Among the sources of social anxiety, people who are seen as different surely rank high. For that reason, immigration policy is always sensitive. Principled politicians try to manage the reception of new arrivals, as Arthur Calwell did when seeking migrants from a non-British background after the Second World War. He arranged and highlighted a welcome for a boatload of fair-haired and blue-eyed Dutch migrants in national dress, while at the same time bringing in dark-haired Southern Europeans. Unscrupulous politicians, by contrast, simply inflame the popular prejudice that regards people who are different as threats.
Set against that background, President Trump’s crusade against immigrants is neither new nor surprising. It echoes earlier United States policies excluding foreigners, the treatment of Jews throughout Europe over centuries, the expulsion of Chinese and Pacific Islanders from Australia, and refugee policy today in most developed nations. By United States standards, his plan to imprison and expel undocumented immigrants is not exceptional. President Obama deported far more people than President Trump did in his first term, as did President Biden. Even Trump’s speculative legislation to limit citizenship by birth to a small group of children born in the United States to parents born overseas is no more exclusive than Australian policy, which limits automatic citizenship to children who have at least one parent who is an Australian citizen or permanent resident. Failure to apply for citizenship has resulted in people who have spent almost their entire lives in Australia being deported on character grounds to nations whose languages they do not speak.
To say that President Trump’s policy is not exceptional does not make it excusable. Rather, it suggests that the laws governing how most nations respond to immigrants and refugees are defective. Some regulation of immigration is certainly justified by the need and right of societies both to ensure that immigration levels serve the common good and to demand that immigrants respect the nation’s laws and institutions. It may be legitimate, for example, to limit immigration when there is a crisis in housing, to deny entry and citizenship to people who have tortured others as officers of a totalitarian regime, and to deport people who have breached the conditions of their recent entry.
That right to deny entry and citizenship, however, is not absolute. Just as individuals have a moral responsibility to assist people who call on them in an emergency, so do social institutions, including nations. This responsibility is enshrined in the United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.
The power to regulate immigration and citizenship does not justify everything that governments do in its name. To be ethically justifiable, regulation must respect the human reality of people’s ties to the nation in which they live. Nationality and, consequently, citizenship, are recognized by regulation, but are established by a network of relationships built and deepened over time. These are primarily personal relationships with others living in the nation, but they are also mediated by ties to place, work, language, financial and other institutions, local groups such as schools and sporting clubs, the media, and the natural environment. People may enter a nation as individuals, but they make friends, marry, raise families, and in doing so both contribute to and are nourished by a complex network of relationships.
It is common to speak of people ‘putting down roots.’ The metaphor is powerful in evoking the extensive network of unnoticed roots and filaments that nourish and strengthen a transplanted tree. These roots define its belonging to the environment of which it is part. Over time, the tree — or, by analogy, the person — earns the right to be there and to be treated with respect.
If human beings are defined by their relationships that grow and become more complex over time, they must not be treated as isolated individuals. Concepts such as nationality and citizenship must take into account the complex set of relationships that define people’s lives.
'The human cost of deporting undocumented immigrants is not diminished but highlighted by the United States Government’s proposed legislation to limit citizenship by birth.'
Judged by this standard, the United States Government’s planned mass deportation of undocumented immigrants is a grave injustice. Many people liable to deportation have lived in the United States for ten or twenty years. They are part of a vast network of family, friends, workmates, and institutions that rely on their labour, of schools, churches, and other groups. Many will not be accepted by the nations from which they originally departed to come to the United States. Others will fear reprisals on return. Their fear is justified, given the restrictions and cancellations of appeals for entry as refugees under the new policy.
The human cost of deporting undocumented immigrants is not diminished but highlighted by the United States Government’s proposed legislation to limit citizenship by birth. Because the legislation contravenes any straightforward reading of the United States Constitution, it will be subject to lengthy appeals. As a result, children will be separated from families who are deported. The relationships crucial to their growth and welfare, including those to family, friends, and education, will be broken. They will presumably be held in large institutions. The suffering of Indigenous children in Australia, who were torn from their families and held in brutal, underfunded institutions, stands as a warning of what such children can expect from a policy so bereft of ethical justification.
Many Americans, no doubt, will applaud the policy. Its victims will ask, ‘Why do you hurt us?’
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: U.S. Customs and Border Protection security agents guide illegal immigrants onboard a C-17 Globemaster III assigned to the 60th Air Mobility Wing for a removal flight at Fort Bliss, Texas, on Jan. 23, 2025. Under the direction of U.S. Northern Command, U.S. Transportation Command is supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement removal flights by providing military airlift. (Dept. of Defense photo by U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Nicholas J. De La Pena / Getty images)