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Nov 21, 2023Liked by Fabio Rojas

Did deportation make more sense when societies like 19th century England had inadequate social controls, but vast, distant tracts it wanted to settle? By most accounts, convicts saw transportation to the colonies as a good deal, preferable to the grim punishments of that time.

(Besides, I thought deportation nowadays is practiced only to send someone back to the country where he is a citizen -- more as triage than punishment.)

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Dec 16, 2023Β·edited Dec 16, 2023

Professor,

Thanks for responding to my comment, but I don't exactly agree with your retort.

There is a couple strong arguments here for deportation of criminals that you may have missed.

I'm going to assume that you are talking about a variable country, and not specifically the US.

"The person who spots the fire needs to collect the hot embers, put them in a bucket, and drop them off in another forest. " Something struck me as off about this metaphor, but then I realized that unlike a forest fire, I would assume we don't want to kill every single criminal who is a immigrant.

Assuming that open borders are not going to be something every country eventually does (and even then), you still run into massive issues. Depending on local policy for criminal cases, you run the risk of opening up new avenues of international crime. Yes, international crime happens regardless of border controls. But, suppose that a country doesn't even have the facilities to handle certain influxes of criminals migrating with other immigrants for whatever reason (which under a open border regime, is bound to happen). The country doesn't have the judicial or correctional facilities to deal with the influx of crime? Or simply is too overburdened to then deal with sentencing and jailing migrants over a border they have no control over? What is the solution except for deportation? Sure, they could hire more police and judges and build more correctional facilities, but unless the said country raises taxes/runs a deficit/makes cuts to the national budget to build the institutions (ignoring the fact that building these institutions take time), there is little else a country can do except deport.

And of course, there's a huge incentive for lower income countries to simply ship off their criminals to open-border/non-deport high income countries if they do not want to deal with said criminals (due to economic/political issues). Heck, hypothetically, it could even be used as a method of hybrid warfare in certain cases, abusing the open border policies of certain nation-states to devastate it slowly.

I can also see an argument that a polity might have relatively lax sentencing for certain crimes they are not ready to handle - I can easily see criminals taking advantage of shorter prison sentences (if at all) in certain countries if those said countries have open border/no deportation policies. What's to stop a criminal from going back to their violent/lucrative illicit trade knowing that the sentence they receive for their crimes is barely a stopgap?

Also, it might be more convenient and less disastrous for all parties if said criminal is simply deported. If you have a non-citizen who committed a crime that a plurality to majority of the population is furious about, especially due to cultural/ethnic/religious divides - it would make more sense to be for the local authority to be pragmatic and simply deport said criminal than invite exacerbating latent sectarian tensions in said country. Yes, it would not look great for the said country to deport someone based on criteria such as that, but it's better to do that then have massive civil unrest.

Also, as @thatMikeBishop pointed out, this would ironically make it harder for people to immigrate here. You can say that in an open-border paradigm, immigration cannot be restricted. However, that doesn't mean that local authorities won't adapt to this change, for better or worse. If a local authority cannot deport, they can simply pass laws to punish non-citizen immigrants harsher for lesser offenses to deter immigration.

And, at the end of the day, why should a society that opened up their arms to you and accepted you 𝘩𝘒𝘷𝘦 to keep you if you violated the social contract? You did a crime, and said society has to use their own public dollars - which could have gone towards something else more worthwhile - to then confine you in a space where they have to house and feed you, and keep you away from society? If you were escaping from terrible conditions in your home country, you really have to think about that before you decide to do a criminal act, especially a violent criminal act.

Last point:

"If someone is really violent, why should they be moved to another place so they can terrorize other people? Why not simply put them in jail in the jurisdiction where the crime happened?"

Why should someone come to the place I live at, where me and the community welcomed them with open arms , and be terrorized by them? Why then should my community be responsible for incarcerating said person, and then have to wonder whether or not they will still commit crime if they get out of prison?

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If a government is banned from deportation under any circumstances, I think they will create more barriers to immigration in the first place which impacts people who would never have become criminals. How big an effect this is an empirical question that I won't venture to guess at this point but it is something to keep in mind.

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