States Don't Have Rights or Moral Obligations

I have a problem with JL Wilson’s recent essay in the Partial Observer. James writes in one place: ”A country has the right to keep out those whose beliefs are hostile to its laws.” In another place he poses the rhetorical question: “Would the United States have a moral obligation to welcome in such nut-jobs?”

I am conflicted about the larger point that James makes in the essay that a state ought to exclude would be immigrants that do not meet a particular ideological litmus test, and I don’t aim to address the argument here. But I am uneasy about how he has framed the issue in terms of states’ having “rights” and “moral obligations”.

Should a state, which is an abstraction, be said to have rights? Certainly, international law is sometimes framed in such terms such as a “right to self defense”, and Israel claims that it has a “right to exist”. But from an anti-state perspective, I reckon that it is counterrevolutionary to reify states in this manner.

States don’t have rights; they are organizing and legitimizing principles for the exercise of power by and on behalf of individuals acting under color of law. State actors do what they can get away with in view of the powers of other state actors and domestic political constraints. Certainly the United States government has the ability in principle to exclude any immigrants that Congress, in the exercise of its plenary power in this matter, pleases to exclude. There is no need to invoke “rights”. The argument should be focused on whether the exercise of such power is or is not a good idea and what the ramifications of such an exercise of power might be.

I am especially interested in considering how the exclusion of immigrants on ideological grounds will be abused. Will anti-state immigrants be admitted, or will statism be a requirement for admission?

Once you have accepted the legitimacy of the United States government to act in the area of immigration, your arguments about how it acts don’t need to rely on a claim of “rights”. All you have to do is explain how the proposed program will be helpful. It may have a chance of enactment if you can also show that it will inure to the benefit of the individuals in power, that it will appeal to the electorate, and that it can’t be used effectively against the people in power by their rivals.

I have the same sort of criticism of talking about states’ having “moral obligations”. States are ideas, and ideas don’t have morals. People have moral obligations. You might argue that individuals acting in the name of the state have moral obligations, e.g. an official ought not to take bribes or neglect his duty. You might even argue that your Congressman has a moral obligation to act to protect American culture from subversive immigrants. If you reckon that this is a legitimate function of Congress, then there is no need to attribute morals to the state.

It is important to problematize the state and to avoid reifying it. If you are a minarchist or proponent of limited government, it is a challenge to distinguish those areas that you regard as legitimate exercises of authority from the areas that you deem beyond the scope of government. The line is ultimately going to be arbitrary and predicated on underlying normative assumptions and subjective preferences. You have to decide what ends are so important to you that you would condone the use of coercion to accomplish them. You don’t need to claim that states have rights or moral obligations to make your case. You just have to explain why the proposed state action is really important, that coercion is the only means to accomplish the important result, and that your solution will not make things worse.