Safety Without a Police State

We Can Have Security While Protecting the Blessings of Liberty

I hope you’ve stayed with me these past few columns, as I’ve laid out a three-part agenda for fighting the fires of social, economic, and climate change raging toward us. When we free ourselves from dysfunctional politics, this is the agenda I hope we will pursue. I’m going to repeat the three parts of the agenda one more time: We need responsive governance from a working constitutional democracy. We need a path to securing the general welfare by shifting power back to ordinary people. And we need strategies for domestic tranquility and the common defense that safeguard the blessings of liberty.

It’s time to turn to domestic tranquility and the common defense. Their shared purpose is safeguarding the blessings of liberty. Just as we want to win the AI competition with China without ceasing to be a free society, so too we want to secure the border and keep our streets safe without becoming a police state. As we defend ourselves, we also have to protect personal liberties, including due process and freedom of speech.

Safety is the outcome of strong, fair institutions, not just force. Safety requires economic stability, educational opportunity and civic trust. It requires health systems that support positive mental health. And it requires social cohesion. All the democracy renovation work we do, and all the energy we put into securing the general welfare, also promote safety and domestic tranquility. In this way, consistent efforts to create strong, fair institutions are the backdrop for our work on border security, immigration, and policing.

But there are three more targeted steps we can take.

Step 1: Re-engage the world as principled partners, not pay-to-play bullies.

Some of the challenges we face really are global in scale, and they demand a multilateral approach, not 194 separate strongman deals. We need to re-engage the world as partners with the goal of achieving new global conventions around migration, climate, and AI’s existential risks. An astonishing 123 million people were forcibly displaced around the globe in 2024, and flames of disruption are picking up speed. No country can address the impacts of this kind of human need unilaterally or with boss politics.

Step 2: Control the border without creating a police state.

We should want those who enter this country seeking a new life to do so lawfully. That way, from their earliest participation in our shared national life, they will be supporting and reinforcing our rule-of-law system. So we need effective border control to provide the American people with confidence in who is entering. Comfort with how entry works is a necessary part of reviving a culture of respect for the drive and ambition of those who seek a new life in America.

The overriding goal should be to reduce irregular crossings as far as possible while protecting the basic framework of liberal-democratic norms and rights. We can hold irregular crossings to a bare minimum by tying together real legal pathways into a more streamlined process (such as carrying out most employment, family and asylum entry work in-region) so that people “choose the door, not the wall.”

At the same time, we should target action at ports of entry on smugglers, not broad, indiscriminate sweeps, and enforce credible employer penalties (with due process) to reduce the attraction of illegal entry.

But this approach to limiting illegal entry does depend on a positive embrace of regular entry. Controlling the border without creating a police state also requires recovering our understanding of how immigration helps our economy, culture, and society. Our self-definition as a free society ultimately requires that we find ways to incorporate freedom-lovers from around the world; completely holding them at bay could be achieved only at the cost of losing our free society. Recognizing that our ideals are attractive to all humanity — and respecting that power of attraction — is fundamental to a free society.

Step 3: Provide modernized earned legalization for long-settled immigrants.

The U.S. now has roughly 14 million unauthorized residents. This means our economy has become dependent on the labor of people who are not fully protected in their rights. That’s a corrosive reality that needs to be addressed.

In the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln set as a policy north star the idea that America should be a society based on free labor. By this he did not mean that people shouldn’t get paid, of course. Rather, he meant that our economy should rest on the labor of people who are free because they are fully protected in their rights.

We currently suffer a pervasive problem of wage theft precisely because so much of the workforce does not enjoy the full protection of their rights. In other words, we have permitted the erosion of a free-labor economy.

Earned legalization for long-term residents who are embedded in families and workplaces can stabilize labor markets and communities as well as bringing wage and tax gains. To avoid the mistakes of the 1986 amnesty, this path to legalization would not be blanket, but instead would hinge on background checks; fines and taxes; and English language and civics requirements. Importantly, it should also include a probationary period.

The solution to the challenge of migrant labor that undermines the quality of American jobs is not to attempt to rid the country of migrants but to extend the protections of citizenship to those who have earned it through pro-social behavior over time.

Because Lincoln was right: We should be a society whose economy rests on free labor. Only one path is now available to us to achieve that — earned citizenship for those who have been working hard for their families, communities, and this country over many years.

Now, please note: This agenda comes straight from the Constitution. Remember how our ancestors defined the job of fighting their wildfire? They wrote in the preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

This preamble gives us our mission, too.

In a sense, we should never be at a loss for what the nation’s agenda should be. (Are you listening, Democrats?) It is always precisely this list of things. The main question debated in our elections is how we will secure justice, domestic tranquility, the common defense, the general welfare, and the blessings of liberty.

In these columns I’ve offered a vision for that. We can hit the mark by renovating our democracy, rebalancing power in our economy and society, and pursuing safety as the outcome of strong, fair institutions that recognize the power and blessings of our liberties.

But to return to where I started, the very first thing we have to do is to free the bear from the trap. We need to free our politics from our dysfunctional party system so that our legislators can work for us again and get busy fighting the wildfire. Together, let’s get on with it.

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Danielle’s “America as a Bear in a Trap” series offers real solutions to America’s core problems. If you missed a piece, check out the full series here!

Or, start from the first post!