Moved by the plight of desperate earthquake victims, you volunteer to work as a relief worker in Haiti. After two weeks, you’re ready to go home. Unfortunately, when you arrive at the airport, customs officials tell you that you’re forbidden to enter the United States. You go to the American consulate to demand an explanation. But the official response is simply, “The United States does not have to explain itself to you.”
What’s so bad about restricting your migration? Most obviously, because life in Haiti is terrible. If the American government denies you permission to return, you’ll live in dire poverty, die sooner, live under a brutal, corrupt regime, and be cut off from most of the people you want to associate with. Hunger, danger, oppression, isolation: condemning you to even one seems wrong. Which raises a serious question: if you had been born in Haiti, would denying you permission to enter the United States be any less wrong?
You might claim that life in Haiti isn’t nearly as bad for Haitians, because at least they have their families with them. But suppose your relief mission included your relatives. Would you feel better if the U.S. government denied your whole family permission to return, rather than you alone?
The Haiti thought experiment appears at the beginning of an essay written by the economist Bryan Caplan called Why should we restrict immigration? published in the Cato Journal Winter 2012.
Question
- Is preventing Haitians from migrating to the US really any less harmful to those Haitians than preventing Americans from returning to the US?