Hey There, Painful Thing

You pass by a small crowd of hungry children, and decide you’d rather 455 apples go rotten than give them to some snotty brat who isn’t your problem.

It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked for your 500 apples, or that you aren’t the parent of any of those kids. in the moment you decide to walk away, it doesn’t matter why they’re hungry, or who owes who what.

You had the opportunity to help people, you had the ability to help people, you had the resources to help people. You had everything you needed to make a small, tiny little difference in someone’s life, and you decided not to.

My latest column at The Week, prompted by the migrant caravan moving through Mexico. This is a fundamental question we don’t usually ask in our immigration debates: Why would we ever accept the government telling people where they can live? An excerpt:

America’s Constitution enumerates many specific rights. Its First Amendment guarantees that the government cannot interfere with our right to worship, speak, and assemble as we want. We cannot be deprived of our lives, liberty, or property without due process. We have a right to privacy and to quick trials judged by our peers.

And those are simply the most overt protections the Bill of Rights includes. It is not a complete list. “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” the Ninth Amendment affirms. We have the right to marry whom we please, to have children and raise them as we please, to choose the line of work we please. Yes, these rights are imperfectly defended and subject to some regulation of disputable constitutionality. But often in practice and always in our collective national imagination, they are inviolate.

Why is there not among them a right to live where we please?

Surely choosing where to live is as integral to our lives as choosing where to work, for where we live enormously affects what we do and who we become. You might be a Republican if you’d grown up in South Carolina, or a Democrat were you a native Californian. If you’d moved somewhere else after college, maybe you’d have an entirely different spouse, different kids, a different dog.

It is difficult to overstate the chain of consequences that result from where we choose to locate ourselves. There is a reason, after all, we consider it so serious a punishment to confine someone to a place they do not wish to be or to ban them from the place they want: Prison and exile deprive us of the right to live where we please. For those of us who have not lost that right via due process, why is it not acknowledged and defended? Why would we ever accept the government — any government — telling us where we may or may not live?

If it would be unthinkable for the state to say you may not be a Baptist or a Muslim, or a plumber or a writer, or a husband or a mother, it should be equally unacceptable for the law to dictate whether you may live in Minnesota or Mississippi — or Mexico.