of Homeland Security, the F.B.I., the D.E.A. and the U.S. Marshals Service from investigating violent (and other) crime and toward immigration enforcement.
The more determined governments are to control immigration, the more they will have to abandon due process and act as if the corruption of the rule of law were justified. Or turn a blind eye to the misuse of power by its agents.
We have to consider what these measures do to a society. They affect America’s core values, particularly liberty and equality. Liberty, because Americans see freedom to live as they choose as central to their way of life. Equality, because liberty is the natural endowment of all, not just some. Americans are not alone in thinking this, but they have said it more loudly and clearly than anyone else.
Proponents of such control will have to persuade at least some citizens that this violation of liberty is warranted and even normal. As the use of power by immigration authorities to stop and search citizens becomes routine and the voices of dissent are suppressed, citizens will even come to accept the militarization of society.
But the efforts at control will be divisive among citizens: Some will accept them as necessary, but others will resist them. So as governments try to normalize the violation of liberty, those who buy this story will look at those who object or resist not as fellow countrymen but as enemies. This is what we are seeing now unfolding on the streets across the United States.
Immigration control will transform America. The more vigorously it is pursued, the more it will turn us into people who do not care about the liberty of others. Worse still, it may turn us into people who do not care about our own.
Chandran Kukathas, the author of “Dialogues on Immigration and the Open Society” and “Immigration and Freedom,” teaches political science at Singapore Management University.
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