Political Scientist View on the Morality of Deportation

With the election of Trump as the Republican candidate in 2016, its effects on immigration have already become apparent without policy changes. Simply the President's xenophobic rhetoric coupled with the ideology of the alt-right has had a profound effect on the way many immigrants already here and abroad have changed their mindset about migrating to the US. But before diving into the economic effects of deportation, we should take a step back and observe the moral question of the issue. Do we have the right to exclude citizens from our nation? History has shown us that we already find these actions immoral with the creation of Japanese concentration camps, Jim Crow laws, the repatriation of Mexican nationals during the first half of the 20th century, and the restriction of citizenship to Chinese nationals with the Exclusion Act. But on the other hand, if the current 11 million immigrants have broken the law and entered the country illegally, should all 11 million of them be punished? To find the answer to this question I would like to take an excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”. King uses religion as a foundation of his argument by comparing a law to God’s moral code to dictate whether or not a law is just or unjust, and by using Christian-Judeo moral thought, were the Egyptians just in exiling Jews? We can compare this to our responsibility as Americans in examining whether or not it is just to exile undocumented immigrants, even though it's not in our best interests economically to do so.

Immigrants coming to the US go through the same lifestyle as every one of us, they work, interact with society, build relationships, yet conservatives want to label them as different based on their race, nationality, and their status. The fear these immigrants have of deportation affects them in every aspect of their lives, in school, work, in their fear of law enforcement and only contributes to society in a negative manner. In today’s society, we determine who is a citizen not by their cultural ties to our country, nor by the contributions they make to our society, but instead focus on whether their name is on a legal document or not. Returning to King’s viewpoint, the status of labeling these immigrants as illegal gives us as citizens a false sense of superiority, and the immigrants a false sense of inferiority. We can see this in practice with the following question, if an American citizen is caught with a minor offense, is their punishment comparable with an illegal immigrant that faces deportation from a country where he or she has lived for years, is this moral? It was the result of free trade and neoliberal policies enacted by Bill Clinton such as NAFTA that was part of the cause for the influx of immigrants, if we are partly at fault for the reasons why they came to the US, are we in a moral position to punish them from unfair trade deals that benefit our country?

In his own words, King states “Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”, and this couldn't be any farther from the truth as we can see in Trump's rhetoric of labeling Mexicans, although he labeled a “small minority” as “bad hombres”, it shifts American public opinion against them when it comes from the an office as influential as the President's. Immigration does not have to have a foundation of amnesty to be just, but the current system we have now is based on a “wait in line for your turn” mentality that is inefficient with our current policies.

While the examples given show biased towards the deportation of undocumented immigrants being immoral, it's not a clear-cut picture. There is a difference between immigrants that migrate to the US in fear of being persecuted by cartels, or fleeing poverty looking for a better life for them and their family members, but then there are those immigrants that come to the US abandoning family members or fleeing from being persecuted for a crime. One is inherently moral, the other immoral. Instead of focusing on the deportation of these individuals, we should instead focus on policy changes that make it easier for people to come to America to find work in a legal, non-bureaucratic process that actually works and that can filter the small minority that can justifiably be labeled “bad hombres”.

The economic policy of deportation would cause havoc on the agricultural system of the Southwest, which relies on migrant labor to keep costs low. With farm labor having a high labor elasticity due to 50-70% of the final agricultural product price a result of labor costs, it would be difficult to substitute these jobs with domestic labor because of low wage rates and being physically demanding without increasing prices at supermarkets. This is especially true with certain products such as fruit and vegetable, that demand high amounts of labor. The implementation of a deportation policy would come at an insuperable cost. With the election of Trump, its renewed the discussion of deportation as a policy solution to our immigration problem. Such a policy would be near impossible to implement due to costs and structure of our current judicial system. The costs of building new deportation centers would cost billions, and that's not including the cost of thousands of new deportation cases that would need to go through a judicial process involving the already strained and backlogged judicial system, and would require hiring new judges to deal with these cases considering they are now the highest number of cases ever. With an average cost of ten thousand dollars to deport a single individual, Trump would have to get Congress to approve more than 25 billion dollars to even begin this process. With the difficulty in passing his repeal and replace plan due to lawmakers skepticism of costs and the morals related to changing coverage, it's difficult to imagine that there would be bipartisan or even uniform agreement on the GOP’s ranks regarding such an endeavor.