“My country isn’t my castle.”

Recent immigration debates bring to the surface a peculiar argument about regulating immigration: Sovereign states may prevent immigrants from entering the country, because they have a right to exclude foreigners from their territory, much like homeowners have a right to exclude strangers from their private kitchen, it is claimed. Whilst the debate in moral philosophy has offered compelling criticism of this analogy between property and state sovereignty, this paper adds a pragmatic lawyerly perspective: Not only does the analogy rest on weak premises. More importantly, it amounts to cherry-picking one aspect of property and ignoring the rest of the institution. Rather, the sliding scale of a property item’s social relevance tends to translate into increasing openness to limitations on property’s right to exclude. Thus, for something as socially relevant as state sovereignty, the property analogy tends to irrationalize debate in that it leads away from immigration regulation’s actual thorny questions of identity and collective self-determination.