It seems entirely obvious to me that Tom should not report Edward. (Furthermore, I suspect that most people, were they in Tom's shoes, would not report Edward.) We can now make a brief argument against immigration restrictions:
- If immigration restrictions are just, then Tom should report Edward.
- Tom should not report Edward.
- Therefore, immigration restrictions are not just (i.e. they are unjust).
Motivating (1): It seems clear that if restrictions on immigration are just, then laws requiring citizens to report illegal immigrants are just. After all, nobody thinks that it is unjust to have laws requiring people to report known thieves or murderers. The reason for this is obvious: the laws prohibiting these actions are just, and so it is perfectly fine to require citizens to assist in their enforcement. Since we generally have a duty to obey just laws, it follows that if immigration restrictions are just, then ordinary citizens have a moral duty to report illegal immigrants.
Premise (2) is motivated by intuitions about the aforementioned story. The conclusion (3) follows.
There isn't a legal obligation to report most crimes in most places.
ReplyDeleteAlso, "I believe that law A is just" does not imply "I should help the authorities catch people who break law A". These are very different statements.
The purpose of restrictions is to prevent something from happening. That doesn't imply some kind of logical obligation to reverse all instances where it does happen.
Many states do require their citizens to report illegal immigrants. Some examples are discussed here:
Deletehttps://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/mopp-2015-0031/html
Also, the claim isn't that you have a duty to help the authorities enforce every law. The claim is that if immigration restrictions are just, then laws requiring citizens to report illegal immigrants are just. But those laws clearly are not just, and so neither are the immigration restrictions.
Also, even if no country in the world required citizens to report illegal immigrants, the hypothetical ("IF these laws existed, THEN they would be unjust") would be enough to run my argument.
Are traffic laws unjust? Most people would say, in general, that they are not unjust, at least in principle (there might be specific laws that are unjust). Would it be unjust to require everyone to report it every time they see someone commit a traffic violation? Definitely. That doesn't imply anything at all about whether or not the traffic laws are unjust.
Delete"Laws requiring citizens to report illegal immigrants are not just, therefore immigration restrictions are not just" is just no kind of argument at all. There is hardly any logical connection between these two things.
The article you linked to doesn't, as far as I can tell (I didn't read every word), offer any support for the idea that Tom (in your story) would have an obligation to report Edward.
I think the reason we would reject laws requiring us to report traffic violations is that this would be completely unpracticable (imagine trying to gauge whether every car you see is speeding, and then frantically trying to note their license plate numbers). Also, most traffic violations are extremely minor.
DeleteNeither of these conditions apply in the immigration case: it is perfectly possible to report somebody for being an illegal immigrant, and supporters of immigration restrictions generally regard illegal immigration as a fairly serious offense (i.e. more like theft than speeding). So it seems as though my premise (1) is true: if the immigration laws are just, then it's probably OK for the government to make laws requiring Tom to report Edward. But since (2) it clearly wouldn't be OK to have such laws, it follows that (3) the immigration laws are unjust.
You think the main reason it would be wrong to require us to report traffic violations is that it would be impracticable? What about tax violations?
DeleteTo generalize your argument, you are saying that no law enforcement objective or indeed any government policy can be acceptable, unless we can also require ordinary citizens to participate actively and specifically in helping the government achieve them. So unless we can say that everyone has to be a police informant, we can't say any law enforcement activity is acceptable.