A Secure Border Is the Humane Border, and Here Is the Moral Case

Compassion is not a sign on the lawn. It is not a slogan, a hashtag or a banner at a rally. It is a result. A policy is kind if the people it affects are better off, and cruel if they are worse off, and the intentions of its authors are a matter for their consciences and not for the ledger.

Apply that test, the only honest one, to the border. Ask not which policy makes its supporters feel generous but which one leaves fewer people dead in the desert, fewer girls in the hands of smugglers and fewer families bankrupted by debt to criminals. When you do, you arrive at an unfashionable conclusion: a secure and orderly border is not the opposite of compassion. It is the most reliable form of it.

The claim, defined

Define the terms. By a secure border I mean a border at which the government decides who enters, when and where, through lawful ports of entry and processes, and at which entry outside those channels is detected and met with a consistent consequence. By order I mean predictability: the rules are known in advance, applied evenly, and mean what they say. By humane I mean a policy that minimizes avoidable suffering and death among the people it touches, migrants and citizens alike.

The thesis is this. A border that is open in practice, or that is enforced so inconsistently that crossing outside the law is the best bet, is not humane. It creates a market for criminals, a stream of avoidable deaths and abuse, and a public that eventually loses patience and demands something harsher. Secure and orderly entry is the moral policy.

I will make the case in numbered steps, steelman the best objection and then answer it.

Step one: the journey itself is the danger

Begin with the thing that is least disputed. The trip north is dangerous, and it is dangerous because it is made outside the law.

Federal agencies document the dangers. The Border Patrol runs a specialized search, trauma and rescue unit, the Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue program, known as BORSTAR, whose existence tells you something: the agency expects to pull people out of trouble, and it does so, in canyons, deserts and rivers, in large numbers over the years. The Border Patrol, the Department of Homeland Security and the International Organization for Migration all keep counts of migrant deaths along the border and along the route. The figures differ by method and year, and I will not quote a single number here, because they are revised, and I would ask you to look at the current publications of the agencies themselves. What is not in dispute is that the Southwest border crossing involves heat that can kill in hours, rivers that drown the strong, and long stretches of land where a person who is injured or lost is far from help.

The dangers are not only natural. Smugglers move people in overloaded vehicles, abandon the sick and the slow, and in some cases hold migrants for ransom until relatives send more money. Reports from the governments involved and from aid organizations have for years described extortion, kidnapping and sexual violence along the route, especially in the border regions controlled by cartels. The people who pay the highest price are the most vulnerable: women, children and the poor.

The first moral premise follows. Any policy that increases the number of people attempting the journey outside the legal channels increases the number who will be harmed on it. The suffering is not an accident. It is the predictable result of the incentive.

Step two: smugglers are the beneficiaries of weak enforcement

Who profits when the border is loosely guarded? Not the migrant. The migrant pays. The profit goes to the smuggling organization, and as laid out in How a Smuggling Network Prices a Border Crossing and Who Gets Paid, it is a business, with prices that rise when demand rises and when enforcement raises the cost of getting through. The same criminal networks that move people also move drugs and weapons. They answer to no law and they have no stake in the welfare of the people they carry. They hold the migrants as inventory.

The second premise follows. A policy that makes the crossing more likely to succeed increases the demand for the smuggler's service and enriches the people who treat migrants worst. Those who call for looser enforcement in the name of the migrant are, whatever their intentions, calling for a policy that funds the cartels. The cartels, as the argument in The Cartels Run Like Multinational Firms, So Policy Should Treat Them That Way shows, do not distinguish between a person's money and anyone else's.

Step three: incentives are real, and release policies send a message

Now the premise that is most disputed and most important. People respond to incentives. This is true of everyone, in every country, and no one would dispute it in any other area of policy. If you cut the penalty for a behavior, you will see more of it. If you raise the reward, you will see more of it.

Apply that to the border. If a person who crosses illegally and claims fear is released into the country to wait for a hearing that may be years away, then the practical benefit of crossing is to live and work in the United States during the wait, regardless of whether the claim will ultimately succeed. That is a powerful incentive, and word of it travels through the networks that sell the crossing. The history of the Flores rules, discussed in Reno v. Flores and the 1997 Settlement That Still Shapes Family Detention, illustrates the logic: a rule meant to protect children has a side effect on who is brought. The European experience in 2015, told in Europe's 2015 Migrant Crisis and the Lessons It Taught Every Democracy, shows the signal effect on a continental scale, and shows that the reverse is also true: when returns to a safe country were credibly enforced, the dangerous crossings dropped sharply.

I make no claim here about exact magnitudes, and I will not invent them. The argument is about direction. A release policy increases the expected benefit of an illegal crossing. An increased expected benefit increases attempts. More attempts, in dangerous terrain and in the hands of smugglers, mean more harm.

Step four: the people who attempt it include those who should not be rewarded and those who cannot be helped this way

The asylum process was designed for people who have a well-founded fear of persecution on specific grounds. It was never meant to be the general path to a better life, however understandable the desire for one may be. When the process is overwhelmed, the people with the strongest claims wait behind those with the weakest, and the system's capacity to protect the genuinely persecuted falls. The cost of a porous system is paid disproportionately by the people the asylum system exists to serve.

Think of it as triage. A hospital that admits every patient at the door, regardless of need, with no triage nurse and no beds, does not serve the sick better. It serves them worse, and the sickest die waiting. A hospital with orderly intake saves more lives. The border is not a hospital, but the logic of limited capacity applies: orderly processing is a condition for helping those who most need help.

Step five: the duty to the stranger and the duty to one's own

Now to the moral tradition, because this is where the serious argument is joined. Conservatives who draw on the Judeo-Christian inheritance take the duty to the stranger seriously. The Torah commands it more than once. In Leviticus 19, the instruction is: "When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself." The same tradition teaches that Israel was once a stranger in Egypt and must remember it.

Notice what the verse commands: that the stranger who is among you, who sojourns in your land under your law, be treated justly. It is a commandment about how a society treats those it has admitted. It does not say that the community has no right to decide who joins it or how. The same Scripture is full of walls and gates. Nehemiah rebuilds the wall of Jerusalem, and the book records several of the builders, including whole priestly households, repairing the section opposite their own houses. The Book of Proverbs says that "a man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls." Neither text is a policy paper, and neither should be treated as one. They show that the tradition holds two duties together: hospitality to the stranger and responsibility for the household.

Christian moral theology makes the same point with the idea of an ordered love. Our duties are real to all, and they are not identical. A father owes his children something he does not owe a stranger's children, and a nation owes its citizens something it does not owe the world. That is not contempt for the world. It is the recognition that obligations come in an order, and that a person or a country that tries to discharge all of them at once discharges none well. A government's first duty is the safety and welfare of the people who authorize it. The Declaration of Independence says that "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." A government that cannot say who is inside its borders cannot secure the rights of those who are.

The result is not a choice between charity and order. It is that charity requires order. The resettlement of refugees, the processing of asylum claims, the legal admission of immigrants and the care of those in need are all things a stable, confident, law-abiding country can do and a chaotic one cannot. For a practical example of what an orderly humanitarian channel looks like, see How Refugee Resettlement Works and Who Decides Where Families Go.

The steelman: enforcement is cruel

Here is the objection at its best, in terms its defenders would recognize.

It says: people flee violence, poverty and persecution, and they come because staying means hardship or death. Enforcement does not remove the reason they leave. It only makes the journey more dangerous, pushing people into remote terrain where they are more likely to die. Every wall and every deterrent is a decision that some people will die in the desert, and a country as rich as ours can afford to do better. Treating desperate people as a law-enforcement problem is a failure of imagination and of mercy. We should open more legal paths and treat the arrivals with dignity, and we should be ashamed of any policy that causes a child to suffer.

That is a serious argument, and the concern at its center, that policy should be judged by its effect on real people, is the one I began with. Let me answer it in four parts.

First, the conduct of enforcement and the principle of enforcement are different things. Any abuse of a person in custody, by anyone, is wrong and should be investigated and punished. A conservative who believes in the rule of law believes it applies to the government's officers too. Condemning a cruel act is not an argument against having a border. Treat the migrant with dignity and enforce the law: both are required and they do not conflict.

Second, the objection assumes that the people who die would not have attempted the crossing if the border had been easier. The reverse is the better bet. A weaker deterrent invites more attempts, and with more attempts come more deaths, even if the share who die were to fall. The relevant comparison is not a world with enforcement and a world without suffering. It is a world with enforcement and a world with a larger flow, a larger criminal industry and a larger absolute toll. Count the people, not the share.

Third, the objection says to open more legal paths, and here the two sides can agree more than they admit. An honest enforcement position includes legal channels, and a credible threat of a consequence for bypassing them. The two work together. People will use the lawful door if the unlawful door is shut and the lawful door has a line they can believe in. A system with no legal channel that works, or with no consequence for ignoring it, produces the chaos. A system with both is what the critics of enforcement say they want.

Fourth, the objection treats the migrant as the only person with a claim on our compassion. The citizen who lives in a border town, the rancher whose land is crossed, the worker whose wages are undercut, the immigrant who followed every rule and waited years: all of them are human beings with claims too. See Ranchers on the Line and the Property Rights Fight at the Southern Border for one set of voices that rarely appear on the evening news. A policy that disregards them is not compassionate. It is selective.

The verdict

I will say it plainly, since a verdict is the point of an argument. The claim that enforcement is cruel and openness is kind is, in the main, a mistake about cause and effect. The kindest thing a government can do for the people at its border is to run a system that works: clear rules, quick decisions, honest consequences, humane treatment and real legal paths. The cruelest is to announce a welcome it cannot sustain and let the smugglers collect the bill.

That verdict does not require hostility toward anyone. It requires a willingness to be judged by results. If we adopt the policy and the deaths rise, we should change the policy. The people who say that "caring" means a loose border should be willing to apply the same test to theirs.

The case in brief

1. The journey north outside the lawful channels is dangerous, and federal agencies document rescues and deaths along the route.
2. Weak enforcement benefits the smugglers and cartels, who treat migrants as inventory, and it makes the crossing more profitable for them.
3. Incentives are real: release into the country while a claim is pending raises the expected benefit of an illegal crossing and increases the number who attempt it.
4. The Judeo-Christian duty to the stranger is real, and it sits alongside an ordered duty to one's own household, which means charity requires order.
5. The objection that enforcement is cruel confuses abusive conduct, which should be punished, with the principle of enforcement, which protects migrants and citizens alike.

What you can do: look up the Border Patrol's published figures on migrant rescues and deaths on its official website, read them for yourself, and write to your representative through the page for your representatives about the policy you think would reduce them.