Border Security

Border security is the state’s control over who and what crosses its territorial boundary. Conservatives treat it as the first test of sovereignty: a government that cannot decide who enters has delegated the decision to smugglers, to foreign governments, and to whoever is willing to make the journey. Every other function of the state — taxation, welfare, conscription, law enforcement — presupposes a defined membership, and membership presupposes a controlled edge.

The conservative position is not a claim that immigration is harmful. It is a claim about sequence and consent. Numbers, composition, and pace should be set by the citizens through their representatives, revisable at elections, rather than established by whoever arrives. Once entry becomes self-selecting, immigration policy ceases to be policy.

Key Takeaways

• Conservatives ground border control in sovereignty and democratic consent rather than in hostility to migrants.
• A controlled border is treated as the precondition for a generous legal immigration system and for public confidence in it.
• The welfare state sharpens the argument: benefits funded by compulsory contribution require a bounded set of contributors and claimants.
• Enforcement failure is held to reward organised smuggling and to penalise applicants who wait in the legal queue.
• Critics answer that borders are historically recent, economically costly, and enforced through methods that impose severe harm on people fleeing danger.

History And Context

Passports and systematic entry control are modern. Before 1914 most European states permitted movement across their frontiers with minimal documentation, and the United States operated open entry for Europeans through Ellis Island, inspecting arrivals for disease and pauperism rather than screening for numbers. Wartime security in 1914 and 1915 produced the documentary regime that survived the peace, and the League of Nations conferences of 1920 and 1926 standardised the passport booklet.

The interwar decades brought quotas. The United States adopted the Emergency Quota Act in 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924, tying admissions to national-origin proportions in earlier censuses. That system stood until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 replaced it with family reunification and employment preferences.

The postwar Refugee Convention, signed in Geneva in 1951 and extended by the 1967 Protocol, established non-refoulement: a state cannot return a person to a territory where they face persecution on protected grounds. Conservatives generally accept the principle and dispute its scope, arguing that a convention drafted for displaced Europeans is now applied to global economic migration through asylum claims that take years to adjudicate.

Enforcement infrastructure followed the volumes. The United States created the Border Patrol in 1924 and authorised extended fencing under the Secure Fence Act of 2006. The European Union established Frontex in 2004 after the Schengen Agreement removed internal frontiers and shifted the burden to the external perimeter, a shift that became acute during the 2015 arrivals through Greece and Italy. Australia adopted maritime interdiction and offshore processing from 2001, suspended the policy in 2008, reopened the Nauru and Manus Island facilities in August 2012 as arrivals rose again, and added naval turnbacks under Operation Sovereign Borders in September 2013.

The Conservative Position

The sovereignty argument comes first. A political community that cannot determine its own membership is not self-governing in any meaningful sense. Conservatives hold that this is a matter of principle rather than of magnitude — the objection to an uncontrolled frontier stands whether the annual number is ten thousand or a million, because the defect is in who is deciding.

The second argument concerns trust. Public support for legal immigration is contingent on the belief that the system is administered. Conservatives point to polling across Britain, Canada, and the United States showing that support for high legal intake falls when voters conclude that entry is unmanaged, and argue that enforcement is therefore the price of an open policy rather than its opposite.

The third is distributional. Milton Friedman put the tension in its sharpest form, observing that free immigration and a comprehensive welfare state are difficult to combine, since benefits available on residence rather than contribution alter who arrives and why.¹ Conservatives who favour large legal intakes often accept this and respond with contribution requirements and delayed eligibility rather than with restriction.

The fourth is order. Uncontrolled routes are operated by criminal networks that charge fees, hold debts against arrivals, and control the crossing. Conservatives argue that humane policy requires removing the market for these services, and that interdiction plus expanded legal channels does this while an unenforced border does not.

Roger Scruton supplied the cultural premise underlying these claims. He argued that the loyalty holding a liberal democracy together is territorial and pre-political — a shared attachment to place, law, and language that makes redistribution and mutual obligation possible among strangers — and that this loyalty is what a border defines.²

Differing Positions

Open-borders economists argue the restriction is the largest deadweight loss in the world economy. Michael Clemens estimated that removing barriers to labour mobility would produce gains measured in tens of trillions of dollars, dwarfing the estimated gains from liberalising trade in goods and capital, because the same worker produces vastly more in a high-productivity economy than in a low-productivity one.³ On this view border enforcement destroys enormous value to protect wage effects that the empirical literature finds to be small.

The humanitarian objection is that enforcement kills. The International Organization for Migration has recorded tens of thousands of deaths on migration routes since it began systematic counting in 2014, concentrated in the Mediterranean, the Sahara, and the Sonoran Desert, and attributes the pattern to the closure of safer routes rather than to the volume of movement.

A rights-based objection holds that the state’s authority over entry is not unlimited. Joseph Carens argued that birthplace functions as a modern equivalent of feudal status — an unchosen accident that determines life prospects — and that liberal states cannot coherently defend equality of opportunity domestically while enforcing it nowhere at the frontier.⁴

Conservatives answer that obligations to distant strangers are real but weaker than obligations to fellow citizens, and that a state which cannot sustain its own social settlement will not remain a place worth reaching. They also note that the countries with the most enforced borders, including Canada and Australia, run among the largest per-capita legal intakes in the developed world, which they read as evidence that control and openness reinforce each other.⁵

References

1. Milton Friedman, remarks on immigration and the welfare state, in The Collected Works of Milton Friedman, Hoover Institution; see also Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).
2. Roger Scruton, England and the Need for Nations (Civitas, 2004).
3. Michael A. Clemens, “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 25, No. 3, Summer 2011.
4. Joseph H. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford University Press, 2013).
5. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, International Migration Outlook (OECD Publishing, annual series).