I know we changed venues over here so that we could discuss freedom and borders as they relate to undocumented immigration and detentions/deportations. I wondered after reading this wonderful meditation on freedom what it had to offer our differences on this issue (if in fact we have any, which I think we do).

I began to think about ways in which this principle of individuation might come into conflict in the travels of sojourners seeking economic flexibility through their response to a global labor demand. I think what most challenges the receiving community of migrants when they enter without papers is the idea that their collective property and economic rights, embodied in borders, are being violated. They seek punishment, with calls for the undocumented to just stand in line.

But while these individuals seeking their fortunes across space is a phenomena that has also spanned many generations (perhaps all of human history), the violation of a nation-state’s territory is rather new. As an individual manifests their freedom in coming here, their movement becomes criminalized because it is thought to impinge on other’s rights to realize their freedom homeside. While empirically this negative has been shown to only effect a small number of the domestic population (see Borjas), I can understand that it is a real and present danger.

Given this, I suppose we should be asking ourselves what limits on freedom of movement their should be, and to whose benefit? Perhaps this is the direction in which the post was going, and philosophically it may be an achievable negotiation. However accommodating the political slant, illegal immigration, detention and deportation of “normal” people is a hard nut to crack. Categories of citizenship, economic benefits, and cultural cross-dressing all come into play.

But strictly speaking of individual freedoms existing a priori of governments and other granting bodies, I would say that people should be allowed to move as they see fit. Ensuing border violations and draconian punishment neither fits the crime nor deters its repetition.

What I found most challenging about it was the correct assesment I think that freedom can’t stop only at the “freedom from” level. It must go farther, all the way to “freedom for.” In fact, all the way to freedom for virtuous excellence.

I also was intrigued by the left-wing political reference. In my fellow-traveler status in the student movement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison long ago and far away, I always wondered during that hectic frenzy to misspend my youth about what economic system might accomodate individual choice most effectively and most judiciously. The economist F. A. Hyack discussed the “information problem,” the idea that the state would never be able to accumulate all the necessary information and have it all at the right moment in order to make optimal production and distribution decisions. So, if this claim has some merit, it would seem that de-centralized markets would be most conducive to making room for individual freedom, albeit of both “freedom from” as well as “freedom for” versions of personal liberty.

This economic claim has some support I think too from the Catholic social doctrine principles of subsidiarity and human dignity. His Holiness Pope Benedict spoke in Charity in Truth just recently of the importance of avoiding the “all-encompassing welfare state.” It seems then that Adam Smith, and before him the good Jesuits at the University of Salamanca who endorsed a version of the ‘invisible hand’ (with The Guiding Hand along!) of de-centralized markets as a vehicle for human freedom in the material realm, not government administration. But we can mull that over perhaps too in another exchange.
 
I conclude with a question. What is “freedom’s sake?” in Galatians 5:1 in which St. Paul tells us that Christ freed us for freedom’s sake?