Prize in Ethics 2017: Second Place

In November LRN hosted the 2017 winners of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Prize in Ethics, an annual competition that challenges college students to submit essays on the urgent and complex ethical issues that confront us in the modern world. I joined the winners for lunch in the midst of a workshop we host at LRN each year on ethics and the teachings of Elie Wiesel and was inspired when I asked each winner to describe what moral authority means to them. They spoke of leaders using their power for selfless ends, acknowledging our place in interdependent systems, the need for openness, vulnerability and self-reflection as keys to building trust, and so much more. Over the next few weeks, I will share the winning essays and a bit about each student to offer further proof of why I am optimistic about the future.

Ana Dougherty graduated with the highest distinction from UNC Chapel Hill in May of 2017 with a degree in Global Studies and Economics. She is currently in Nicaragua working as a Princeton Latin America Fellow with the nonprofit impact investor ‘Global Partnerships’ and plans to go on to graduate school to pursue international law and human rights. She is passionate about criminal justice reform and singing acapella. 

Ethical Obligations to the “Unwanted”

By Ana Dougherty

“The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists…” -Donald J. Trump during his presidential campaign (June 2015)

Introduction

Last summer, I worked for the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. As a Spanish-speaking Intern Investigator, I spent my days taking crime scene photos and interviewing witnesses in the Latin American immigrant communities of D.C., helping to prepare clients for court, and translating for attorney-client meetings at the D.C. jail. I was working at the intersection of two areas that have long confused and fascinated me: criminal justice and immigration. In fact, I was working with undocumented immigrants facing felony charges: the very people emphasized and caricatured in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign throughout 2016 to justify his stance on both tighter law enforcement and immigration policies.

It is not difficult to understand the strategy of demonizing undocumented immigrants who have been charged with committing crimes; this has broad emotional appeal and taps into the fear that grips many. In my internship, I was working with those labeled as “criminals,” and with those said to have no legitimate claim to staying in this country. More importantly, I was working with some of the most vulnerable members of our society in their greatest moments of need. Their attorneys worked zealously on their behalf, motivated by a fierce desire to tip the scales toward justice in an adversarial system. Everyone at the Public Defender Service shared an understanding that our clients were not necessarily the unscrupulous threats to our society that dominant political rhetoric would lead us to believe; these were people deserving of compassion. 2 As I came to know some of our clients, I found myself fixated on the question of how this country justifies its treatment of undocumented immigrants and those charged with crimes. These are members of our society who share in our daily lives, and who we choose to cast off and forcibly remove from our midst. When an undocumented immigrant is sentenced to at least 12 months in prison, regardless of the nature of the criminal charges, he/she becomes a priority for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and must face deportation after serving the sentence. Thus, the severity of punishment for crime is dramatically higher for undocumented immigrants. We might think of undocumented immigrants as the “unwanted” members of our society, and of undocumented immigrants charged with crimes as the pariahs within this group. The following is my attempt to explore the possible ethical justifications for treating those in the broader category of the “unwanted” differently than we would hope to be treated ourselves as members of a so-called liberal democracy. I find that a restrictive immigration policy is not ethically compatible with liberal democratic ideals.

Ethical Obligations to the “Unwanted”

What, if any, are the ethical obligations of liberal democracies to the “unwanted”? This question is critically important to immigration debates because our normative judgments about immigration policy are necessarily grounded in ethics. Four main questions will guide the discussion in this paper. First, what are the generally accepted ethical principles of liberal democracies? Second, what are the prevailing arguments about the ethical obligations of liberal democracies to the “unwanted”? Third, in what ways do these arguments align or conflict with the generally accepted ethical principles of liberal democracies? Finally, what does this tell us 3 about the ethical obligations of liberal democracies to the “unwanted,” and what are the practical implications?

Before I begin answering these questions, I need to define the “unwanted” as all those who wish to gain legal status in a liberal democracy and who are denied this opportunity. As such, there may be many “unwanted” members of our communities who are actually wholeheartedly accepted and wanted by many, such as by neighbors and employers, but who are apparently “unwanted” by the state, which denies them legal recognition and the privileges it affords. Note that I use quotation marks around the word unwanted to emphasize the complexity of this designation. In fact, many members of this group may actually be needed by the state for economic reasons (for example, the U.S. increasingly depends on low-skilled Mexican migrants as laborers in fields such as agriculture and construction), despite its unwillingness to grant them legal status. The controversy around the ethical obligations of liberal democracies to the “unwanted” stems from the fact that some people believe that liberal democracies have a very limited ethical obligation to the “unwanted,” and they seem to afford special moral consideration to legal residents and to citizens of their states that they do not afford to the “unwanted.” Others argue that liberal democracies have very demanding ethical obligations to those who wish to enter their territory (or to those who have already entered), whether these people are wanted, needed, or neither.

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