Does a Nation Have a Right to Control Who Enters It? Immigration and the Common Good
Since the 2015 migration crisis, several European states have faced large and sustained inflows of people — fleeing war in Syria, instability across North Africa and the Sahel, and more recently the invasion of Ukraine — arriving in numbers and on a timescale few of their institutions were built to absorb. Governments have responded in sharply different ways: Germany’s initial “we can do this” openness under Merkel, Poland and Hungary’s far more restrictive border policies, Denmark’s unusually strict integration requirements even for those already granted asylum, France’s long-running and unresolved argument with itself over laïcité and the visibility of religious difference in public life. The debate that has followed tends to collapse into two camps — those who see border restriction as a betrayal of Europe’s moral and often explicitly Christian obligations to the stranger, and those who see unrestricted movement as a threat to the very possibility of a cohesive political community. Natural law thinking has resources for taking both concerns seriously without collapsing into either camp.
The first truth worth holding onto is that the right to migrate is real, and it does not evaporate because exercising it is inconvenient for the receiving country. It is grounded in something more basic than sentiment: the universal destination of created goods, the principle that the earth and its resources are given to the whole human race and not permanently sealed off by accident of birth. Aquinas’s treatment of property in the Summa is instructive here — private and national ownership are legitimate arrangements for the sake of good order, but always subordinate to the more fundamental fact that the goods of the earth exist for everyone. A person fleeing war or genuine deprivation has a real moral claim that does not disappear at a border, and a wealthy, stable nation cannot simply declare the claim someone else’s problem.
The second truth is that a political community has genuine authority to regulate its own membership, and this too is an exercise of justice, not merely a concession to xenophobia dressed in respectable language. A nation’s social fabric — its shared language, its civic trust, its common expectation that the law applies equally and predictably to everyone, its capacity for the kind of solidarity that makes a functioning welfare state or an effective justice system possible at all — is not incidental to the common good; in an important sense, it is the common good, or at least the substrate the common good depends on. Rapid, large-scale immigration, particularly of people arriving from backgrounds with markedly different civic and religious assumptions, can place genuine strain on that substrate: on the capacity of schools and social services to integrate newcomers, on the shared assumptions that make democratic self-government workable, on the trust between citizens that erodes when a state appears unable to enforce its own laws at its own borders. A government charged with the wellbeing of the community actually entrusted to it is not acting unjustly by taking that strain seriously and calibrating the rate and manner of admission accordingly — it would be failing its actual duty if it did not.
Where this reasoning goes wrong — and it does go wrong, often — is in sliding from a real concern about integration capacity into treating newcomers as a homogeneous threat rather than as individuals, or in using “preserving the social fabric” as cover for a hostility that has nothing to do with capacity or cohesion at all. Nearly every wave of migration in European history was, in its own moment, described by host populations in exactly the terms now used of the most recent one — as an alien culture too different to integrate, arriving too fast to absorb. Irish Catholics in nineteenth-century England, Italians and Poles in early twentieth-century France, Turkish guest workers in postwar Germany: each was met with real anxiety about custom, religion, and loyalty, and each, over a generation or two, became simply part of the national fabric being anxiously protected against the next wave. That history doesn’t prove every current concern is baseless — genuine differences in scale, integration policy, and the specific civic assumptions at stake do matter, and prudence requires looking at the actual case rather than assuming history simply repeats. But it should make anyone invoking “the social fabric” pause before assuming the current moment is uniquely dangerous rather than uniquely unfamiliar.
What natural law refuses to do is settle the specific policy question by decree — how many refugees a given country can reasonably absorb in a given year, what integration requirements are proportionate rather than punitive, how quickly asylum claims should be processed are all prudential judgments resting on facts that shift year to year and country to country. What it insists on is that the argument be conducted in the right terms: not generosity against self-interested closure, but a genuine weighing of two goods that are both real, both grounded in justice, and neither of which a government is entitled to treat as simply cancelling the other out.