Does the US have a moral duty to welcome refugees?

I should start by clarifying that this post is not a policy recommendation; I am not speaking about whether the current immigration bans, refugee arrangements, and sanctuary city stances are illegal or impractical. I am discussing only whether they are immoral. In addition, I am not arguing that any particular ban is morally required; I am talking only about whether it is morally permissible.

I have heard a great deal of rhetoric condemning the President’s ban on travel from several North African and Middle Eastern countries and reduction in the number of refugees accepted from 110 thousand to 50 thousand. The problem with these arguments is that most of them are shallow in nature, and having written my thesis on the interaction between government, culture, and law, I would like to go back to the traditional thought on this subject and see if we can’t find the complexity that we’re missing.

First off, we need to free ourselves of the anthropomorphizing of governments. We sometimes think of governments as being like people; they are ‘born’ with certain moral obligations to each other and the world (note the picture for this post). But not everything in the world has the obligations: rocks don’t; turtles don’t; encyclopedias don’t. And even people aren’t obligated to solve every problem and help every person they come across; the economy would collapse if everyone were required to give to every charitable cause they heard of.

My point is that countries, governments, cannot, and are not obligated to, solve every problem on earth; every government does not have the obligation to provide and care for the global population. That’s an oversimplified view of government, and it places an enormous amount of strain on a fallible, finite institution, a strain under which that institution will collapse, leaving everyone worse off. Governments do not have altruistic obligations by virtue of existing; they have moral obligations in as much as they are institutions created by people, and they have specific purposes designated by their creators.

So, what is the purpose of our government in the United States? Well, let’s go look: “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson writes that it is the right of a wronged people “to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

In short, governments exist to serve the good of their people. This may seem like something that appeared with Locke, the social contract, and democracy, but it was part of medieval thought, in Aquinas, and even earlier in Augustine, as they summarized and helped develop much of the theory of government in their day. The ruler’s responsibility was to ensure the peace and well-being of his people. This was eventually converted into our idea of the modern nation-state, with its emphasis on self-determination and “the consent of the governed.”

So the primary responsibility of a government is the safety and well-being of its citizens, and its primary obligation outside of that is to refrain from proactively harming the safety and well-being of those outside its borders. If we start from here, without a half-formed notion that governments are international charities, it seems perfectly clear that any country is perfectly within its rights not to allow any given group of people in if it considers them a threat to security or stability, provided they are not its citizens; international law, in fact, makes this lack of obligation very clear. This includes people from certain areas of the world, people of certain ideologies, and even refugees. Also, note that America’s status as an immigrant nation, in purely logical terms, implies only that we should be letting some immigrants in, not that we must let any particular group in. So the ban, if read charitably, which I believe it should be, is morally permissible (though not, I repeat, obligatory).

Now, so far I have talked about governments; check out my next blog post to hear about individual reasons for voting for refugee bans or against sanctuary cities, and if these are in fact a triumph of fear over love or a violation of the golden rule, as some have claimed.

“immigrants” by JessicaMasulli is licensed under CC BY 2.0