Even In a Liberal Democracy, Some People Need to Be Deported

Due process lacks legitimacy when losing never has consequences

Is it morally justifiable to deport people from a liberal democracy? If you hesitated just now even for a moment, or if your answer was anything short of a resounding yes, this essay is for you.

Without any need for throat-clearing, my own answer is absolutely. Moreover, it’s possible liberal democracy even requires the real possibility of deportation. My sense is that a large number of pro-immigration advocates and normie liberals, including many of my fellow migration scholars, simply carry an implicit assumption that a just immigration system is one where no one—not a single person regardless of anything—ever gets deported. What I’ll try to convince you about here is that this assumption is wrong, and I think it has become one of the obstacles to building the immigration policy most of us actually want.

This spring, I argued in The Atlantic that the old norm of opposing “only” illegal immigration, insincere as it often was, served as the political shield protecting legal immigration, and that its collapse should worry everyone who wants more of the latter. This essay takes that argument one step further, to the part hardly anyone on my side wants to defend, and argues for a narrow but essential proposition: in a liberal democracy, some people who lack a legal right to remain need to be removed, including by force, and to third countries, when nothing else works.

That sentence sounds harsher than it is because immigration debates have trained us to hear “deportation” as either unnecessary cruelty or restrictionist toughness. But the better way to think about deportation is to consider it, just like incarceration or even capital punishment, as one of the legitimate policy instruments our democratic governments have to enforce its laws and to maintain order. If our asylum procedures are meaningful, some claims will fail. And, if court review matters, some appeals will be exhausted. In the end, if we want to ask citizens to trust a generous immigration system, their government must be able to carry out the system’s own decisions.

I am not going to propose a detailed enforcement framework here, and the essay is deliberately agnostic about how many people should be removed and how. My goal here is simply to establish a baseline that everyone can stand on, so that we can have a productive conversation about enforcement design instead of the current bickering between “deport them all” and “deportations are illegitimate.”

The best case against deportation

Since I’m trying to provide the liberal case in favor of deportations here, I should steelman the opposite view first. Don’t get me wrong—deportations are pretty bad, to say the least.

When government agents deport migrants, they commit coercive state violence against people who are, in the vast majority of cases, guilty of nothing beyond wanting a better life. Deporting people costs serious money that could be spent on almost anything more constructive.¹ It inflicts direct, lasting harm on the deported, their employers, friends, and families, including many citizens. It can violate international law when it deports people to persecution, while migration adjudication decisions are made under genuine uncertainty, with trauma, bad translation, missing documents, and uneven access to lawyers, all raising the odds of error. On top of all that, sometimes there is no functioning state to deport anyone to, or no willing state to accept anyone. In the end, deportation is clearly among the most severe things a modern liberal democratic state can do to a person outside its criminal law.

Some scholars and advocates take these premises to a radical conclusion, so what follows is no strawman. In the UCLA Law Review, legal scholar Angélica Cházaro argues that deportation is an indefensible act of violence whose abolition should be the horizon of pro-immigrant advocacy. Others scholars have mapped out what lawyering toward that horizon looks like.

I have no doubts this position is coherent and sincerely held. It’s also likely more influential than its explicit adherents suggest: for every scholar who writes “abolish deportation,” there are many more advocates and academics who would never sign the slogan but treat every actual removal as morally suspect. And a still probably larger group, including many of my more moderate and libertarian colleagues, simply keeps deportation out of sight and out of mind. For them, the topic feels vaguely discrediting, so their papers and policy proposals mostly route around it. I should admit I have been guilty of this myself. My own book barely discusses the need for deportations and enforcement at all, even though everything it argues about trust and order plainly depends on them. Writing this essay is my attempt to correct that.

I saw this worldview on display at the Council for European Studies conference in Dublin this June (a rare big conference which I actually enjoyed), where panels on migration kept running in two different directions, with some very heated disputes. Part of the room insisted that liberal democracies cannot survive without clear membership and public order, while many other researchers and advocates talked about removal as something morally contaminated, something decent states just do not do anymore. What struck me most was how rarely that second camp would say what should actually happen when a person’s asylum claim has failed. The question usually just hung there until the panel moved on to the next hard case.

The structure of this evasion is familiar from another debate. Prison abolitionists have built a serious intellectual movement on the observation that prisons are brutal, expensive, and unequally applied. Those observations are true as far as they go. But the movement has always struggled with the question of what happens to people who commit serious harm, and the most common answer is that in a just society, with poverty and desperation addressed, people would rarely commit such harm in the first place. Just last month, days before winning her New York congressional primary, democratic socialist and prison abolitionist Darializa Avila Chevalier was asked repeatedly in an interview what should happen to someone who kills another person; she never directly answered, saying she was talking about “the distance between the world we want to see and the world that we’re at.”

Many pro-immigration advocates hold the mirror-image view: in a just immigration system, with barriers low or gone, there would be few immigration laws left to break, so no one would need to be deported. Both moves relocate the hard case to a utopia where it no longer arises. Both leave the actual institution, the one operating in the world we have, without a principled account of its hardest and most defining task.

Of course, illegal immigration is literally not a murder. My friend Bryan Caplan made a version of the argument just last month: everyone who has ever driven has broken the speed limit, and “if you think it’s OK to break a law against driving 56 mph in the desert, you should think that it’s OK to break a law against mowing grass for money.” Unauthorized presence, in this telling, is a victimless regulatory violation, which makes deportation a grotesquely disproportionate punishment.

I hear Bryan and other libertarians who make this argument. But we live in a democracy, for better or worse, and that’s just not how most voters who have a say in who gets elected next think. And “victimless” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. In the United States the description is at least half right, since unauthorized workers pay federal taxes toward benefits they can never claim, but the costs of their presence land close to home: the schooling and local services their families use are funded by states and towns, a mismatch the National Academies documented in its landmark fiscal study. In Europe’s far more generous welfare states, where even people ordered to leave remain entitled to accommodation and benefits, the fiscal ledger is harder still to wave away.² Besides, the current state of the law in the United States and other developed democracies is that illegal aliens, once ordered removed, must by statute actually be deported, while speeding—which is enforced sometimes even when it’s not absolutely necessary—will normally get you nothing worse than a ticket.

Political scientists Matthew Wright, Morris Levy, and Jack Citrin have also shown that Americans evaluating illegal immigration switch from weighing individual immigrants’ characteristics to categorical moral judgments rooted in the rule of law, and Levy and Wright’s book argues that civic fairness is the dominant frame through which Americans judge the issue. Voters treat unauthorized entry as a breach of the social contract, and a movement that keeps comparing it to a traffic ticket mostly convinces them that it has no plans to enforce anything.

So even the best case against deportation still falls short of the conclusion many advocates draw from it. Yes, the high economic and moral costs of deportation are an overwhelming argument for a fair and just deportation process: full hearings, competent interpretation, access to counsel (which, by the way, taxpayers would also have to pay for), and aggressive error correction to ensure no false positives. They make a strong, if less convincing, argument for making removal as rare as possible, prioritizing the worst offenders, and subjecting decisions to review. But the best case against deportation does not support the conclusion that no one should ever be deported, just as the best case against the horrifying conditions across America’s domestic carceral systems fails to prove that no one should ever be separated from society.

My test for anyone who hesitates is this single hypothetical case. Let’s say someone applies for asylum and receives everything the process can offer: proper notice, an interpreter, a lawyer, a full hearing, and an appeal. They lose at every stage; their country of origin is safe for them and willing to take them back, no legal protection applies, and the government even offers to pay for the flight home. They still refuse to leave. If you’re saying that the liberal state cannot remove even this person, then losing an immigration case has no consequence at all,³ and all those hearings were an expensive ritual of pretend law. Even Joseph Carens, the philosopher who did more than anyone to make the ethical case for open borders, writes plainly that nothing in his argument “denies a government’s moral and legal right to prevent entry in the first place and to deport those who settle without authorization, so long as these expulsions take place at a relatively early stage of residence.”

Germany: what happens when no one is deported

Germany is worth extended attention because it is a wealthy liberal democracy with elaborate legal protections and visible enforcement failure, and because Americans, who currently associate deportation with televised raids and daily arrest quotas, tend to find its situation genuinely unbelievable when they learn about it. On my research visit there last year, I talked to politicians and activists across the spectrum, and the mainstream center-right (CDU) kept telling me the same exact surprising thing: It is nearly impossible to deport anyone from Germany. Many people whose asylum applications were rejected years ago, they complained, still live in accommodation financed by taxpayers, and the authorities cannot do much about it. I was skeptical, since complaining about weak enforcement is what right-wing politicians do everywhere. Then I checked the numbers, and they were mostly right.

To an outside observer, this may all sound like a bureaucratic joke. At the end of 2025, about 232,000 people in Germany were legally required to leave the country, and about 82 percent of them held a “Duldung,” an official certificate of toleration: the state has ordered you to leave and simultaneously certifies that it will not, for now, make you. Over the whole of 2025, Germany deported fewer than 23,000 people, while more than 34,000 planned deportations were called off or otherwise never carried out, usually because the person could not be produced on the day. More planned removals fell through than succeeded, and just as the CDU claims, many of those ordered to leave remain entitled to state-financed accommodation and benefits while they stay, sometimes at reduced levels. Note that such an arrangement is no kindness to the “tolerated” either: years of insecure status and shifting work restrictions, with no way to plan a life.

Of course, if you talk to left-wing pro-immigration activists, they would tell you a different interpretation of these exact numbers. German deportations have actually risen for five consecutive years, voluntary departures exceed forced removals, and most people with a Duldung cannot lawfully be removed right now, for reasons that range from missing travel documents and unresolved identity to family and medical circumstances. Germany also keeps converting the stock into legal residents through a recent “opportunity to stay” law for the long-settled.

But even a state that deports more every year has built a durable category holding a quarter million people at a time, suspended, often for years, between a legal decision and any genuine resolution, whether departure or secure status. Carrying out removals is “fundamentally the responsibility of the Länder,” the sixteen states, whose practices diverge so much that the government’s own Expert Council on Integration and Migration diagnosed a “manifest coherence problem”: identical cases end differently depending on which local office holds the file. The local official who must put a family on a plane absorbs the newspaper story, while the costs of never enforcing anything land on no one in particular.

This is all no longer hypothetical. After an Afghan man who was legally required to leave the country killed a two-year-old and an adult in Aschaffenburg in January 2025, Friedrich Merz built his five-point enforcement plan around this enforcement gap and pushed a nonbinding motion through the Bundestag with AfD votes, shattering a postwar taboo. Meanwhile, the removals that dominate headlines remain almost ceremonial: two heavily publicized flights of convicted offenders to Afghanistan and one man returned to Syria, around a hundred people in total, against a stock of 232,000. When mainstream government looks simultaneously cruel and ineffective, the parties that promise to be merely cruel do not stay at 20 percent forever. The AfD now polls ahead of the CDU, pushing 30 percent.

None of this paralysis is the price a liberal democracy must pay for being humane. Canada, everyone’s favorite immigration success story, closed about 23,000 removal cases in 2025, up from about 15,000 in 2023, more than four in five of them involving failed refugee claimants. Most of these people left unescorted after a final decision, with force reserved for a small minority, and the government openly funds its border agency to sustain 20,000 removals a year to protect the integrity of the asylum system. A wealthy democracy can clearly run one of the world’s most generous immigration systems and still make sure that a final no is usually followed by an actual departure.

USA: large-scale enforcement without credibility

The United States has the opposite pathology, and I watched it up close. In November 2025, I was still living in Charlotte, North Carolina, when Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino brought his agents to town for what the government called Operation Charlotte’s Web. In five days, agents made over 250 arrests, of which, according to an internal DHS document obtained by CBS News, fewer than a third involved people classified as “criminal aliens.” On the Monday after the operation began, more than 30,000 students, a fifth of the district, did not show up to Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools. Many businesses had to close for weeks. Even Republicans flinched: former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory told The Daily Beast that his party “had the upper hand on immigration, as long as they were going after the criminals and the gangs,” and was losing it “because of the apparent disjointed implementation of arrest.”⁴

Unlike Germany, America has been removing people at scale: by December 2025, the administration claimed more than 605,000 deportations in under a year, plus far larger numbers it counts as self-deportations.⁵ But I should be honest that the two countries have more in common than the cable news versions suggest. America has its own Duldung-shaped stock: roughly 1.5 million people sit on ICE’s docket with final removal orders that have never been executed, a heterogeneous pile that ranges from absconders to people the law itself currently protects, stalled by many of the same things that stall Germany, from countries that refuse to take their nationals back to missing travel documents and limited detention and flight capacity. And the process behind those orders manages to be slow and thin at the same time: the immigration court backlog stands at about 3.2 million pending cases, asylum cases take four years or more to decide, most people in those proceedings have no lawyer, and in fiscal 2025 roughly 63 percent of removal orders in newly initiated cases were issued in absentia, to people who were not in the courtroom. In the end, in both Germany and the United States, the visible lesson for citizens is pretty much the same: the immigration system’s formal decisions do not describe what actually happens.

Our American discourse has its own version of the no-deportation assumption, and it hides inside an apparently moderate position: the idea that enforcement is legitimate only against “criminals.” When Janet Murguía of the National Council of La Raza famously dubbed Barack Obama “deporter-in-chief” in 2014, his administration had just set the modern record of more than 438,000 removals in a single year. The label stuck precisely because most of those removed were not dangerous.

Today’s critics of the Trump administration lean on the same premise from the other direction, arguing the crackdown is illegitimate because agents arrest gardeners instead of gang members. Prioritizing serious offenders is correct triage, and I share the revulsion at what replaced it. But notice what the premise implies if you take it as a principle rather than a priority: that violating immigration law as such may never, even after a full process, carry the consequence the law prescribes. Every legal system runs on discretion, but a categorical bar on enforcement essentially repeals the law it claims to soften.

Obama’s own enforcement leadership understood the distinction; in his final year in office, over 90 percent of interior removals involved people with serious criminal convictions, yet the system retained the stated capacity to remove others with final orders. Losing that capacity does not produce a more humane equilibrium; it produces the German scenario, in which a quarter of a million people live suspended between a legal decision and its consequence. Many of the tolerated would surely rank limbo above deportation, even if what they actually want is secure status. But a liberal democracy is still a democracy, and its immigration rules are ultimately up to the citizens and their representatives.

Deportations do work

OK, now you may say: fine, deportations may be legitimate in principle, but they do not work, so all this cruelty buys nothing. Or to be precise, deportations do not help deter people from coming illegally.

This reasoning usually comes in two steps. Step one says that restricting legal immigration cannot work because it just displaces the same people into illegal channels. Step two says that enforcement and deportations cannot work either, because push factors decide everything. People who risk their lives to cross the border are pushed out by the conditions of their home countries, and nothing the U.S. government does will influence their decisions.

Neither step survives contact with the evidence. Hein de Haas, Mathias Czaika, and their colleagues, who have studied migration policy effects as systematically as anyone, conclude that these policies are “generally effective”: restrictions genuinely shrink the flows they target, and the documented deflection into irregular channels is only partial. In a related European study, Czaika and Mogens Hobolth found that a 10 percent increase in asylum and visa rejections raised irregular migration by only 2–4 and 4–7 percent respectively, far from one-for-one displacement. Immigration is hardly the only domain where smart people make this mistake—the fixed-quantity way of thinking goes well beyond, into debates over prohibitions of almost anything.

So, whether you like it or not, immigration policy does change who comes, how many, and through which door, and the last two years demonstrated it at scale. Border Patrol encounters at the southern border fell from over 2 million in fiscal 2023 to under 240,000 in fiscal 2025, the lowest annual level in more than 50 years, with 2025’s monthly totals among the lowest ever recorded. Economists at Brookings and AEI project that net migration turned negative in 2025 for the first time in roughly half a century, with people leaving in response to the enforcement climate possibly outnumbering the people formally removed. Yes, the decline began in January 2024 under Biden and Mexico’s stepped-up enforcement did much of the early work, but no one can look at these numbers and still claim with a straight face that enforcement has no deterrent effect on unauthorized migration.

And deterrence is only a part of the case anyway. Criminologists have long distinguished between deterring crime and simply incapacitating the person committing it, and deportation runs through the same channels. Like incarceration, it works even when it scares no one else: it ends a stay the courts have already ruled unlawful and stops the local costs I mentioned above. Even if the deterrent effect were somehow close to zero, removals would still be worth carrying out, just like any other final judgment.

People respond to credible rules, which is exactly why the rules themselves need to be worth enforcing. We absolutely should be mindful that every deterred crossing or a deportee is a person who never gets what would probably have been the largest income gain of their life, and for people fleeing persecution the loss can be safety itself. What justifies paying that price is what it buys, a system trusted enough to keep admitting people, ideally more of them, through the front door.⁶

Deportations are what democracy owes citizens

The deepest reason someone needs to be deportable in a liberal democracy is about what democratic government owes the people who authorize it. A liberal democracy is a self-governing political community: citizens bear the local costs of policy, vote governments out when policies fail, and (indirectly) make binding rules for a bounded territory, including rules about who may enter and stay. A rule that can never be enforced against anyone is an aspiration rather than a law, and voters can tell the difference. So no one in particular has to be deported on any given day, but deportation has to remain possible in principle, with the actual number settled by good process rather than by paralysis or spectacle.

In my own recent research, I argued that protection for humanitarian migrants stays politically durable only on a foundation of trust in the broader system, including its enforcement. How much removal performance itself feeds that trust is exactly the kind of question my field should be testing instead of avoiding. A government that asks citizens to accept immigration while visibly declining to enforce its own final decisions is asking for trust it has not earned, and the immigration thermostat eventually kicks in: when voters sense the system is out of control, they push policy back in the opposite direction, usually harder than anyone intended.

None of this dictates where people go, and the destination is where enforcement earns or forfeits its legitimacy: in the normal case, the country of origin or a third country under an agreement that upholds basic human rights, and never a maximum-security prison run by a third authoritarian country. The legal baseline is worth stating plainly here, because pro-immigration advocates tend to keep blurring it, and annoyingly so. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right to leave any country and the right to seek asylum from persecution; it contains no right to enter the country of your choosing, and no right against removal once a lawful process has said no. To the extent any of this is enforceable at all, international law’s hard limits, above all the ban on returning anyone to persecution or torture, govern where and how a removal may happen; they do not make removal itself illegitimate.

The obligation runs to noncitizens too, and this is where my argument departs from the restrictionist one. A liberal democracy owes every person in removal proceedings a serious hearing, competent interpretation, accurate information about their country of origin, protection from return to persecution, and treatment that never becomes degrading. The people most betrayed by a collapsed distinction between lawful removal and arbitrary force are the noncitizens with strong claims, whose cases drown in a system nobody trusts.

What follows for policy deserves its own essay, and I have already sketched the general formula in Reason: administrative capacity, the binding constraint in Germany as much as in America, that delivers faster protection for those who qualify and faster removal for clearly ineligible cases, and enforcement predictable enough that the rules feel real in everyday life for regular citizens and noncitizens alike. The goal of this all should be a deportation system that is credible, bounded, and boring.

Serious pro-immigration advocates already know much of this, whatever they think of my framing. The American Immigration Council’s blueprint for rebuilding the asylum system concedes that even with every one of its reforms implemented, people without meritorious claims “will still be deemed ineligible for relief and ordered deported.” And as Dara Lind, whose chronicling of American enforcement failures I trust more than almost anyone’s, put it at that blueprint’s launch: “The problem isn’t that too many people are seeking asylum. The problem is that the U.S. hasn’t done the work to handle those who come. That’s what creates backlash.”

Whoever governs after Trump, and whichever mainstream coalitions survive in Europe, will inherit the same choice: own enforcement and make it lawful, or keep ceding it to people who enjoy it. The backlash to this administration’s methods will tempt Democrats to define themselves by the opposite of everything ICE does, just as humanitarian pressure tempts German officials to leave every file untouched. Both instincts feel humane, and both keep producing the politics we currently have.

So my ask to my skeptical readers—assuming you all are still here—is a rather small one. What I want from pro-immigration folks is a plain concession that in a liberal democracy with any immigration rules worth having, the number of justified deportations is not zero. I don’t want you to cheer for masked agents or endorse anyone’s removal targets to grant it. But once we say that deportations are legitimate and needed out loud, we can finally argue about the questions that matter: how many, after what process, and what to do when removal would be unlawful. A liberal democracy that cannot say no will not be believed when it says yes.

Huge thanks to Mike Riggs and Jannik Reigl for their helpful suggestions on the draft.

1. ICE’s own estimate of the average cost to arrest, detain, and deport one person is about $17,000, and independent estimates that account for longer detention run several times higher. Germany’s charter deportation flights cost the government more than 30 million euros in 2023 for about 6,500 deportees, close to 5,000 euros per person for the plane alone, with police escorts, detention, and the rest of the machinery billed separately.

2. The classic libertarian reply, of course, is to keep the migrants and shrink the welfare state instead, or at least to wall benefits off from newcomers. That position is internally coherent, but almost no one who agrees with libertarians about open borders also agrees with them about shrinking the welfare state (except other libertarians), so the package deal has no political buyers.

3. Of course, the person who loses still pays: years of limbo are a real consequence for the individual. But from the immigration system’s perspective, a no that is never enforced changes nothing about who stays.

4. And Charlotte was far from the worst of it. In January, federal agents shot and killed two American citizens protesting ICE operations in Minneapolis: Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother shot in her car, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse shot while filming an arrest. The administration maintains both shootings were justified self-defense, while state officials and video evidence reportedly contradict those accounts, and the deaths set off mass protests and state-federal confrontations that would have been unimaginable a year earlier.

5. The Department of Homeland Security claimed the unauthorized population fell by 1.6 million in the administration's first six months, a figure that implies mass self-deportation, while its own internal records showed about 13,000 self-departures alongside roughly 150,000 deportations. Independent demographers think the true outflow is substantial but far below the official claim, and the data quality is bad enough that Pew's Jeffrey Passel cautions against concluding a mass exodus at all.

6. As usual, Great Britain managed to get the worst of both worlds. Theresa May’s “hostile environment,” launched in 2012 and written into law through the Immigration Acts of 2014 and 2016, produced the Windrush scandal, in which the Home Office wrongly detained and deported lawful Commonwealth-era residents, while the official review found little evidence that anyone had even measured whether the policy achieved its aims.