Why is there no right to live where you please?

Shouldn't this be a right as fundamental as those Americans hold dear?

Migrants.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino)

The progression of a caravan of mostly Honduran migrants, now reportedly 7,000 strong, toward our southern border has inflamed America's perpetual immigration debate. Restrictionists quiver and fume about "invasion" and "assault," and we revisit well-worn controversies over amnesty and jobs, DACA and visas, crime and family separations and whether you should say "undocumented" or "illegal."

But there is a more fundamental question which, so far as I can tell, generally goes unexamined in our immigration conversations: Why is there no right to live where you please?

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.