Episode 1: José Mendoza on Immigration Enforcement, Crimmigration, Abolition, and Anti-Colonialism

[Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.]

JK: Welcome to Borderland, an interview series with experts in immigration ethics. I’m Jonathan Kwan, the Postdoctoral Fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. And I’m very pleased to be joined today by Dr. José Mendoza, who is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Washington and the co-editor of Radical Philosophy Review. José’s research deals with topics concerning immigration ethics, Latinx identity, and racial justice. He is the author of The Moral and Political Philosophy of Immigration: Liberty, Security, and Equality, published by Lexington Books in 2017. He has written numerous academic articles that have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Public Affairs Quarterly, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Philosophy in the Contemporary World. Thank for being with us here today, José. 

JM: Thank you for having me—excited!

JK: Why don’t we start off by talking about questions about enforcement in immigration ethics, which I know that you’ve written about recently. In public and academic debates on immigration, the question of who should be permitted to enter into a country is often kept separate from and seen as prior to how a country’s immigration policy should be enforced. The implicit assumption is usually that once we’ve decided how we set our immigration policy, then that is the policy that should be enforced. But in your work, you challenge this assumption and you’ve argued that matters of enforcement actually have implications for questions about who should be admitted and excluded from a country and so should be taken into consideration from the very beginning. Can you explain this position further and the arguments behind it? What’s problematic about thinking about enforcement only as a secondary concern?

JM: What I try to argue in my book is that I think that there are actually two ways of philosophically approaching the issue of immigration. And I think actually sometimes philosophers might get a little confused as to how they’re doing this or what they’re trying to do. One way of looking at immigration is to think of it as a problem for a particular kind of moral and political philosophy. So, the issue of immigration in this way is not like other applied issues. It’s thought if you get an applied issue in philosophy—there’s anthologies on applied issues—you take your favorite philosophical doctrine: Kantianism, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics, and you run the death penalty or whatever issue you want through that framework and it spits out an answer for you. But immigration is interesting and philosophers have found it interesting because actually it challenges a lot of the deep normative assumptions that we have. To use Rawlsian language, it’s a kind of reflective equilibrium problem. You have principles and they conflict with other principles. You have principles and they conflict with deeply held intuitions that you have.

So, what philosophers have done is that they’ve looked at this issue and they’ve said, well look, as philosophers coming out of the liberal tradition, communities ought to have a right to be democratically self-determined and that’s a particular kind of freedom, autonomy, and so forth for the community. And that comes into conflict with freedom for the individual who wants to have freedom of movement. Or, you look at it from an egalitarian standpoint and you say, well, we like this idea of distributive justice at the domestic level—that’s a form of equality. And there are ways that immigration seems to challenge that. So then our domestic forms of equality come into conflict with more universal equality: all persons should be given equal moral consideration.

When you look at it this way, you’re not actually dealing with immigration the way that most people worry about the problem. When you go out on the street and you talk to people about immigration, that’s rarely what they’re worried out. So there’s a way in which you’ve taken a real-life issue and shown this real-life issue exposes a problem for philosophy. It becomes a kind of a trolley problem. We don’t solve trolley problems to make better trolley conductors. We don’t take Peter Singer’s shallow pond example to make better lifeguards. We take these examples as a way of showing us that our principles and intuitions are out of whack. What’s happened though is that philosophers think we can take those things and apply them to the real world. 

And what I think enforcement does is it exposes the ethical issues that are motivating most people. We do want the techniques of philosophy to help us with our immigration issue. But we’ve got to take those techniques and apply them to the issues that worry people. And there are some people that think we can enforce our way out of this problem. We have an immigration problem to the extent that we are unwilling to enforce it. Spoiler alert—I’m on the opposite side.

My argument is similar to an argument for decriminalizing drugs where it’s not so much whether you are pro-drugs or anti-drugs. It’s more the way we’ve enforced this thing has created way more injustices than enforcement is supposed to take care of or deal with. What I want to look at are the times you employ really harsh enforcement policies and when you look at these times, I think that perhaps the real problem is that we are trying to enforce an unjust immigration policy. So, you sit there and you think, why are we funneling people through the desert and having them die there? Why are people dying in the Mediterranean? All these things: holding people in camps and so forth. That probably tells me that we have an unjust immigration policy if you buy the assumptions that I have, which is that immigration status is not a natural kind. It’s a socially constructed category.

There are ways that people are undocumented that are pretty obvious, other ways that they are not. Melania Trump, Donald Trump’s wife, was actually technically an undocumented immigrant at one point. She came to the US on a tourist visa and did some modeling work. You can’t work with a tourist visa. You automatically become undocumented. It’s a social construct. It’s very complicated, yet we treat it as natural. Once we see it as a kind of a construct, then we ask ourselves what kind of policy should we have. And once you have to endorse a very harsh enforcement policy, then you are running into some real problems.

Really quickly, what was my solution? I looked at two kinds of enforcement. First, enforcement at the border and I said, look, if you have to have these draconian militarized borders, then that suggests you are not taking into account push and pull factors, which more than enforcement determine the migration of folks. Enforcement pretty quickly has diminishing returns. So, it’s true if you have really harsh enforcement, you will deter and prevent certain people from entering. But that effect has diminishing returns really quickly. At a certain point, push and pull factors overdetermine that and in some ways, we’re responsible for creating both the push and the pull factors.

My last point. Joseph Carens at one point had said that borders have guards and the guards have guns and that’s the thing I emphasize. But Chandran Kukathas pointed out that the guns are sometimes pointed inward, not just outward. So, I’ve also looked at internal enforcement and what enforcement does to the folks who even the domestic egalitarians think we should treat as equal citizens, the way that internal enforcement marginalizes certain kinds of citizens. I’ve gone a step further in my book and said that it’s not just that it’s bad libertarian government overreach. It’s that those guns are not just pointed internally but they’re pointed at a very specific set of folks. And in this very long-winded way, I’ve tried to give an indirect argument for open borders. So I’ve tried to have both. I’ve tried to look at enforcement thinking it gives us some real-world answers but also gives us an under-appreciated argument for academic philosophers for open borders.

JK: That’s all fascinating argumentation. I really like the analogy to decriminalizing drugs. The idea that, look, if you have a policy, and the only way to enforce that policy is to commit a bunch of injustices, then that shouldn’t be the policy that you should have, right? And so similarly, it’s not as though you decide your immigration policy in a vacuum beforehand and then decide, ok, whatever that immigration policy should be, then we figure out how to enforce it most efficiently or most effectively. Rather, if the enforcement itself commits a lot of injustices, then that shouldn’t be the policy that you should have. I really like that way of flipping the lens of how you should think about immigration. I mean I think it’s not just in academia that this assumption has been made but certainly in public debates, I hear this a lot too. People say, well look, we just want legal immigration. We have to decide what that is and then once we decide what that is, we must enforce it as strongly as we can. But your suggestion is that maybe if that is the way we go, you’re not actually able to do that justly and so you ought to revise your policy to begin with to be more of an open borders policy.

JM: You put it a lot more succintly—exactly, that is correct. And it’s true, migration is something that humans have done since... not just humans, all animals on this planet migrate for different reasons. One of the things also to think about is to what extent is immigration itself the problem. A lot of immigrants aren’t desirous to leave their family and friends and so forth. They’re displaced. And if given a chance, they would rather stay home. So, there’s a way in which we’ve displaced people and then we enforce these borders and then just make some of the most vulnerable people on the planet even more vulnerable and exploit them even more. But then the problem is keeping these two arguments distinct. The other one that has kind of dropped out but I raised earlier was a very interesting philosophical problem, the debate between the community’s right to self-determination and the individual’s freedom of movement. And all that is true. But the way I do it becomes much more of a truly applied philosophy, looking at the ethics of the debates people are actually having. Folks in the Trump administration say, build that wall, we need more enforcement, the way we end the problem is through enforcement. And folks like me saying, no, enforcement really is the ethical problem.

JK: Yeah, that’s a really good way of framing it for sure. Speaking about internal and external enforcement, I want to talk about the issue of crimmigration, which I know you’ve written about as well and which usually refers to how immigration enforcement has been conflated with criminal enforcement as well. And you think this is a bit of a problem. Could you explain it for people who haven’t heard about crimmigration before, what it is, and what is so problematic about it? Because I can see someone coming to this question and they might think, well, this is just a matter of efficiency. If the government can enforce its laws by overlapping immigration law enforcement with criminal law enforcement, why shouldn’t it do that?

JM: This is, I think, one of the more troubling aspects that has developed. Something I will keep coming back to is when and where does the movement of people become a problem. For a long time, for most of human history, immigration wasn’t so much the problem as emmigration with an “e”. A lot of kingdoms and fiefdoms and so forth wanted to keep people in. Getting the right to exit was a very important thing. For a big chunk of the history of the United States, there were no immigration exclusions. Those come around in the late 1800s for very racist reasons. The United States had open borders with every country, let me stress this, every country in the Western Hemisphere until 1965. We had basically open borders. You had to show up to a port of entry and identify yourself and so forth, but we had open borders with every country in the Western Hemisphere.

When do these sorts of things become a problem? Now, as we have decided that we are going to restrict folks, slowly but surely, one of the things we started doing was we started saying, if you have a criminal conviction, that’s a reason to deport folks. There are three aspects of crimmigration. The first one is when criminal convictions carry immigration consequences. Now, this seems like a no-brainer. You’re asking me to come to your country. At least I can respect your laws.

But one of the things that happens especially for long-term immigrants, immigrants who have been here more than five years and have established a home here and so forth, people do occasionally either break the law or get accused of breaking the law. One of the things that we have to keep in mind when we bring these two things together is the fact that over 90% of cases now are done by plea bargain. So, if I get accused of a crime, there’s a very good chance I’m going to just try to plea out of it. They’ll give me less of a sentence and so forth. So, I will plea guilty and take this lesser sentence. The court system is not designed for you to fight it. You will probably lose. It’s designed for you to plea out now. This is a problem for immigrants if there are immigration consequences now. So, the two things are separate. Well, how much time are you going to spend in jail? It turns out you might not spend any time in jail. You might just get a slap on the wrist. But you have pled guilty to this and if you plead guilty to this, then you get deported. So, you’re given this kind of harsh bind if you’re an immigrant if criminal convictions carry immigration consequences. Now you’re like, wow, in a system that’s designed for me to plea out, to not fight for my innocence, I can get deported. Or, I can get to fight this thing and get double-whammied: get more prison time and get deported. One of the things I’ve argued is that it creates a kind of parallel justice system for folks, which is unjust. 

On top of that, I think (and I might not win this argument with certain folks and I’ve tried) it’s double punishment. Why do you punish people for doing one thing? But then you add a second punishment that is only there for immigrants. I think it is inherently cruel to expel people, especially if they’ve made a life for themselves. Now, this might apply more for long-term residents. But still, I find that if there’s such a thing as cruel and unusual punishment, it’s expelling people in this way.

Lastly, and I think this is important in a real-world context. When you deport people convicted of criminal offenses, you are putting a heavy burden on certain states that might not be able to take in certain folks and reform them. This might not be the case for DUIs. But if you have people who have committed very serious crimes, our criminal justice system does not reform people. In fact, you can look at some of these studies and what we do to people in prisons can actually make them worse persons. And you take these persons and then you deport them to countries like El Salvador and then you’re shocked to find out that they were alienated in El Salvador, couldn’t get jobs in El Salvador, there was nothing there to help them, and they end up starting a gang called Salva Madara Deuce. So, one of the things we’ve exported to El Salvador is gangs when they become international. That’s one aspect of it.

The other aspect of it is the other way: when immigration violations come to have criminal-style punishments. This one is very disturbing. Immigration law is not criminal law. It’s part of the executive branch. So, the executive branch in this particular arena gets to be judge, jury, and executioner. It’s their discretion. They get to decide the immigration law. Now, when you start attaching prison time to some of these things… So, let’s say you’re guilty of re-entry. You’ve entered undocumented. They sent you back. You re-enter. That starts to carry prison time, up to 20 years. They rarely give you 20 years, but you can get up to 20 years in prison for unlawful re-entry. Now, the problem here is that when you get convicted of re-entry, you’re not entitled to a lawyer. A lot of constitutional protection do not protect you because this is not technically a criminal case, it’s an immigration case. And it’s decided by the executive. It’s not the judiciary judges that decide this. These are folks appointed by the executive branch to judge over you. You’re prosecuted by people that are appointed by the executive branch. There is no separation of powers. The executive is judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to immigration convictions. And now if criminal convictions get added on top of them, you can start seeing the problem here. There’s a weird loophole that you can use on immigrants.

And then finally, and this is the one you see the most, when you take law enforcement agencies and you take immigration enforcement agencies and you allow each of them to use tactics or to perform the job of the other. So, here we start seeing things like immigrants who get detained who have asylum claims. They get basically put in jail. You are in jail. But it’s not considered incarceration because technically you can leave anytime you want. You can say, “Hey, I want to drop my asylum claim. I am willing to suffer for it.” And now you put people in a terrible bind. It’s basically either you are in jail without the possibility of bail, or you can go back to this country where you feel that your life is threatened. You incarcerate people without giving them the protections we are normally afforded in any other context we are incarcerated. You ask local police to perform immigration functions, which police officers themselves say has created distrust within the community. If we’re trying to police a community, we want trust in the community. If the community is largely an immigrant community, then we’re not going to get very much trust from that community.

And finally, there is this mandate now, which is again very recent, of asking immigration agents to do things that wasn’t part of their mandate before, which is performing anti-terrorism and drug enforcement duties. And what this has actually done—it really started in the 80s but got ramped up after September 11th—is change the relationship between immigration agents and immigrants. Immigrants are not seen as people who could potentially become Americans or seeking to become Americans and so forth. They are seen and treated as folks who we should be suspicious of. This changes the relationship between those two. 

Those are three things that together come to form the heart of crimmigration when you see them as a system and they are very troubling. And if we use something like the birdcage analogy for oppression, I think that’s helpful. Each one by themselves seems like, well okay, Mendoza, that stinks but that’s not that bad. But if you come to see this using the famous Marilyn Frye birdcage example, you come to see crimmigration as actually extremely pernicious. And it all works together to create this larger injustice that goes unnoticed because each one of those things that I’ve outlined for you, you might have nodded your head and been like, okay, that’s bad but not that bad. But together, they form this larger injustice.

JK: It seems to me that the issue of crimmigration really reveals how if you’re going to do political philosophy on immigration, you have to pay attention to the specific details of how exactly enforcement happens. As you outline, there are all these complicated ways in which the conflation of criminal law enforcement and immigration law enforcement causes all these injustices, these double-binds, these oppressive policies, lack of due process, lack of checks between different agencies, etc. But if you just think in a vacuum, “Well, we have our immigration policy, we ought to enforce it. Why not leverage all the agencies we can to try to enforce that policy?”, you’ll ignore all the actual injustices on the ground that are happening as a result of what has become known as crimmigration.

Related to crimmigration, I wanted to ask you a question about abolition. Of course, in the past year or so, there’s been a lot of discussion about abolishing the police, abolishing prisons, especially in the wake of protests over police killings of Black Americans like George Floyd and others. The abolition movement has gained more traction and become more visible in the mainstream public. If you are upset about crimmigration, you might be more radical and take a step back and say, well, it’s not just the conflation of criminal law enforcement and immigration law enforcement. It’s this whole complex, this whole incarceration complex. So really, we should fight for abolition. And abolishing police, abolishing prisons, we have to think about that not just for citizens but also for non-citizens. So, we also need to link prison abolition with ICE abolition and with abolition of immigration detention. I wanted to ask what you think about these larger arguments about these abolitionist frameworks being applied to the immigration context. Do you find them helpful in your analysis?

JM: I think so. As you can probably guess, I mean, I hope I didn’t come off as crazy. I think a lot of the things I think of are very reasonable and I’m like, woah, these things are very upsetting. And then I come to conclusions that I think that people think are extremely radical. But very much so, I’m pro-abolish ICE and I do think linking these things up with abolishing the police make all the sense in the world to me. I think we have to ask questions like, what’s the goal of enforcement? Can we achieve the overall goals that enforcement is supposed to bring us using non-lethal, non-militarized forms of enforcement? And most people smarter than me who look into this say, yeah, we can achieve these goals through these other avenues. We don’t need cops. And even police say themselves that we’re not trained to do these other things that could get to the root of these problems. And if we got to the root of these problems, then we could achieve our goals better instead of trying to enforce our way out of all these things.

So, you got to stop and ask yourself, well, what’s keeping these things going? And one worry I have and I think part of what is motivating your question is that a lot of the answers I give tend to be (and I think it’s the right approach for now) more immigrant rights related. What rights and protections can we give immigrants? What limits can we put on enforcement? And even in my book, I didn’t go all the way and say abolish ICE. And I think what correctly motivates your question is, Mendoza, you got us right to the edge and you didn’t jump.

And part of it is I don’t know how to go about yet abolishing these things because I think there are powerful forces motivating them. There’s a kind of perverse Keynesianism (I’ve put this phrase in a new piece). We have a lot of folks who want to have middle-class jobs. We have a lot of folks, like Lockheed Martin, who want to sell their wares. And as we leave places like Afghanistan as badly as we are right now, people still need to sell their weapons, need to sell their wares. There’s a way in which the economy depends on these places selling their wares, making money, and the border security industry is very profitable and it’s expanding. It blows people’s minds to learn that in 1989 when the most infamous militarized border, the Berlin Wall, fell, there was something like 15 militarized borders all around the world. Today, there’s something like 77. They employ a lot of people; they buy a lot of products. Going back to the guards have guns, we should also add to Joseph Carens’s notion that borders have guns and Kukathas’s that they are pointed at us that those guns are super expensive and super profitable. And the guys and gals holding the guns, they have employment that otherwise would make them under- or unemployed. So, there’s this kind of perverse economic system at play. There’s a sense in which we can make all the rational and moral arguments we want, but unless we start looking at the economics that are driving these things, there are a lot of powerful forces keeping these things in play. 

So, I want to do two things. I want to critique the larger economic system that makes this a rational thing to pursue, which is more and more enforcement to be able to do these things. But also at the same time, realize that that’s not going to come tomorrow and what I can do is to hopefully provide some protections to the most vulnerable. The short answer to your question is yes, I think it is very helpful. But then I think it becomes a matter of can we chew gum and walk at the same time? Can we argue for limiting enforcement and immigrant rights without at the same time endorsing the system? And that’s really tricky. Because I find myself in that bind sometimes that in order to defend immigrants and provide protections for them, there’s a sense where you are playing the game and when you’re playing the game, you kind of justify the system if that makes sense.

JK: Right, maybe you are a little bit too reformist or supporting the system in a way when you should be abolishing the system as a whole. It does seem like there are those kinds of arguments in the abolitionist literature and abolitionist social movement that seem helpful in thinking about immigration: these debates about reform versus more radical abolition, the analysis of racial capitalism and how that informs the prison-industrial-complex. And I feel like not a lot of people in academia, at least philosophers, have written about that in terms of what you’re saying about border enforcement, how the logic of racial capitalism and this industrial complex applies to the immigration complex as well and how borders are being managed. And this segues me into my next question, which is about race.

Not every political philosopher who is thinking about immigration foregrounds race in their work, but you certainly do. I wanted to ask you about this debate in academia between racism versus xenophobia. Should we think about discrimination in immigration policy as a kind of racism or as a kind of xenophobia? What’s the difference between the two? What is your take on that debate? 

JM: The simple answer is I want to have as many effective tools in my toolbox to undermine oppression, exploitation, and discrimination as possible. And I think it is helpful to distinguish between xenophobia and racism, even though it’s also at the same time very important to see all the ways and how often they actually do overlap. So, one thing to say is yes, here are the ways they overlap and work together but there are times that I think the two don’t overlap. And if we don’t have tools to help us see this, it’s going to make us think that maybe we’ve solved the problem. You see this in immigration all the time. You say, “Well, we’re not racist anymore.” Well, there can be a way in which xenophobia is just as bad. Or you can say, “Well, we’re not xenophobic anymore,” and there still continues to be racism.

What are the differences between the two? Xenophobia could be harms, wrongful discrimination—whether direct or indirect, individual or systemic—that is based on actual, more likely, perceived non-citizenship. Racism is similar but it is based on actual or perceived race. The xenophobia versus racism debate within the philosophy of race comes out of a larger debate over whether we should apply a wide scope or a narrow scope of racism. And there are good arguments on both sides. Should all harms that are racial wrongs be considered racist? Folks like Larry Blum have said, well, look, there are certain harms that we should reserve for racism. Racism is such a morally powerful condemnation and we think it should be that powerful. We should reserve it for the really harsh racial wrongs. And let some other racial wrongs be just that. Call them racial wrongs. Maybe certain jokes or something. He thinks of it as a level. Racism is hitting a racial wrong at a very high level and if you don’t hit that threshold, it doesn’t mean that it’s okay, these things are still bad. Just reserve racism for these really bad ones. 

But there is another way of having a broader or narrower scope of racism and that is with regards to which kinds of group-based harms should be called racist. So, when you look at say, for example (I’m a baseball fan), the logo of Cleveland Baseball Team. The logo of the Cleveland Baseball Team is clearly racist in my opinion. But what about the character for the Boston Celtics, Lucky the Leprechaun who runs around and is goofy? Is there a way that someone could be offended by that? Would that be racist? You start to see we could go at this by levels. Does a racial wrong have to meet a certain threshold to be considered racist? And then we can look at groups. Is discrimination against someone based on religion racist? It’s tricky. In some cases, yes, in some cases, no. It doesn’t mean it’s better or worse. So, which bad wrongs against certain groups count as racist?

And one of the things I’ve tried to argue is I think American whiteness is deeply connected to citizenship, and xenophobia and racism have intertwined. But if you don’t separate the two, I think, you look at what happens at, say, the Germans in the early 1700s. And if you look at some of the things Ben Franklin said about the Germans, they are almost word for word what Donald Trump has said about Muslims in the United States: they’re weird, they’ve got this weird religion, and so forth. Ben Franklin said that Germany was not sending us their best and their brightest before Trump said they’re not sending us their best and their brightest. But there’s a way in which these groups get incorporated into American whiteness. The Irish, the Italians, all these folks, are able to come into the melting pot in a way that other groups—even when they are given citizenship, even when their citizenship is no longer in question—aren’t ever considered real Americans but for different reason, which are racial reasons. What I think is helpful is to have this kind of a distinction in our back pocket. And that doesn’t mean that xenophobia and racism are always separate and that we need to keep them separate because often they come together. But sometimes they do come apart and we need to see when it does, because if we don’t, we might start making assumptions that are unwarranted.

And so, this is something else that I’ve written on, which is that the Latinx community is not racially homogenous. And the fact that it’s not racially homogenous means that we can’t always expect the entirety of the Latinx community to act or to feel racism in the way that Indigenous communities, Asian communities, and Black communities face racism. Because for some Latinos, namely white Latinx folks, white supremacy might be offer to them in the way that white supremacy was on offer for the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, these folks. And if we don’t see these differences, then we might not notice the way that xenophobia is keeping the Latinx community as a group together right now and the way that xenophobia might wane for some folks. There are definitely Black Latinx, Asian Latinx, and Indigenous Latinx for whom white supremacy will never be on offer. But if we don’t understand how these things work, then we start treating groups as monolithic when they are in fact not monolithic. And then we are surprised why the leader of the Proud Boys is a Latinx person or why George Zimmerman was Latinx. There’s a way in which xenophobia and racism come together but also come apart sometimes.

JK: That’s fascinating. I feel like oftentimes in public debates, xenophobic immigration policy is just labeled as racist but there is not further analysis that you are bringing to the table about how if we are really trying to unpack how that oppression works, we have to look at how these two things are separate but also sometimes coming together. And that really gives us a more complex picture about how we might want to combat the problems and the wrongs that are there.

So, now to sort of shift gears a bit, I want to ask a bit about current events and what you think about, in particular, the Democrats’s $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package that provides a path to citizenship for 10 million or so people. It was passed in the Senate. Because of budget reconciliation rules, the Democrats only needed a simple majority to pass this in the Senate. So, they were able to avoid a Republican filibuster as long as the legislation pertained to the federal budget, to spending and revenue. But something else that I noticed is that in the budget reconciliation package, there is also a proposal for increased investment in border security. Related to our discussion at the beginning of this interview, there is in a way a compromise being made: well, we’re going to provide more citizenship for people but on the flip side, we’re going to increase security and increase enforcement. That’s often a refrain that you hear mainstream Democrats propose in order to fight for the kind of immigration reforms that they are in favor of. What do you think of the budget reconciliation package?

JM: So, there’s Mendoza the human and I think anything that is going to regularize the status of folks who are very vulnerable right now is a good thing. I also feel that no matter what they do, it’s not like they’ve stopped. People who think we’re not enforcing the border just are living a different reality. The number, the money, the kinds of weapons we use at the border have dramatically grown in the last 25-30 years, by like 2000% in certain areas. We’re heavily enforcing the borders. We haven’t stopped that. So, in some sense, this might be a slight increase in what we’re doing, but it’s not like we’ve stopped doing it. So, that’s the human Mendoza tacit support for this in the sense that yeah, I get the enforcement stuff, but I want to protect the most vulnerable.

But I think this is the product of having three different philosophical positions on immigration and none of them taking what I take to be the radical approach, which is getting to the root of whatever we think the problem is, which is people being forcibly displaced and being made vulnerable. The first of the three is the liberal egalitarian reformist view, which is not wrong and which says people are vulnerable and we need to help them. There is the neo-liberal capitalist view, which says the market can solve all problems and what we just need to do is open up immigration. So, usually you will find increase for skill-based immigration in that. And then there’s the reactionary view and this is to appease some folks, which is that we can just enforce our way out of it. The neo-liberal capitalist one is interesting because it’s kind of open borders but for free markets. The reactionary view is for more draconian enforcement. And then the reformer is stuck in the middle there. And I think that’s what the Democrats are proposing. I don’t know what I would do if I was a politician. I’m glad I’m an academic and can say the kinds of things that I can say. I think this will help some people but it’s not going to address the underlying issues that create the immigration problem. 

I’ve said sometimes that the immigration problem can almost be an epiphenomenon in the sense that we just have so much injustice in this world that if we were to somehow rectify these other things, really immigration wouldn’t be a problem. If you go back to the thing I mentioned earlier, when does the movement of people become a problem? I had no problem, zero problem, going from Massachusetts to Washington state this year. I came over and said, here I am, here’s my driver’s license, can I have a new one?—yeah, sure, I’d like to start voting. I moved here in August. I was voting at the end of September—no problem. No one had a problem with me voting in these local elections even though I had been here less than a month and a half, because the kind of person I am and my movement is okay. It only becomes a problem when you have Jim Crow even and so on, when you restrict people from having access to certain things. It’s usually something else that is going on. The immigration problem is a real philosophical problem. I think you see it expressed in enforcement. But in some ways, it can be an epiphenomenon in the sense that what’s really underlying it are these other injustices. And if we were somehow able to address these injustices... It wasn’t that long ago that Europe had free movement within its borders. Why? Well, because France didn’t think of its neighbors and the people in those countries as a problem. We tend to think of certain people as a problem and that’s when this thing pops up as an immigration problem.

JK: That’s a fascinating reframing of, maybe not the immigration problem, just the host of immigration problems plural that just comes with living in a non-ideal world, a world full of different sorts of injustices that contribute to what we see as immigration problems.

Let me end on one final question. At the Markkula Center, we often talk about using ethical lenses to help guide our decision-making. We have a framework that employs five, soon to be six, ethical lenses. So, I wanted to ask you in the context of immigration ethics specifically, what do you think would be an ethical lens that would be helpful in our thinking of immigration problems.

JM: I hope this is clear from some of the things that I’ve been saying. I think the way I approach it is kind of anti-colonial. I think that certain states continue to mine the resources of other countries, whether that be their natural resources or the labor power of their people. And some ways of doing that requires that people who want to come to this country and work be vulnerable and more easily exploitable and be willing to do some of the worst work for the lowest wages to keep the standard of living that we have. When you take this anti-colonial framework, you start to see borders very different. You start to see that the exclusions are only targeting certain people, and even then, it’s not really meant to keep them out in some sense. If you make it across, you will be vulnerable. But if you look at corporations, borders don’t exist for them, for the hyper-wealthy. These folks—the hyper-wealthy, the hyper-elite—they do what undocumented immigrants are always accused of doing. They go to poor countries and they trash them, they wreck their environment, they exploit them, and then they leave when it’s no longer beneficial to them. They have no loyalty to that place.

So, when you take an anti-colonial framework and you start seeing borders in that way, the borders just do different things. The border isn’t just a fixed line anymore. The U.S. border with the Global South no longer begins with Mexico. It begins with Honduras. We actually supply and fund the border enforcement of not just Mexico, not just El Salvador, not just Guatemala, but now all the way down to Honduras. There was someone, I’m forgetting his name, who had a great quote where he said, “We can’t have this as a series of gold-line stances. Where the U.S. border should start is 2000 miles south in Peru.” He wants to go all the way down. And it’s not just land-wise, we have border patrol in airports in other countries. We patrol the border with Haiti and the Dominican Republic because if you can get to the Dominican Republic, then you can probably get to Puerto Rico. So, there’s a way that borders expand inwardly, as we talked about, and outwardly. But they’re not barriers; these things work in a system. They’re barriers to some, but they actually help other folks. They either don’t apply or actually facilitate the movement for other folks. It looks kind of chaotic. Who gets to do what? Up until, I think, you take an anti-colonial look at this, and you say, oh I see, now I see how these different borders, or “border sets,” work together as a system, how they work, what they are trying to accomplish. And if we really want a just world, we have to understand how these things work in order to dismantle them.

JK: If you think of immigration problems as epiphenomenal in the way that they are epiphenomenal over colonialism and histories of colonialism, ways in which the borders as a system help to perpetuate colonialism and linking back to our discussion on enforcement from the very beginning… If you think about enforcement of immigration policies as a secondary concern, then maybe you miss the way in which enforcement ends up enforcing and reinforcing colonial borders, structures, and systems.

JM: I think that’s right. This is one of the things—I don’t want to call it a nugget of truth—that motivates Joseph Carens’s analogy that citizenship is like the new feudal privilege. And I think we can say more than that. But what’s right about that is that if you go back even 100 years ago or maybe a little more, there’s a way that colonialism was seen as normal. This is just what you do, old-school colonialism. You just took it for granted. And then we saw it and said this was really bad and people fought for liberation. And now we found a way to re-instate it. And citizenship and the current immigration system is presented as natural; this is just the way things are. It’s interesting to me how people who defend the current status quo do it in such a reflexive way but don’t really understand that it’s covering over justifying these other things.

JK: Well, thank you so much, José, for joining me today and speaking with us. This will be available on the Markkula Center website as well as the Markkula Center YouTube page. Feel free to find it there. Thanks again, José.

JM: Thank you. Have a good one.