The Volokh Conspiracy

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Crime

Podcast on the use of eminent domain to take private property for Trump's great wall

|The Volokh Conspiracy |


Eminent Domain. Art work by Richard Weinstein (used with permission).
Eminent Domain. Art work by Richard Weinstein (used with permission).

I recently did a short podcast for the Cato Institute on the dangers of using eminent domain to seize the large amounts of private property that would be needed to build Donald Trump's proposed wall across the Mexican border. The audio is available here.

I wrote about eminent domain and Trump's wall in greater detail here and here. Check out also insightful discussions of the issue by legal scholar Gerald Dickinson, political scientist Logan Strother, and Randal John Meyer of Cato.

At the very least, this is a notable example of how immigration restrictions harm native-born Americans, as well as would-be immigrants.

Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University, and author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom and Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter.