The Mahmoud Khalil case has prompted much commentary on the following question: should the US government deport noncitizen terrorist sympathizers? The main argument against doing so is that this policy threatens freedom of speech.
But such a policy could also help protect freedom of speech and advance the cause of immigration liberalization. (To be clear, I’m a First Amendment absolutist. I even think blackmail should be legal, as Walter Block argued in Defending the Undefendable.) I’m going to set aside the details of the Khalil case and the question of whether the US government is enforcing the law appropriately, which is more of a legal than a philosophical and political question. Instead, I want to look at the law the US government is relying on in this case and evaluate whether it’s good policy in general.
That law reads as follows:
Except as otherwise provided in this chapter, aliens who are inadmissible under the following paragraphs are ineligible to receive visas and ineligible to be admitted to the United States:… Any alien who… endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.
I fully admit this policy punishes resident aliens for their speech, and it does so in a manner that would clearly violate the First Amendment if applied to citizens. The First Amendment protects the rights of noncitizens, too, yet the policy of deporting noncitizen terrorist sympathizers is arguably a wise one.
US citizenship is quite properly a privilege, not a right. Citizenship confers the rights to vote, hold office, and collect welfare benefits, among other things. These are not natural rights but government-conferred privileges. If they were natural rights inherent to every human being, the US government would have a duty to confer them on all human beings on the planet, not just residents of the territory it governs.
Currently, US law provides no mechanism for permanently denying citizenship to a lawful permanent resident. The process for becoming a citizen is almost entirely mechanistic and “shall-issue”: a permanent resident willing to go through the steps cannot be denied citizenship.
Given that citizenship, unlike mere residency, confers on a person the right to participate in ruling over his fellow Americans, it would be wiser to treat citizenship more like membership in an exclusive club. A person should need to demonstrate a strong commitment to advancing the well-being and common purposes of the club in order to gain admission. Otherwise, new members with weak or nonexistent commitment to the club could ultimately undermine its purposes and even harm fellow club members.
Of course, the United States is not a club. The government enforces its rules on citizens regardless of whether we’ve consented to them, or even to the process by which they are created. But the analogy of a club helps us understand how the naturalization process should work to maintain a free society.
At minimum, new citizens of the United States should be required to demonstrate convincingly their understanding of and commitment to the founding values of the country as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t do this at present. But one of the tools it does have is to remove resident aliens who pose a threat to our constitutional order. Advocating terrorism — the use of violent aggression against innocent civilians to cause widespread fear in service of a political goal — demonstrates a lack of commitment to our constitutional order and our founding values. Accordingly, someone who advocates terrorism is most certainly someone we should prevent from becoming a citizen, even if preventing that from happening requires deportation.
One argument against deporting terrorist sympathizers is that they haven’t committed a crime or any actual aggression. This is true. If they had committed actual aggression, the government could imprison them, as it does with citizens. But when a resident alien advocates terrorism, he is proclaiming a settled design of committing aggression in the future, at minimum through the ballot box. Terrorist sympathizers, like supporters of overseas totalitarian regimes, will vote away our freedoms when they get a chance. Voting away the freedoms of others is a form of aggression, because it delegates the power to violate rights to government agents. In this way, voting is not like free speech – it necessarily affects the rights and interests of others. (Jason Brennan makes this point in his work to support the claim that you have a duty not to vote if your vote would be incompetent or unjust.) There’s no way to forbid people who are already citizens from committing this kind of aggression — at least, no way that is both feasible and just — but that is no reason to make the problem worse by letting anti-Americans from abroad come, stay, and gain the right to vote and take taxpayer money.
The logic is all the more persuasive for those who favor open immigration. If the US government liberalized its immigration laws, many more people would come here from abroad. Most of them would seek to stay and gain citizenship. It would be disastrous to allow many millions of people committed to destroying the constitutional order to come into the country, gain citizenship, and achieve their goals.
Moreover, if the US government deports immigrants who spew hateful rhetoric against our system and our civilization, it will make American citizens more comfortable with allowing more of the good, productive, tolerant immigrants into the country. To achieve overall immigration liberalization, we need to do a better job of keeping out those who truly don’t belong.
Another argument against the policy is that we can’t trust the government to enforce it properly. Perhaps officials, once so empowered, will define political enemies as “terrorists” and seek to deport them.
I wouldn’t put it past them. But if governments are so abusive, that’s all the more reason to prevent them from falling into the hands of people openly committed to destroying our way of life. We have due process so that the government has to prove its claims that someone is a terrorist sympathizer. Now, the government might try to ignore due process, as the Trump Administration appears to be doing in some of the deportation cases. But if we assume that no constraints on government will ever be even minimally effective, then the only conclusion is a sort of nihilistic pessimism that anything will ever matter.
At the end of the day, we have to compare the realistic threats to freedom represented by alternative policies: allowing avowed totalitarians and terrorism supporters to participate in governing us, on the one hand, versus deporting some foreigners who are mistakenly adjudicated to be totalitarians or terrorism supporters, on the other. Given that the former policy will, in addition, build political support for immigration restrictions, a result to be deplored, it seems clear that the balance of advantages lies in favor of maintaining and enforcing current US policy.
