Good and Bad Arguments Against Immigration Crackdowns

One of the most annoying things about online political discourse in the 2020s is that it’s become totally dominated, on all sides, by hypocrisy-baiting. Something happens in the world, and every ideological combatant’s first response is to find ways to accuse his or her enemies of inconsistency or hypocrisy for what they think about what happened. You either find some previous event that those guys actually reacted differently to, or you just help yourself to the assumption that they would have felt differently under equivalent circumstances. Either way, you focus on pointing out the inconsistency. It’s so much easier than reflecting on what you think and why you think it.

Sometimes, gesturing at the idea that some sort of irony or hypocrisy is at play when your enemies come to whatever conclusion they come to can even feel like it adds up to a positive argument for your position. That’s when things get especially dumb. I’m a very adamant death penalty abolitionist, for example, but it drives me up the wall when people I agree with about the underlying issue express their position by shaking their heads at the folly of death penalty supporters wanting to “murder murderers to show that murder is wrong.”

Like…what are the rules here? Can we punish kidnappers by putting them in prison, or is that unacceptably ironic? Is we reduced the punishment for larceny to paying a fine, would that actually be too harsh because we can’t show that stealing is wrong by stealing from thieves?

Similarly, last year when Trump was terrorizing Los Angeles with increasingly flashy and cruel ICE raids (and then by sending in the military), I saw a lot of smirking takes along the lines of “gosh, I sure hate to see Mexicans invading Los An-ha-lees.” This was a way of owning immigration restrictionists while also vaguely gesturing in the direction of what kinda sorta looked like an anti-restrictionist argument. But, if California having been stolen from Mexico actually contributed in some meaningful way to the wrongness of the raids in LA—in other words, if they were more objectionable because of that than they would have been otherwise—then it would pretty well follow that ICE raids in, say, Minneapolis are at least somewhat less objectionable. Does anyone, anywhere, actually believe that?

A popular way of generalizing from California to the rest of the country is to say that “no