When it comes to guns, conservatives argue, the crimes of a few should not be used as a pretext to violate the rights of the many. Rights come from God or nature, they say, not the government, and often properly are reflected in the Bill of Rights.

When it comes to immigration, though, many of the same conservatives presume that the right to move here derives solely from permission of the federal government, which may grant or revoke that permission at will, and that people lacking that permission may be forcibly rounded up and even incarcerated without trial in torturous conditions for life.

I guess nobody ever promised that politics would be about logical consistency, intellectual integrity, or basic human decency.

Colorado gang invasion

But conservatives are right about important aspects of the immigration debate. Government has a responsibility to keep people safe from dangerous people, including foreign gang members. That immigrants, both legal and illegal, have lower crime rates than native-born citizens does not excuse the government from expelling or prosecuting those immigrants who commit violent crimes.

The threat to Aurora of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua was real, however much Donald Trump may have exaggerated it. We all saw the video last year of heavily armed gangsters going door to door at an apartment complex. NBC provides background of how the gang arose in the aftermath of the socialist destruction of Venezuela; spread internationally; and got into sex trafficking, drug dealing and “low-level arms dealing in Denver”; and a “protection” racket in Aurora.

Conservatives also are right to worry about large numbers of immigrants overwhelming local resources and about bad actors who slip through inadequate checks. NBC reviews, “Beginning in 2023, close to 50,000 Venezuelans settled in metro Denver, including Aurora, in roughly the span of 18 months.” It’s unclear to me what fraction of those people entered or stayed with government permission. The AP reported in 2023, “The Biden administration says it’s granting temporary legal status to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who are already in the country.”

A conservative case for immigration

What would a conservative position on immigration look like that took seriously the conservative commitment to individual rights? The key conservative political stance, as I see it (at least in the American context), is that rights are natural or derive from “Nature’s God.” (I’m an atheist but I agree that rights are rooted in our nature.) So how can conservatives claim, say, that the right to own a gun derives from a natural right to self-defense, but that there is no right to migrate other than what government proclaims? That is a fundamentally contradictory stance.

The University of Colorado’s Michael Huemer, arguably the world’s leading libertarian philosopher, argues forcefully that people do have (what I would call) a natural right to migrate, at least in some contexts. Huemer argues that generally it’s wrong to forcibly prevent a person from peaceably improving his lot, and that goes for people who wish to move to do so.

Huemer does not argue for an absolute right to migrate. For example, “the state may deny entry to international terrorists or fugitives from the law,” he writes. Similarly, people do not have an absolute right to own a gun. Government properly may restrict gun ownership by children and by people who threaten others. Huemer concedes that government should move slowly in opening up immigration to see if “we start to observe serious harmful consequences.”

The more-conservative angle that I would add to Huemer’s position is that government properly limits immigration based on government’s capacity to vet would-be immigrants and to police growing neighborhoods. But government should seek to capably do this job, not artificially limit its capacity as an excuse to limit immigration.

What about schools, hospitals, housing, and social welfare programs? Government should free up the market, especially in housing, so that property owners and developers can better-respond to market demand. In terms of subsidy programs, government need not offer these to immigrants, or, if it does, it should ensure those taking advantage of them also pay the usual taxes to help support them.

Conservatives are right to argue that all immigration should take place in a legal context. However, as the Cato Institute points out, at this point “legal immigration is nearly impossible.” If you claim to want legal immigration, then advocate sensible rules enabling it.

The debate over sanctuaries

As CPR reports, Trump’s “U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit . . . against Denver and Colorado officials, alleging in federal court that they had passed ‘sanctuary laws’ that violate the U.S. Constitution.”

We can again evaluate the coherency of the conservative position by testing it against guns. If Colorado and various cities passed “sanctuary laws” limiting the involvement of local law enforcement in enforcing harsh federal disarmament laws, would Colorado conservatives condemn or praise those local laws? We all know the answer.

Bill Masters, Colorado’s longest-serving sheriff from San Miguel County, points out in a Facebook post that the Trump administration is by executive order actively encouraging local law enforcement to partner with federal agencies for immigration enforcement (see also a Fox31 story). In other contexts, conservatives would scream about the threat to local autonomy. (Disclosure: I helped edit Masters’s two books critical of the drug war.)

Masters said, “I strongly support the investigation of and arrest of all persons, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status, who commit serious crimes. Over the past 50 years, I have arrested dozens of undocumented persons and at times their human smugglers, sometimes by the van load. . . .

“This executive order is an attempt to federalize, by intimidation, the San Miguel County Sheriff’s Office to do the current administration’s bidding on their political cause of the day. . . . As concerned as I am regarding federalization of local peacekeepers for immigration enforcement, I also see this current attempt as opening the door for future administrations to consider requiring local Sheriffs to enforce federal laws to arrest firearm owners, political opponents, protestors, etc.”

A fight for due process

CPR reports, “A Colorado federal judge has barred the federal government from deporting a group of roughly 100 Venezuelans detained in Colorado under the Alien Enemies Act until they either complete their cases in immigration court or higher courts weigh in.” The Colorado ACLU also comments on the case and links to relevant court documents. Of relevance is the fact that the federal government has shipped numerous people to be indefinitely incarcerated in a torturous El Salvador prison.

You may have heard the conservative canard, “They didn’t pursue due process coming in so why should they get due process going out?”

Part of the answer is that, without due process, the federal government doesn’t know where the individuals in question came from or if they are here legally or not.

The conservatives who cheer process-free deportations also ignore the difference between the federal government shipping someone back to the person’s country of origin and arranging with a foreign government the indefinite imprisonment of those deported. Obviously, the standards for due process are higher for permanently locking someone in a cage, and those standards absolutely bar subjecting people to torturous conditions.

Those conservatives who proclaim to be constitutionalists may wish to review the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees that “no person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”; the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees to people accused of crimes “the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury”; and the Eighth Amendment, which forbids “cruel and unusual punishments.”

Either rights come from our nature (or Nature’s God), or rights come from government and may be rescinded by government at will. Those conservatives who pretend that immigrants have no rights may discover the hard way that a threat to anyone’s rights is a threat to all of our rights.

Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.