Debate: Deportations, Trump, Human Dignity and the State

Can you oppose mass deportations and support state sovereignty at the same time?

Donald Trump promised mass deportations “as soon as he takes the oath of office.” He is following through on that promise. Trying to make sense of the situation, I wrote to

Pablo Christian Soenen

. Christian (as he likes to be called) is project manager for the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University, and a student at Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration. He’s worked with humanitarian organizations at the U.S. southern border and supported immigration attorneys with asylum cases and deportation defense.

Below, the fruits of our email exchange. It’s less a debate than an effort at understanding the moral and political questions posed by Trump’s deportation policy.

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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Santiago Ramos: A majority of Americans want less immigration. They voted for Trump largely because he campaigned on tighter border security. Despite the fact that most immigration comes from Hispanic/Latin American countries, Trump not only won more Hispanic-American votes than any Republican candidate in recent history, but he won it in all the border counties in Texas. Illegal border crossings doubled under the Biden administration compared to the first Trump term. This, despite the fact that the number of deportations under Biden more or less matched those of Trump. (Obama, incidentally, handily beat both of his successors in number of deportations: 3 million.) In recent years, our porous border has been exploited by foreign criminal gangs, who crossed illegally into the United States and entrenched themselves in major cities.

You know all this already — you’ve worked for humanitarian organizations on both sides of the border. I only mention them so we can keep in mind the immense political complexity of the immigration issue as we try to think morally about it. Specifically, I want to talk about mass deportations. Deportations are a matter of course for any nation-state. They can be unjust, even cruel, to those who are deported or to the family members broken apart by deportation. As I mentioned above, they happened en masse under Obama and Biden.

But the fact that Trump has made deportations a centerpiece of his campaign worries me. The idea that the U.S. cannot become a fairer place until this particular group of people are gone is not only false, but dangerous. We are still seeing Trump’s policy develop. In recent conversations with friends and members of my church, the news is that many undocumented families are living in fear. But they console themselves with the idea that “Trump is focusing on criminals, for now.” For every plausible-sounding statement from J. D. Vance (deportations will start with “a lot of violent criminals”) you have one from the disturbingly enthusiastic Stephen Miller (“Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown”).

Moreover, these policies are supposed to be efficient not only at executing deportations, but also at creating a deterrent through fear. Already we saw that policy of fear at work during the last Trump administration, when the White House exploited the children separation mechanism to generate more and more broken families, in the hopes of deterring future migrants from crossing. (Child separation also happened under Obama, but it was the Trump administration that leveraged it as policy.) Even a half-successful Trump deportation regime will be tragic. It will reduce crime, no doubt, and possibly raise wages (economists debate the impact of immigration on wage suppression). But it will also separate families and create an environment of fear among migrant workers. It will be a tawdry business that will create all sorts of perverse incentives for state officials on the make, and private detention facilities looking for contracts, and who knows what else.

Maybe I am overstating things here. But that’s why I am writing to you. At Wisdom of Crowds, we debate first principles — the prior assumptions or starting points that inspire our political judgments. So, here is my question for you. What is the principle by which we can distinguish a good deportation regime from a bad one? Given that deportations and its attendant tragedies happen under all administrations, then what are the specific steps that would make Trump’s plan worse than, say Obama’s? What would make Trump’s immigration law enforcement, and his deportation regime, exceptionally cruel and unjust? What is the red line — if there is one — that separates Obama’s deportation policy and the one Trump hopes to implement?

I think this discussion is important if we want to avoid an endless whataboutism (“Obama did it too!”) and moral numbness (“Yes, it is a cruel policy … but a certain amount of tragedy is unavoidable when it comes to law enforcement”).

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Christian Soenen: We’re going to focus on morals, but it’s important to lay down a factual groundwork here given the false narrative around mass deportations advanced by the Trump campaign, and now the administration. As we know, the narrative around these mass deportations is that unauthorized immigrants are public safety threats and steal jobs. But academic research analyzing the effects of undocumented migration and deportation on crime and job availability is actually a rare case of scholarly consensus: undocumented people not only commit far fewer crimes than native-born Americans, they actually seem to decrease crime rates among the native-born; and deporting them en masse shrinks industries such that it actually reduces employment opportunities available to native-born American workers.

You asked what would make Trump’s deportation regime exceptionally cruel, and this is one of the big ones for me: it’s exceptionally cruel because it’s based on false pretenses. Far from serving the common good, it attempts to curry political favor with the electorate by stoking fears of economic and physical insecurity, and it scapegoats already-disadvantaged people as a means to that end. Under just about any ethical system, this is a big problem. But as a Catholic, this is a very big problem for me, because we believe that vulnerable people have a privileged claim to our compassion, and to instrumentalize the lives of a marginalized class of people, to separate their families, and to uproot them from communities because it energizes a voter base while working against the best interests of those same voters is doubly wrong: it’s disingenuous and it’s predatory. This is something that separates Trump’s plan from Obama’s or Biden’s deportation regime.

There is, however, another justification that the Trump campaign offered for its proposed mass deportation program that might be plausible (albeit in a theoretical way that seems too abstract to be convincing to me). That’s the “we’re a nation of laws” argument that claims that enforcing immigration laws is necessary for the state to maintain control of its territory. This is a better argument, because of course it’s within the federal government’s duties to enforce its laws. But enforcing laws is not an end in itself for the federal government; it’s a means to fulfilling its primary duties to promote human flourishing and the common good and to ensure that those within its territory are able to enjoy basic rights. Deporting unauthorized immigrants who commit violent crimes, for example, is consistent with this purpose of the government. But anyone who believes in our “nation of laws” should reject a law enforcement program that undermines basic rights. Such a program degrades the government’s legitimacy as a champion of those rights. It weakens the very underpinnings of that “nation of laws.”

Joseph Carens, a political scientist at the University of Toronto wrote a piece in 2008 titled, “The Rights of Irregular Migrants,” that’s helpful here. He argues that democratic states, who base their legitimacy on the protection of the rights of those within their territory, should build a “firewall” between immigration enforcement and the protection of basic human rights. On the most fundamental level, these basic human rights could be considered the things necessary for survival and functioning within a society: physical security, medical attention, basic education, and the like. The state’s services that protect these rights (police, hospitals, schools) should not be used as tools to target unauthorized immigrants, because doing so would erode their purpose as public services and erode the state’s purpose as the guarantor of rights.

Using hospitals to report undocumented patients, police to arrest undocumented victims of crimes who make a report, and schools to report undocumented students are some “moral red lines” that the Trump Administration should not cross, at the very least because doing so would undermine its own “law and order” logic. Unfortunately, using these “protected areas” or “safe areas” is precisely the kind of strategy that the administration is taking to distinguish its deportation regime from prior administrations. The administration is signaling it might go after places of worship, too, which have served as sanctuaries for undocumented people in the past as the churches they belong to have opted to follow their religious obligations of hospitality over the laws that target their undocumented neighbors. Heightened fears around right-wing extremism have caused some pastors to reconsider those commitments.

Basic rights are important, on a more foundational level, because they’re a central part of living a dignified life. This is the basis for some Catholic leaders’ public rebukes of Trump’s enforcement strategy. Dignity is something even more fundamental — some might say more sacred — than legal rights, and it’s true from the very fact of a person’s existence, so thinking about dignity might be a fruitful place to focus some of our further conversation: which aspects of Trump’s deportation plan particularly target the dignity of undocumented people? Which, if any, of those actions can be justified? Besides going after basic rights, I’d say that using fear, intimidation, and prejudice to fuel this deportation plan probably crosses the line into unusual cruelty, and unfortunately seem to be the approaches of some of the less measured members of Trump’s team.

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Santiago: OK, so let’s focus on that principle: human dignity.

What is dignity? I feel like we need to answer this question, given that I did a podcast with Damir about this very topic, and he convinced me that we can’t take the meaning of the term for granted. Without getting too philosophical, I think we can begin with the root of the word: the Latin dignus, which means “elevated” or “noble,” and to raise human dignity to a universal ideal (as the United Nations Charter does, for example) is to claim that all human beings are noble and elevated, merely by virtue of being human. We should treat horses and mules humanely, but we can do so while still using them as pack animals, for example. But dignity precludes treating human beings like tools or pack animals. As Kant put it, we should never use human beings “merely as a means to an end.” We shouldn’t treat people like tools. Even when we hire someone to do a job for us, we should never treat them merely as an employee, but always also as a human being.

Do we treat undocumented migrants as “mere means”? Let’s look at what we know. About 8.2 million of the 11 million undocumented migrants are in the workforce, which amounts to about 5% of all workers in the US. This means that a significant chunk of American labor comes from undocumented workers — that is, workers who do not enjoy the security, guarantees and protections that American workers enjoy. Moreover, these workers are employed in a crucial industry: food. About half of the two million farmworkers of the United States are undocumented workers. Were these to be deported, economists warn, the food supply chain could break down. Food industry leaders have asked Trump to spare farmworkers from his deportations plan.

And businesses want undocumented workers. Two weeks after Trump was elected, the New York Times published an investigation into the staffing agencies which serve as middlemen between undocumented workers and American businesses. The staffing agencies would assume most of the risk involved in hiring undocumented workers and thus breaking the law: “records indicate that at least 160 staffing firms, most of them identified during the Trump administration, employed people with suspicious documents or no evidence of authorization.” Our economy is largely structured around the availability of a sizable shadow workforce.

A friend of mine told me about his dad, a well-off retired businessman, who voted for Trump in 2016. A few months later, he hired a team of gardeners who were undocumented Mexican migrants. “I mean, it’s a good deal!” he told my friend.

So yes, we are using these people, and to a great extent, our prosperity — at least, food prices — depend on them. And since these workers are undocumented and vulnerable, we come close to treating them as “mere means” to our prosperity. In this regard, we are not treating them with dignity.

And yes, to claim that undocumented migrants are the sole, or at least the leading reason, for our problems, and to focus a political movement on getting rid of them — is to treat them worse than mere means: it is to scapegoat them. Scapegoating is a dangerous mental habit, one that taps into our lizard brain impulses towards passion and violence.

So it looks like we are locked in heated agreement here. But let me ask you a new question. Is it possible that the interests of the state — in this case, of the United States and its government — are inherently at odds with the human dignity of migrant workers? Could it be the case that we must reject ultimate allegiance to the nation state, at least in this case, if we are to stand for these migrant workers? Yes, Trump’s plan violates their dignity. But a consistent opposition to Trump’s plan requires that we focus on more than just American interests.

This is the paradox, or contradiction, or whatever you want to call it, that bothers me. I think you hint at the same when you write: “enforcing laws is not an end in itself for the federal government; it’s a means to fulfilling its primary duties to promote human flourishing and the common good and to ensure that those within its territory are able to access basic rights.” In other words, enforcing the laws of the state is not as important as protecting the common good, at least in certain instances. Well, the common good includes economic justice. And for decades, we have benefited economically from the labor of migrants, who for their part did what they thought was reasonable: risk their lives to cross the border, and work a job in the United States, where opportunities and higher wages could be found. What we have here is a transnational situation, one that the United States largely brought upon itself, by sending mixed signals to workers south of the border, and before that, by invading or occupying so many of the nations which today are a source of economic migration.

So here’s my question, rephrased: Is American sovereignty incompatible with justice for migrants, especially migrant workers? And if so, are we duty bound to choose the latter?

Christian: Consistent allegiance to the principle of human dignity usually leads to some politically impractical conclusions. American sovereignty is incompatible with justice for undocumented migrant workers if we consider “justice” to imply a full recognition of the dignity of these workers, and “sovereignty” to require their deportation. Now, I’m not sure the latter is necessarily true; mass amnesty, the polar opposite of mass deportation, is also a government’s sovereign decision about who is brought under its wing, and therefore an expression of that sovereignty, especially if it’s an action taken affirmatively in the service of the national interest. But I think the interesting moral questions come from reflecting on the contradiction you pointed out: must we reject the expression of sovereignty achieved by deportations if we believe in a universal human dignity?

Before going on I’ll note that challenging sovereignty for the sake of human dignity is not some radical idea but actually has strong precedent in the history of liberal nation-states: the international refugee regime, for example, is based on this dynamic. In 1951 during the drafting and signing of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the international community agreed that if there was to be some kind of international protection for displaced persecuted people, it must come at the expense of individual states’ absolute rights to control their borders and immigration. States have challenged that conclusion especially in the last decade, but it’s held firm for over 70 years.

So what does human dignity require in the case of undocumented people, and what does this mean for deportation? Your framing — that treating a human as a mere means to something else is to deny their dignity — is helpful, because this is precisely what the specter of deportation does to a person.

What relegates a migrant worker to the status of a “mere means” for the sustenance or interests of U.S. society is their separation from that same society. It’s the rejection of their sociality, a central part of their reality as human beings. The primary tool to achieve the “mere means”-ness of a migrant worker is their expendability, which is achieved by hanging the threat of deportability over their head. Deportation is not an isolated action; it’s a perpetual threat that could come to bear at any moment. At any moment, a government can deny a person’s social world and remove the person from it. Undocumented people are parts of communities like everyone else. Their kids are in schools, they have neighbors, networks, families just like any other person. These are things necessary for flourishing. And their deportability is a kind of barrier to full social existence: at any moment, their family can be split and their livelihood lost in a way that is not true for other members of our society.

In one of our past conversations you called ideology “a narrative of reality that excludes a lot of important parts of reality.” That’s another very helpful framing. Nativism, nationalism, or whatever you want to call the impulse that makes peace with mass deportations, is an ideology that excludes the social reality of undocumented people and treats them as economic and political pawns defined by illegality and deportability. As you noted at the opening of this conversation, there is a morally difficult side to every deportation. That moral issue is heightened when the threat of deportation is heightened. Emphasize the deportability of a person, and you’ve diminished their humanity.

The destruction of a person’s social world is a violent act. There comes a point at which we need to face the detachment that enables our political ideologies — and the violence they imply — and weigh them against the undeniable reality of a human being. As the Catholic Bishops of Texas put it so perfectly in their statement on Trump’s immigration executive orders, “national self-interest does not justify policies with consequences that are contrary to the moral law.”

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Santiago: I’ve neglected to write you back for a couple weeks (Christmas time). In the meantime, two things have happened that, I think, bring some unexpected clarity to our discussion: A civil war broke out in Trump’s coalition over H1-B visas, and Justin Trudeau resigned as Prime Minister of Canada. His liberal immigration policies are largely to blame for his political fall.

The debate over the H1-B visas is relevant here because it involves labor: H1-B visas are for “high-skilled” temporary workers who usually work in industry or academia. The right wing debate was about nationalism: Should we import foreign workers? Or protect American workers? Bernie Sanders was in the minority of those who focused on the economic side of the issue — the work itself. Outflanking the pro-visa Trump, Sanders said that H1-B visas replace “good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad.”

All of a sudden, the exploitation of American professionals and/or that of foreign ones commanded everyone’s attention. It’s less likely that there’s ever going to be much of a political advantage to discussing the type of exploitation we’ve been discussing here — that of undocumented low-skilled workers who have contributed to the economy for decades, in many cases pay taxes, and are now facing possible deportation. They’re already servants.

Trudeau’s resignation highlights the tough politics of this issue. From the BBC: “In 2022, 27% of Canadians said there were too many immigrants coming into the country. … By 2024, that number had increased to 58%.” Voters across the developed world are reacting against what they see as insufficiently regulated immigration. They see it in their security and economic interests to curb immigration, and they punish those politicians who fail to deliver on this score.

Here’s a point in which you and I might differ: I don’t fault those voters. It’s legitimate to vote to regulate the inflow of foreign workers and to demand greater security along the border. (If voters are motivated by xenophobia, of course I would not support that.) The very fact that we have a border implies that crossing it will be controlled and restricted. Sovereignty implies citizenship, which implies the existence of non-citizens. If we accept all of these things, and we do, then I don’t think we can blame people for claiming the right to curb immigration. And I would argue that that is also compatible with fighting against an ideology that reduces human beings to “deportables,” as you put it.

At the same time, I feel like all of that is at odds with what we owe our neighbor, and what we owe migrant workers who have contributed to the wealth of this country. I guess looking for “red lines” was a way to negotiate some sort of balance between the demands of citizenship and our debt to migrants.

“Start by reconciling universal human rights with the concept of citizenship. One is an empty construct, another is an emergent property of an anarchic world,” Damir wrote today in a different context. I fear that we might be in a tragic situation where there’s no politically viable way to reconcile the two. But because I believe that the idea of human rights is not an empty construct, because I believe in human dignity, I am not sure whether what I’ve just written is untenable.

Where I find hope is in the idea that justice and charity can be meted out on the ground level — in every immigration hearing where a person’s case is made and defended, and in the humanitarian organizations, like the ones you’ve worked for, which help migrants regardless of where they come from, and watchdog groups, who report on human rights violations. It also means protesting specific inhumane policies, like the child separation policy. This demands that, if I don’t blame voters, I do blame people who go out of their way to attack those who help migrants. I am thinking here of Brian Burch of CatholicVote.org, presently Trump’s nominee for Vatican ambassador, who in 2022 pursued legal action against Catholic Charities and even demanded to read Bishop Flores of Brownsville’s emails just because these organizations helped migrants. Recently, JD Vance has been repeating Burch’s arguments.

So, I am conflicted and maybe too much of a squish. I don’t know. You have the last word.

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Christian: I want to return to something we discussed at the beginning of this exchange, namely that empirical data consistently show that irregular migration to the U.S. is a boon for public safety and economic prosperity alike. That message is clearly lost on many voters, but I, like you, also don’t think we can blame them. What I think they vote on is the perception of chaos, which is not unreasonable. The U.S. southern border did in fact become rather porous throughout the Biden Administration’s tenure. What’s less certain is whether that was actually a bad thing, on the whole, for U.S. citizens. As we’ve discussed, the U.S. economy relies on undocumented people. For the sake of everyone in the U.S., irregular migrants must enter the country. It's simply an essential function of how economic production works in America. If irregular migration could be eliminated, doing so would harm U.S. citizens.

But it can’t be eliminated. As a 2000-mile-long, sparsely populated historical construction tasked with restraining the strongest motivating forces known to humankind — I’m talking about a migrant’s urge to reunite their family, to provide for it, to move it to safety, to allow it to thrive, among a host of other unfathomably strong motivations for migration — the U.S. southern border will be under control only when enforcement becomes so strict as to cross every moral red line in the book. And it’s simply not worth it.

If it’s unrealistic or impractical to say that human dignity should govern everything and we should forget about sovereignty and citizenship, it’s just as unrealistic and impractical to move in the opposite direction and say that sovereignty should reign supreme and therefore we ought to eliminate irregular migration. People have always crossed the border illegally, and they always will, and now they’re here, and they never stopped being people. The question is whether arguing that they should live in peace without fear of deportation is too mushy, and whether we lose an important allegiance to the principle of sovereignty if we do so.

Where we started this conversation, with the question of moral red lines in a deportation regime, is helpful because that’s where we can make progress without resorting to untenable ideas, and I want to reiterate some of those red lines: There is tragedy inherent in every deportation, but if deportations are carried out by weaponizing services that guarantee basic rights (schools, public safety resources, hospitals, and the like), they begin to erode the legitimacy of a government’s role as the guarantor of rights. It’s in this situation that principles like human dignity are most helpful.

We do seem to live in a world where two truths butt heads frequently: the eternal, ontological truth of dignity and the political truth of sovereignty and citizenship. And as a consequence of my belief in eternal things, it’s easy for me to prefer eternal truths to historically contingent ones. But because those eternal truths are always expressed and recognized historically (a human being always exists in a certain historical context and is always social, and therefore political), often the best we can do is rely on the eternal principles to redirect the cruelties of the historical situations we find ourselves in. In practice, that ends up looking a lot like the ground-level charity you mentioned: legal defense, vigilance over human rights issues, and humanitarian assistance that persists despite legal and other challenges because it bases itself on the commands of love itself.

But this is also why it’s important that the ground-level charity happens with explicit reference to the eternal principles that inform it. We resist a cruel deportation regime because we believe in human dignity, and we hope that that belief one day gives rise to a historical situation where suffering people are not vilified, scapegoated, or targeted, but rather recognized as human beings possessed of dignity. Charity has historical consequences when it serves as evidence of the unrealized, eternal goal towards which it’s oriented.

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