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Today, Liberalism.Org posted my first essay as a regular contributor to their project. It is entitled “Immigration Restrictions Restrict Americans’ Liberties.” Liberalism.Org is a new initiative of the Institute for Humane Studies, led by Jason Kuznicki, formerly of the Cato Institute. Its purpose is to explore, promote, and revitalize liberal political thought in an era where illiberal and anti-liberal movements of various types are on the rise. Jason provides an overview of the project and its purposes here.
I will be contributing new essays to the project (published at their website) several times per year, most likely focusing on issues related to immigration, democratic theory, and constitutional law. The other regular contributors are prominent libertarian or libertarian-leaning thinkers. They include Radley Balko (leading expert on criminal law and law enforcement issues), Janet Bufton (prominent Canadian classical liberal thinker and political commentator), Prof. Michael Munger (Duke University), Sarah Skwire (Liberty Fund), and Prof. Matt Zwolinski (U of San Diego, coauthor of The Individualists: Radical, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism). It is an honor to be associated with this impressive group, and I look forward to working with them.
Here is an excerpt from my first article:
The biggest victims of immigration restrictions are the would-be migrants, who are consigned to a lifetime of poverty and oppression simply because they were born in the wrong place, to the wrong parents. But the horrific experience of the second Trump administration highlights how restrictionism also poses a grave threat to the liberty and welfare of native-born citizens. While some of the harms caused to natives are specific to the policies of this administration, many are inherent in the very nature of exclusion and deportation, and they occur even under more conventional presidents. The ultimate solution is to end all or most immigration restrictions, or at least to severely curb them.
Since Trump returned to office in January 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other immigration enforcement officers have killed at least three U.S. citizens (two in Minnesota and one in Texas), wounded numerous others, and detained hundreds illegally, after mistaking them for undocumented immigrants. ProPublica found some 170 cases of illegal detention of citizens through October 2025, but that is almost certainly a severe underestimate, given that the federal government does not keep statistics on such cases, and ProPublica could only include those they were able to track down. ICE and other agencies also make extensive use of racial profiling, which leads to detention and harassment of numerous U.S. citizens who look like they may be Hispanic or belong to other nonwhite groups, and thus potentially suspect. The enormous extent of racial and ethnic profiling by ICE is shown by the fact that immigration arrests in Los Angeles County declined by 66 percent after a federal court order barring the use of such tactics; the ruling was eventually blocked by the Supreme Court.…
For all too many natives, immigration restrictions are literally a matter of life and death. The disproportionate role of immigrants in scientific and medical innovation indicates that large-scale exclusion prevents or at least postpones a wide range of life-saving innovations, thereby costing many American lives. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study found that a 25 percent increase in immigration rates would likely save about 5,000 lives per year simply by virtue of the fact that immigrants are disproportionately employed in the healthcare and elder care industries, and increased immigration would provide elderly people with more of the care they desperately need, in a society with an aging population.…
The immigration restrictions of the second Trump administration have inflicted even greater harm on U.S. citizens because they have been so egregious, including ramping up mass deportation efforts, greatly increasing the number of ICE agents (from 10,000 to 22,000) and expanding detention facilities. But it’s important to recognize that grave damage is inflicted even under more conventional presidents, even if it is less visible and garners fewer headlines. Illegal detention and deportation of U.S. citizens long predates Trump. Northwestern University political scientist Jacqueline Stevens estimates that the federal government detained or deported more than 20,000 U.S. citizens from 2003 to 2010, at a time when George W. Bush and Barack Obama—two relatively pro-immigration presidents—occupied the White House.
Racial profiling by immigration enforcers is also not unique to the Trump era. In 2014, the Obama administration decided to perpetuate the use of racial profiling by federal immigration enforcers in areas within 100 miles of a “border,” a designation that covers areas where some two-thirds of the population lives, as well as several entire states, including New Jersey, Michigan, and Florida. Obama officials reasoned that large-scale immigration enforcement could not work without such racial and ethnic discrimination….
Some of these negative effects can be mitigated by limiting immigration restrictions, rather than ending them completely. For example, we can abolish ICE and bar all or most interior deportations, limiting federal deportation operations to actual border areas near the Canadian and Mexican frontiers. This would significantly reduce the threat deportation poses to natives’ civil liberties. But those effects would still be present in border areas, where millions of native-born citizens live, including many who are vulnerable to racial profiling and other abuses.
We can also try to reduce negative economic and fiscal impacts of immigration restrictions by letting in those migrants most likely to contribute to growth and innovation, while keeping out others. But governments are unlikely to do a good job with such selection. Many of the biggest immigrant innovators and entrepreneurs arrive as children or young adults, making it difficult or impossible to predict their impact in advance….
These realities don’t mean that incremental immigration policy improvements are useless. Incrementally reducing immigration restrictions can still diminish the economic and social damage they cause. And incremental cutbacks to the apparatus of exclusion and deportation, such as abolishing ICE, can reduce the threat to U.S. citizens’ civil liberties. We should not let the best be the enemy of the good. But we should also not forget that the best should be our ultimate objective.
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