Your Fascist Immigration Policies

Eschewing all hyperbole.

Greetings from Los Angeles! If you’re in town, please join Richard Hanania, Scott Sumner, and myself today at noon at Maria’s restaurant in Pasadena.

I will be at Descanso Gardens around 10 AM today before the meet-up. You’re welcome to join me for a tour of the gardens. Email me if you can’t find me.

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Hyperbole about “fascism” has been rampant throughout the post-war era. After crushing defeat in World War II, self-identified fascists almost disappeared from the planet.

Part of the reason, obviously, is that bona fide fascists, fearful of using their true name, retreated into crypto-fascism. The main reason, though, is that bona fide fascists became very rare. The leading fascists and their most fanatical followers largely perished during the war, and the movement failed to regenerate itself. It’s especially hard for a vocally “might makes right” philosophy to stage a comeback after being abjectly humiliatingly crushed.

Despite the objective rarity of bona fide fascists in the post-war era, accusing your political opponents of being “fascists” has been perennially popular. Stalinists pioneered this tactic during the interwar period, when they smeared Social Democrats as “Social Fascists” and insisted that Trotsky himself was not only a fascist but a conscious agent of Hitler. Even decades later, the official name for the Berlin Wall was the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart.” Most recently, Russia has claimed that it had to invade Ukraine to liberate it from fascist rule.

Still, the point of the tale of the Boy Who Cried Wolf is not that wolves don’t exist, or that wolves are always easy to spot. Though I’m painfully aware of the ubiquity of false accusations of fascism, one glaring expression of fascism hides in plain sight all over the world: anti-immigration policies.

The fascist nature of U.S. anti-immigration policies has been especially blatant this year. The Department of Homeland Security claims to have deported over 400,000 people. The vast majority of them are accused of no crime against person or property. Instead, they are being violently detained and expelled simply for breathing the air of our country without government permission — permission that is almost impossible to obtain. Even migrants who managed to get this elusive permission have had it revoked. Not because of anything they did, but simply because the government didn’t want them to keep breathing our air.

Pro-deportation propaganda routinely accuses some immigrants of serious crimes. But this is plainly a pretext, because the government self-righteously arrests and deports even the most peaceful and productive immigrants if they lack (or were deprived of) the proper paperwork.

Why can’t peaceful, productive people easily get this paperwork? Why do they need paperwork in the first place? For a canonically fascist reason: Your very presence violates our nation. Not because of anything you’ve done or failed to do. But because you aren’t one of us.

As the dictator in V for Vendetta tells himself:

Oh yes, I am a fascist. What of it? Fascism…a word. A word whose meaning has been lost in the bleatings of the weak and the treacherous.

The Romans invented fascism. A bundle of bound twigs was its symbol.

One twig could be broken. A bundle would prevail. Fascism…strength in unity.

I believe in strength. I believe in unity.

And if that strength, that unity of purpose, demands a uniformity of thought, word and deed then so be it.

I only wish Moore had added, “identity” to that list of uniformities that fascism demands.

I’m hardly the only person these days calling current U.S. immigration policies “fascist.” But as far as I can tell, almost all of the other people who call ICE “fascist” focus on its brutal methods of enforcement. This isn’t crazy; if “Your very presence violates our nation” is fascist, “We will end your violation of our nation by any means necessary” is super-fascist. But on reflection, there’s nothing fascist about brutally hunting down robbers and murderers. The heart of fascism is declaring that peaceful presence in your country is, in itself, a crime.

I know that plenty of otherwise nice people strongly support anti-immigration policies, and I’m not likely to win them over by saying that such policies are fascist. But these policies totally are fascist. Seriously, if we’d had open borders until today, and a few anti-immigration activists starting claiming that peaceful, productive foreigners in our midst should be arrested and expelled because their very presence violates our country, you’d think those activists were fascist, too.

The most conciliatory thing I can honestly say is that supporting one canonically fascist policy isn’t enough to make you a fascist. You can classify an idea in isolation, but to classify a person, you have to take an average. Still, if arresting and deporting immigrants is your overriding priority, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that both you and your favorite policy are fascist. I wish I knew a less alienating way to speak this truth, but I don’t.

The world is a confusing place, and major events occasionally help us attain clarity. Almost anyone with a conscience has been troubled by stories about the brutality of recent immigration enforcement. But as long as you accept the idea that it’s morally acceptable for government to arrest and expel someone simply because “he’s not one of us,” the methods ICE has been using make sense. They’re treating the people they call criminals as if they’re criminals. Yes, brutally enforcing fascist laws is worse than enforcing them laxly. But the primary evil is not the methods of enforcement, but the laws themselves.

P.S. Yes, I know that there are better rationales for immigration restrictions than “Your very presence violates our nation.” I address a vast range of such arguments in my Open Borders. But I still maintain that “Your very presence violates our nation” is the rationale that best fits actually-existing immigration restrictions.