Immigration Restrictions Cause Enforcement Excesses
Recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Minnesota, marked by large-scale raids and civilian harm, are less a local controversy than a predictable product of US immigration institutions. When lawful entry is heavily restricted, enforcement becomes the policy margin. That margin is exercised by armed agents with wide discretion, weak accountability or legal recourse, and strong incentives to demonstrate “control” rather than minimize error. Minnesota is an illustration of how restriction necessarily operationalizes coercion.
Ilya Somin has long argued that immigration restrictions are best understood as limits on individual liberty, with unusually poor cost-benefit justifications. Movement across borders, just like movement within them, generates large economic gains and modest, manageable externalities. When the presumption flips, and entry requires permission rather than being the default, the state substitutes centralized coercion for decentralized choice. This manifests downstream in enforcement practices that must be visible, forceful, and discretionary to sustain the restriction itself.
This dynamic complicates debates over “better” or “smarter” enforcement. Any restriction regime requires taking a stand on how much coercion is acceptable and how much harm to civilians is an unavoidable cost rather than a failure of execution. Whether enforcement is aggressive or restrained, it operates under incentives that prioritize demonstration over precision. The result is not a binary choice between humane and inhumane enforcement but a continuum in which civilian injury costs are present to varying degrees regardless of approach.
The Minnesota raids underscore a broader point that often goes unaddressed: Immigration restriction is not merely a policy choice followed by enforcement but an enforcement regime in itself. So long as entry is treated as an exception rather than a baseline liberty, coercion becomes structural rather than accidental. In that context, tragedies like Minnesota’s are not policy failures in need of better messaging or marginal reform, they are foreseeable outcomes of a system that relies on discretionary force to sustain its underlying premise.
Cross-posted from Substack. Jai Glazer, a student at Harvard College, cowrote this piece.