With regard to immigration, I’ve heard people comparing the government barring immigrants/refugees into the country with a homeowner locking his door or building a fence around his property.
I think this analogy resonates with a lot of people. It has a certain surface level plausibility. If you belong to the middle class, you probably do have the resources to let a homeless person sleep on your couch and you probably are opting not to do so.
But if the United States of America were a person, it wouldn’t be a middle class family. It would be a trillionaire with vast swathes of vacant land and millions of unoccupied houses! I judge a stingy trillionare a lot more harshly than I do a middle class person struggling to pay his mortgage.
Also, even if a landlord would be happy to rent to an unauthorized immigrant and an employer is happy to employ him, the unauthorized immigrant can still be removed from the country.
It would be a better analogy if the homeowner also gave permission to a lot of white people to come to his house, and then never said anything once the visitors decided to never leave.
Yes, this is where the analogy breaks down. It’s not a single homeowner “locking his door or building a fence around his property”, he’s also insisting that all his neighbors build fences and lock their doors, and then never unlock them, even if the neighbors like the people knocking on the door, and would like to invite them in to enjoy the party.
Oh, and the homeowner’s spouse also wants to let the visitors in, but the homeowner has rigged the vote so their spouse doesn’t get a say in it.
Perhaps we could compare it to a gated community with a Home Owner’s Association that is run by people who have different priorities than the average resident.
Well, the folks who want to close the borders won the last US presidential election with less than 50% of the vote. So the borders are being closed, even though most of the people in the country voted in favor of more openness.
It’s just as dumb as the “national debt is the same as personal debt” analogy - which the Republicans used to use before they blew up the national debt.
Not to mention for it to work there would have to be people being admitted to sleep in the basement and spare rooms already.
The analogy might be wrong for several reasons, but one reason is that private property is not something you can find an analogy to. A country is not like private property because a country isn’t private property. And it being not private property is obviously essential to this particular discussion.
Plus, a householder does not owe any legal duties akin to due process or civil rights to another citizen. A household can turn away anyone for racial reasons, ethnic reasons, etc. And if someone comes into the house without their consent, the householder doesn’t owe any duties of due process to that individual.
Agreed that the analogy fails due to the country not being private property.
In ay event, whenever someone starts going on about immigrants invading one’s house, I generally say, “Oh, the whole country is your house? Great, Thursday it’s your turn to do the vacuuming.”
A better analogy to a nation-state would be a state-level state.
And, in fact, state-level states manage to let anyone from a different state come in, get a job, buy or rent a house and live there with out any sort of border bureaucracy getting in their way. There seems no a-priori reason why the borders of nation-states could not in principle work the same way.
Now you can argue ‘well, that wouldn’t work because people from other countries are more different from this nation’s citizens than people from one state are from another’. And while it’s certainly true that inter-country differences ARE bigger than intra-country ones, that’s actually a totally different argument from ‘these people from Different Place shouldn’t come to This Place because we own This Place and they don’t’. The sense in which Americans ‘own’ the USA and Iranians don’t is exactly the same as the sense in which Texans ‘own’ Texas and Alaskans don’t.