Who is my neighbor?

Okay, I guess I have something to say about the immigration issue after all. Not so much about the concrete policy proposals being offered, but about the kinds of moral issues raised by the debate. The question, as I see it, is something like this: do we have obligations to those with whom we have special relationships that we don’t have to strangers?

Some American Christians seem to answer this with a straightforward “no.” Appealing to the kind of values embedded in, say, the story of the Good Samaritan, they say that, as Christians, we can’t set any bounds to the circle of care, and that means we have no grounds for favoring our current fellow-citizens over immigrants who would like to come here.

Bob at I Am a Christian Too is particularly lucid on this point:

So what does our Christian faith have to say on the subject? I can’t see any biblical or theological basis for us to do anything but welcome immigrants, legal or illegal, with open arms. Jesus commands us to care for the least of these, and to love our neighbors whether Anglo, Latino or Samaritan. The Minutemen may think that they are patriots, but they certainly aren’t acting out of a Christian faith.

Some are against liberalizing immigration on economic grounds, arguing that illegal immigration results in huge social services costs. First, the economic research on this issue shows that immigration is a financial wash. But secondly, as Christians, are we going to withhold social services based on nationality or ethnicity? Does an American citizen’s life count for more in the eyes of God than an immigrant’s? Are we arguing that the wealthiest nation on the face of the planet can’t afford, or won’t afford, to educate and provide health care to families working inside its borders?

On the one hand, it seems undeniably true that an American citizen’s life does not “count for more in the eyes of God than an immigrant’s.” But there is a complication here: we’re not God. Each of us, finite creatures that we are, has only a limited amount of care to offer to others. We have to decide who we will devote ourselves to. And most of us, most of the time, think that we’re justified in expending our resources on people with whom we have particular relationships such as our family, our friends, the people in our immediate community, and our fellow citizens. We may imagine our obligations existing in a series of concentric circles with our immediate family and friends in the smallest circle, our acquaintances and neighbors in the next, and so on, with the intensity of our obligations diminishing as we proceed outward.

One may even see this arrangement as providential. Given that we can’t care for everyone, the world is arranged such that we best serve the common good by caring for those close to us.

Augustine put it this way:

[A]ll men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you. For, suppose that you had a great deal of some commodity, and felt bound to give it away to somebody who had none, and that it could not be given to more than one person; if two persons presented themselves, neither of whom had either from need or relationship a greater claim upon you than the other, you could do nothing fairer than choose by lot to which you would give what could not be given to both. Just so among men: since you cannot consult for the good of them all, you must take the matter as decided for you by a sort of lot, according as each man happens for the time being to be more closely connected with you. (On Christian Doctrine, Bk. I, Chap. 28)

Possibly, though, one may argue that, while my family and friends may have a greater claim on me than strangers, my fellow citizens have no special claim on me compared to the claims of foreigners. But this would seem to imply something far more radical than simply a generous immigration policy. Not only would it seem to require completely open borders, it would also seem to imply that America’s obligation to provide for the health, welfare, and security of everyone in the whole world was just as great as providing for those within her borders. After all, if citizenship isn’t a morally significant category, why should mere geographic proximity be? Rather than seeking to provide more for the relatively wealthy people in the U.S., shouldn’t Americans immediately divert all their available resources to, say, Africa? How can we justify witholding resources from those whose need is so much greater? Heck, illegal immigrants in the U.S. are arguably far better off than someone living in the Congo, so it seems that we’d be amply justified in ignoring the former and focusing on the latter.

This strikes me as a particularly acute dilemma for American liberals/progressives who typically want to increase levels of social spending here in the U.S. How can we possibly justify doing so when there are people whose need elsewhere in the world is so much more serious? But if you allow that it’s permissible for American welfare policies to favor people based on a morally arbitrary criterion (citizenship or residence), why is it impermissible for immigration policy to do the same? The alternative would be to concede that citizenship (or geographic proximity) isn’t a morally arbitrary fact after all, but that would also allow immigration policy to discriminate in favor of people who already live here or are already citizens. (One could make a similar argument about defense policy: why should the U.S. government “arbitrarily” protect only the lives of Americans? Isn’t an Iraqi or North Korean life worth just as much as an American life?)

Of course, even if it’s true that we have obligations to our fellow-citizens that we don’t have to foreigners, it’s not the case that we don’t have any obligations to the latter. There are certain obligations we have to everyone simply in virtue of the fact that they are fellow human beings. At a minimum, this means that we shouldn’t commit injustice against them. This provides a kind of check, if you will, on whatever obligations of special beneficence we may have to our kith and kin. It’s not okay for me to do something to benefit someone with whom I have a special relationship if it requires me to unjustly harm a stranger. And it’s possible that preventing someone from entering a country counts as harming them (though I’m far from certain about this), at least if it’s not required to forestall some greater harm like a crime of some sort.

Now some might argue that Christian ethics requires us to go beyone what is minimally required in terms of strict justice. We’re called to “go the second mile” and seek the good of the other, even the stranger or the enemy, and even at considerable cost to ourselves. And that seems right, but the question is whether this can be formulated in terms of general principles and applied to a question of national policy like immigration. Given the limitations of our knowledge and natural human sympathy, a government may well do better, as a matter of general policy, to give preference to its citizens while avoiding injustice to non-citizens than to attempt to legislate Christian charity.

In fact, such policies may well end up doing more harm than good. Suppose that the U.S. declared a policy of unconditional open borders along with welfare provision for every immigrant. Wouldn’t this act as a disincentive for foreign governments to adopt policies that would improve the lot of their worst-off citizens since they could “export” them to the U.S. (not to mention that such a policy would quickly bankrupt the country)? Some limits are inevitable, so we’re back to thinking about what basis on which to draw those limits. Of course, given our immense wealth as a nation it’s not implausible to argue that our capacity for helping strangers is tremendous, but it nevertheless isn’t unlimited. One still has to discriminate on some basis.

This isn’t an argument for any particular immigration policy, mind you. I’m simply saying that the nature of our existence as finite, embodied beings means that, unavoidably, we will show partiality to someone. Trying to love everyone equally, we would end up loving no one in particular. Better, I think, to seek the well-being of those we can and whose needs we’re in the best position to be intelligently informed about, and to avoid injustice in our dealings with everyone else. But it’s also important to keep in mind the ever-present call to move beyond our current circle of concern to consider the needs of those who we’ve previously ignored. While there are limits to the good we can do for others, it would be surprising if those limits coincided with what happen to be our current concerns.