A Satirical Visit to the Gated Estate That Wants Every Other Gate Torn Down

This is satire, and I am telling you in the first paragraph so nobody mistakes it for a news report. Everything in the next few sections is a thought experiment: a made-up community, made-up residents, made-up meetings, with no resemblance to any real neighborhood, and no real person's words or acts behind any scene. The target is an idea, not a family and not a zip code. If you meet a character who seems familiar, that is because the idea is familiar, and ideas are fair game.

Now, folks, welcome to Meadow Crest Preserve. Please stop at the gatehouse.

The visit

Our imaginary estate sits at the end of a long, curving drive. At the entrance stands a stone gatehouse with a retractable barrier, a keypad, a camera, and a uniformed attendant whose entire job is to ask visitors a single question: "Are you on the list?"

The list is a serious document. It is maintained by a committee. It has a revision history. There are rules for adding a name: a resident must sponsor you, the sponsor takes responsibility for your conduct, and your visit is limited to certain hours. If you arrive without being on the list, you wait at the gatehouse while someone calls the house you claim to be visiting. If nobody answers, you do not get in, and the attendant, who is perfectly polite about it, writes down your license plate.

Inside there is a pool. The pool has a capacity, posted on a small brass sign, and a rule that guests of residents must be accompanied. There is a clubhouse with a members-only dining room. There are annual dues, and the dues pay for the gate, the guard, the grounds, the pool and the insurance, which is the quiet reason any of this works: the people who benefit from the amenities are the people who pay for them.

So far, this is an ordinary and entirely reasonable place. I have no quarrel with it at all. A community that decides who walks through its gate, on what terms, and at whose expense is doing something nobody finds shocking when it happens on a private road.

Now we come to the Annual Meeting.

The Annual Meeting

In our satire, the Meadow Crest board has invited a distinguished guest speaker, and the speaker is delivering the keynote. The title of the speech, projected on a screen behind the lectern, is "No Human Being Is Illegal: Toward a World Without Walls."

The residents applaud. The speaker, a gifted orator, spends forty minutes explaining that borders are arbitrary lines drawn by dead men, that the whole concept of national membership is a form of selfishness, and that a truly moral society would open its doors to anyone who wants to come. There is a standing ovation. An attendee in the third row wipes a tear.

Then the speaker takes a question. A resident near the back stands up and asks: "Does that principle apply to the pool?"

There is a pause. The speaker smiles the smile of a person who has been asked this before. "Well," says the speaker, "that is different."

"How is it different?"

"The pool is a limited resource. The pool has a capacity. There are safety considerations. The residents have paid for it. There are legitimate concerns about maintenance, and insurance, and liability, and, you know, what happens to the experience of everybody else if it is overcrowded."

"So the pool may have a capacity," says the resident, "but the country may not."

The room, in our satire, goes quiet in a way that suggests the board will be revising the Annual Meeting agenda next year.

I'm exaggerating, of course. That is what a satire does. I took the argument one step further than its defenders take it, and I stopped exactly where it falls over. The people who give speeches against borders rarely apply the argument to their own front door, and the satire is only pointing at the gap.

What the gap shows

Let me step out of the satire for a moment and argue in a straight line, because the joke has a serious engine in it. Here is the claim, defined and numbered.

The claim: a political community has a right to decide its own membership, and every person who denies that right in principle affirms it in practice.

1. Everybody believes in a gate. The person who says borders are immoral locks the front door at night. The person who says no human being is illegal does not leave the car keys in the ignition at the airport. The claim "a boundary is never legitimate" cannot be lived by a single adult in a single week. Everyone draws a line somewhere, at the door, at the property line, at the guest list for the wedding.
2. The only question is who draws the line, and by what authority. If you accept point one, the argument is no longer about whether lines are legitimate. It is about who gets to draw them and whether they answer to the people who live inside. A homeowner answers to himself. A homeowners' association answers to its members. A nation answers to its citizens.
3. That is the whole idea of self-government. A people that cannot decide who joins it is not a people that governs itself. It is a people governed by whoever shows up.

Notice that none of this requires hostility to newcomers. Meadow Crest can admit new residents. It does admit them: through a process, on terms, with the consent of the existing community. And the best version of the national argument is the same. A nation can welcome enormous numbers of immigrants through an orderly process and still be a nation that decides. For the Founders' own thinking on newcomers, see What Washington, Hamilton and Jefferson Feared and Hoped About Newcomers.

What Locke actually said

For the constitutionalist in me, this is where the argument touches the Founding. The Founders did not invent the idea that a community may govern itself and guard what belongs to it. They inherited it, and the philosopher they inherited it from most directly was John Locke.

Locke's Second Treatise of Government, published in 1689, builds a case in two steps that matter here. First, in the chapter on property, he argues that a person has a right to what he has mixed his labor with: the land he clears, the field he plows, the house he builds. A man's property is, in Locke's account, an extension of his own person and effort, and a just government exists in large part to protect it. Second, in the chapters on the origin of political society, he argues that legitimate government begins in consent. People leave the state of nature and form a political community by agreeing to do so, and the community, once formed, acts by the consent of its members.

Put those two together and you get the principle behind the gatehouse. The residents of Meadow Crest built the place, pay for it and agreed to its rules. Their consent is what makes the rules legitimate, and the right to decide who joins follows from the right to the thing itself. Nobody has to be a cynic about outsiders to believe it. A community that cannot say yes or no is a community that has no say at all.

The Declaration of Independence takes the same line in a sentence every American should know by heart: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Governments exist to secure rights. They get their just powers from consent. Consent is the thing that a border protects, because consent means the governed get to decide who is governed alongside them.

The strongest objection, stated fairly

I do not want to rig this. A satire that only mocks the other side's weakest speaker proves nothing, so let me state the best open-borders case as its serious defenders would put it.

One: a person's birthplace is an accident, and it seems wrong that an accident should determine a person's opportunities for life. Two: free movement of labor, like free movement of goods, makes the world richer, and the people who gain the most are the poorest migrants. Three: the nation-state is a relatively recent invention, and walls have often protected privilege more than liberty. Four: the person who wants to cross a border is typically not a threat but a worker, a parent, someone looking for a chance, and the state's power to stop him is a power over the most vulnerable people on earth.

That is a real argument, made by serious people, and some of its parts are true. Birthplace is an accident of birth, and it does shape a life. Free labor markets do create wealth. We have a longer post on The Open-Borders Libertarians Make a Real Argument. Here Is Where It Breaks that gives it the room it deserves.

But here is where it breaks, and I'll make the point in three steps. First, the argument is about what an individual wants, and the question of a border is about what a community owes its own members. Second, a country is not a labor market. It is a set of institutions (courts, schools, a welfare system, a way of settling disputes) that took generations to build and that work only if the people inside share enough of a common understanding to keep them running. Third, the open-borders position has no answer to the pool. If the principle is that no community may limit who joins it, then Meadow Crest may not limit who swims, and the principle has dissolved the very thing, a membership that pays and sponsors and consents, that made the pool worth having.

The scaling problem

Let me run the satire one more turn, because that is the honest way to test an idea: apply it to a case where the principle must actually be lived.

Suppose Meadow Crest, moved by the speech, decides to adopt the keynote's principle. The gate is raised permanently. The list is abolished. The attendant is thanked and reassigned. The sign at the entrance now reads "All Are Welcome," and the board posts a notice that anyone who arrives may use the pool, the clubhouse and the dining room.

For about a week, it feels wonderful. Then the practical questions arrive. Who pays for the lifeguard when ten times as many people use the pool? Who decides what happens when the dues are the same and the demand is multiplied? Who is responsible when something is damaged, since nobody sponsored the person who did it? And what do the original residents, who have paid for years, say about all this?

They say what every community says: "We would like the gate back." And here is the sentence that ends the satire. They do not say it out of hatred for the people who walked in. They say it because they understand, at the level of ordinary experience, that a shared thing needs a rule about who shares it. The residents are not xenophobes. They are owners.

The nation is a larger version of the same thing. A republic is a shared inheritance of laws and institutions and a way of life, and the citizens are its owners. Their legislators, and not a gatehouse committee, decide who may come and on what terms, and the Constitution says so in Article I, Section 8, giving Congress the power "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization." The rule is uniform, which means it belongs to the whole people and not to one state or one committee, and it is made by elected representatives who can be voted out.

The coverage

There is one more thing to say about how this argument usually gets handled, and it is about the framing of the story. When a wealthy community builds a wall, the coverage tends to treat it as a curiosity or a symbol of privilege. When a country decides to enforce its own boundary, the same wall becomes a moral emergency. The same act is described in two different vocabularies, depending on the scale and on who is doing it.

I would invite you to notice that the argument against borders is almost always delivered by someone who benefits from the stability the borders create. It is rarely delivered by the people who live closest to the line, such as the ranchers and border towns whose property is the real-world version of the gatehouse. For their side, see our post on Ranchers on the Line and the Property Rights Fight at the Southern Border. They are the people with no gate, and they are not the ones giving the keynote.

What the satire cannot say

A last word, out of the satire and into plain speech. Satire is a sharp instrument, and a sharp instrument is easy to misuse. I am not saying that anyone who wants a gentler immigration policy is a hypocrite. Plenty of people hold that view sincerely and live by it, and some give up real money and time to act on it. I am saying that the particular claim, that borders in themselves are immoral, is an idea that nobody applies to his own life, and an idea that nobody can apply to his own life is an idea in trouble.

The conservative position is more modest and more humane than its critics claim. It says: a nation may admit as many people as it wishes, and conservatives have argued for generous legal immigration. It says the admitting should be done by a rule, through a process, with the consent of the governed. It says that fairness to those waiting in line, and respect for the citizens who built the place, require the rule to mean something. The gate is not the opposite of welcome. The gate is how a welcome becomes a promise.

The case in brief

1. Everyone believes in a gate: the person who denounces borders in public still locks his door and keeps a guest list. The only real question is who draws the line and whether they answer to the people inside.
2. Locke's account of property and consent, and the Declaration's line that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed," explain why a political community decides its own membership.
3. The open-borders case is serious, but it argues from what an individual wants, not from what a community owes its members, and it has no answer to the pool.
4. A nation is a shared inheritance of institutions, and the Constitution gives Congress, in Article I, Section 8, the power to set "an uniform Rule of Naturalization."
5. A gate is not the opposite of welcome. It is how a welcome becomes a promise that can be kept.

What you can do: read Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution on the Constitution page, then look up who represents you on the my representatives page and ask your House member what rule of naturalization he or she would vote for.