Transformers: Immigrants in Disguise?
This month’s column was inspired by a question from Hoop, who asks:
Depending on which version of the Transformers story you prefer, the Autobots either A: came here in the modern day, which means they would have to somehow be subject to U.S. immigration law, or B: crash-landed well before humans occupied the North American continent, and only awakened in the 1980s. As such, would they be granted retroactive citizenship in the same way that the residents of the former Colonies were?
There are two issues here. First, could intelligent robots be granted citizenship at all, and second, how would it play out in those two different origin stories?
In order to be a citizen one first has to be a legal person. While there has been some argument about whether intelligent non-human aliens like Kyptonians might be automatically treated as legal persons (we think they wouldn’t be), the case is even harder for intelligent robots. They’re just too different from what the Founders and past Congresses had in mind when writing the Constitution and various statutes. Hope is not lost, however. There are signs that it is within Congress’s power to grant legal personhood to non-humans, so long as it did so explicitly. Cetacean Community v. Bush, 386 F.3d 1169 (9th Cir. 2004) (discussing legal standing for cetaceans such as dolphins).
Personhood is really the crux of the matter, as the Constitution does not define the term, but the Fourteenth Amendment does provide that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Thus, if Congress defined the robots to be persons capable of naturalization, then presumably they could be made citizens.
As a nice side effect of this framework, the Autobots would not be subject to immigration laws when they first arrived because they would not yet be legal persons, so that solves that problem.
And how would the naturalization law likely be structured? Would the Autobots have to get in the queue like everyone else or could Congress simply declare them to be citizens? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it could simply declare them to be citizens. A good analogy might be Native Americans born in Alaska after it was purchased from Russia but before it became a state. 8 U.S.C. § 1404 declares that “A noncitizen Indian born in Alaska on or after March 30, 1867, and prior to June 2, 1924, is declared to be a citizen of the United States as of June 2, 1924.” Native Americans born in Alaska after that date were citizens by birth. So Congress could pass a law to the effect of “A noncitizen Transformer resident in the United States before January 1, XXXX is declared to be a citizen of the United States as of January 1, 2013.”
While Congress could probably structure the citizenship law in order to avoid giving citizenship to any Decepticons remaining in the United States, it probably couldn’t deny them legal personhood. Thus, granting rights to the Autobots probably means that the Decepticons get trials rather than simply being consigned to the scrapheap.
Giving the Decepticons trials isn’t likely to be a big problem under most circumstances.
While Congress probably can’t avoid granting them personhood, it *can* treat them as invading enemy troops. The Autobots might seek and value US citizenship, and arguably refugee status. The Decepticons, however, are military from a political entity (home territory: Cybertron, political system: dictatorship by Megatron) which is in an expressly declared state of war against… well, the rest of the universe.
Unfortunately Cybertron isn’t signatory to the Geneva conventions,so there is no basis for protesting the Decepticon habit of warfare against civilians.
For interesting fictionalized legal reasoning on the nature of legal personhood for non-human entities, see “Jerry Was a Man” by Robert Heinlein, “The Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov, “Little Fuzzy” by H. Beam Piper. That last one is available for free in the Kindle Store, and I believe that the first one is available online.
I’m not sure you couldn’t deny the Decepticon personhood. Mechanical intelligences are fundamentally different from biological ones, so there’s a justification for treating them differently under the law; I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t require mechanical intelligences to APPLY for personhood rather than granting it automatically. My toaster is pretty smart for a toaster… it knows just when to stop cooking the bread… but it is still a toaster. Requiring a Turing test for mechanical intelligences to be treated as persons rather than appliances seems prudent and reasonable…Of course, then in this specific application you’d have the question of whether the Autobots are suppressing the Decepticons’ civil rights by attacking them as soon as they showed up to attempt to claim rights as “persons”. Without a checkpoint along the lines of a Turing test, you get to resolve this question: Is a mechanical intelligence a “person” when it rolls off the assembly line, when it boots up for the first time, when its software is installed? Granted, human infants ALSO cannot pass a Turing test when first activated… they do not receive full benefits of personhood until they reach majority.
I should have been more clear. My point was that once there is some sort of test, then if a Decepticon could pass the test, then the government could not exclude it from personhood just by dint of it being a Decepticon. Basically I’m saying that once the door is open to robot personhood then the various kinds of robots would likely have the benefit of Equal Protection.
I criss-crossed between two different arguments there (one, the fact that a dejure requirement couldn’t be overcome by defacto suppression, two, that the rules that apply to biological intelligences would necessarily be applied to mechanical ones.)
I’m not so sure you can’t have a qualitative difference in the way “personhood” works for human-type people and for other intelligent entities that are people. For comparison, consider the paths to citizenship: birthright and naturalization. People with birthright citizenship are citizens by right, while naturalized citizens have to petition… and not all petitions are granted.
Perhaps the requirement to be a “mechanical person” includes passing a Turing test AND being of “good moral character”… congratulations, Commander Data, sorry, Skynet. Under that type of regime, sorry, Decepticons. You guys are just machines.
What about the fact that the Transformers aren’t just sentient machines, they are also alien sentient machines, that, depending on which continuity you follow, either a) naturally evolved from non-sentient machines (that were either built by evil alien merchant/pirates, or developed naturally after contact with the All-Spark) or b) were created by the physical god Primus, in His image to battle Unicron, the physical Devil that eats planets. They were not built by humans; even in the continuity where the Quintessons built them, the Quints considered them slaves not machines. In many continuities the Transformers have physical “souls”, aka Sparks, they have religions and political movements, and as far as the Decepticons are considered, humans are about as sophisticated as a rat. You don’t ask the vermin in the house you move into for permission, you call an exterminator. While there have been several occaissions where Decepticons have worked with humans to acheive their goals, they wouldn’t want political rights granted by an inferior lifeform like a human. And because there is no real biological difference between an Autobot and a Decepticon, this really creates more of a problem for the Autobots, who seek to promote liberty, freedom, justice, tolerance and other concepts that Americans share in common. The issue isn’t convincing Congress or the courts that Transformers are sentient; the issue is convincing them that Megatron, Starscream and Soundwave should not be the yardstick by which their species is measured.
Historically who or what constitutes a “person” is a debatable matter in US jurisprudence- pace not just the fact that African slaves were considered not only “three fifths of a person” but- pace Dred Scott, were held to have no rights that whites were bound to respect- and they were flesh and blood- not robots! In Star Trek: TNG’s “The Measure Of A Man”, Commander Data had a hearing todetermine whether as an android he could be termed a person- fortunately he won!
If citizenship were automatically granted to Autobots but not Decepticons, what would happen with a Decepticon (such as Jetfire) who switched sides? Would he automatically become a citizen? And if an Autobot switched sides, would that automatically make it a non-citizen? I could see the second happening if “switching sides” were akin to renouncing citizen ship to join a foreign army, but if Decepticons are treated as a foreign army, does that mean the Autobots would be considered part of the US military, and subject to the restrictions thereof? If so, wouldn’t that make fighting the Decepticons problematic? As well as effectively forcing the Autobots into service?
If you go the route of being in America before it (or even the human race) was around, wouldn’t the same apply to the Decepticons? In that case, wouldn’t the Decepticons be the same as “normal” criminals? Even if they are like an organized army, they would be just a larger version of the Mafia or organized gang. It would be interesting for a policeman to try to arrest them… and presumably the Autobots would have to become part of a nation-wide (and also international) police force in order to fight them.
Finally, let’s suppose some other country grants Decepticons citizenship. Couldn’t they forbid the Autobots from fighting them there – in which case all the Decepticons have to do is fly back “home” and be perfectly safe from a legal standpoint? And if that country made it a crime to attack their citizens regardless of the location, would the Autobots have any recourse other than avoiding entering any country which had an extradition treaty with the one in question?
“forcing the Autobots into service” = not a problem. The draft doesn’t violate the 13th amendment, although (to me) the reasoning seems shaky.
“let’s suppose some other country grants Decepticons citizenship. Couldn’t they forbid the Autobots from fighting them there – in which case all the Decepticons have to do is fly back “home” and be perfectly safe from a legal standpoint?” = You’ll need a really, really big Predator drone, and they can whine about their rights being violated from their unmarked gravesite in the Indian Ocean.
Or the Decepticons could just bombard the planet from orbit, pull Cybertron into Earth’s gravitational field in order to rip our planet apart, destabilize Earth’s core with anti-matter, have Trypticon walk across America (he is a dinosaur-like robot the size of Manhattan) or capture the Voyager Golden Record and record a message to future generations of Decepticons (or their descendants) who have access to time travel with Earth’s coordinates and instructions on how to wipe out humanity in the distant past. Oh wait, the Decepticons have done all of those things, or at least attempted to. The US military were not the ones to stop them, that was left to the Autobots (and the Maximals).
That being said, in the Transformers Ongoing comic from IDW, following Megatron’s almost successful conquest of Earth (in the mini-series “All Hail Megatron”) three groups of Decepticons found employment with humans: three of the Combaticons started working for North Korea, four Predacons started working for China and Swindle began selling Decepticon technology to humans as part of Megatron’s plan for revenge. However the relationship between Onslaught’s Combaticons and the Koreans, and Rampage’s Predacons and China was purely mercenary; they provided muscle in exchange for Energon. It was also not approved by Megatron, unlike Swindle’s scheme. The Decepticons would not want citizenship in any human country. They consider humans to be a lesser lifeform, like a rat or a termite, infesting a planet ripe with resources they need to win their war.
In the Transformers: Prime continuity, the US Government is working closely with Optimus Prime’s Autobots to protect Earth from the Decepticons. On the few occaissions the US Armed Forces fought the Decepticons, they needed Autobot help to do more than destroy a few Vehicons (very low ranking footsoldiers). The other group of humans to oppose the Decepticons, MECH, only succeeded when they fought a single, damaged Decepticon. When Megatron invaded America at the end of the second season of Transformers: Prime, the US Air Force was very much outmatched.
Although this discussion of citizenship is interesting, the Autobots and Decepticons have their own allegiances and hierarchies. Would they WANT to be citizens? I suggest that they’d rather consider themselves resident aliens, and that their headquarters is an embassy, not subject to American (or human) laws.
I hardly need mention that the Decepticons are both members of a hostile foreign military and heavily prone to disguising their distinctive markings/insignia so as to travel on our world incognito. They are the very definition of ‘robots in disguise!’
As such, under the Geneva Conventions, they are unlawful combatants from a non-cosigning state and can be treated as such after a competent tribunal has so judged them.
As I mentioned in earlier posts, there are many different continuities for the Transformers, and some of these continuities are widely divergent. The Generation One Cartoon and Marvel Comic were both created in the same era, but have a different origin for the Transformers (and different reasons for why the Autobots and Decepticons left Cybertron and ended up on Earth, though the details don’t diverge that much). The Beast Wars and Beast Machines cartoons generally tried to make the divergent details from the Cartoon and Marvel Comic dovetail, with some success. A slightly expanded version of the streamlined Beast Wars origin is used in the IDW comic books. In all of these continuities, the Transformers are always sentient beings, though the details of how exactly they gained sentience differ.
The Michael Bay movies uses a completely different origin for the Transformers. That origin was instantly contradicted by the second movie, which was mostly ignored by the third one. Other than the idea of the All-Spark (and Bumblebee’s damaged voice box) none of these ideas are widely used in other continuities.
The Transformers: Animated and Transformers: Prime cartoons generally take concepts from prior continuities and either combine them or use them in slightly different ways. The Transformers: Prime continuity is supposedly considered Hasbro’s current “default” continuity, since it incorporates concepts from every previous incarnation of the franchise.
So what do these differences mean for the Autobots getting awarded US citizenship? In the G1 Cartoon, the Autobots and Decepticons were created as slave races by aliens called Quintessons, who programmed their robots using a super-computer called Vector Sigma. Vector Sigma’s programming is what provided sentience to Transformers in this continuity. The Autobots and Decepticons left Cybertron looking for a new source of Energon and as a result of their battle in orbit, crashed in North America (the exact location left vague). In this continuity the Autobots might have a strike against them since the Quintessons built them (and still consider them their property). On the other hand, they might be able to ask for protection from the Quints via the 13th Amendment.
In the Marvel Comics, the Transformers were created by Primus, a powerful god-like being that inhabited their homeworld of Cybertron. Primus built the Transformers to do battle with his enemy Unicron, another god-like being, who could transform from a planet into a Galactus sized Transformer. Optimus Prime carried the “Creation Matrix”, containing the essence of Primus, and could grant life to new Transformers. In addition, the Decepticons Jhiaxus and Liege Maximo discovered another way to create new Transformers via asexual reproduction. (They could induce their metalic forms to produce “buds” which grew into full size robots.) While some of the more conservative members of Congress might not like the Transformers’ claims of being created by god living inside their planet, they don’t have the problem of being alien toasters in this continuity.
Beast Wars split the difference between these origins: the Transformers were created by Primus, using Vector Sigma to grant them “Sparks”, Transformer souls. In Beast Wars Transformers have a life cycle, beginning their lives as “proto-forms”, which gives them an even better claim to being life forms.
In Transformers: Animated the All-Spark created life on Cybertron, and can be used to create new Transformers. Most Transformers are created as proto-forms on Cybertron; the means of creating new proto-forms was never explained before the show was cancelled. However in Transformers: Animated, the Autobots have another legal hurdle: the existence of hundreds of thousands of non-sentient robots created by Sumdac Systems in New Detroit. The Autobots faced systemic discrimination from human authorities for most of the series, and they would need to work really hard to convince Congress to grant them citizenship.
Michael Bay’s movies are all over the place. Sometimes the All-Spark is needed to create new Transformers, other times it isn’t. More importantly, none of the Transformers, except Megatron and Jetfire, arrived on Earth in the distant past. (Megatron crashed into the Arctic, outside US territory, Jetfire was never given a satisfactory explanation, like almost everything else in “Revenge of the Fallen”.) Could the Autobots get citizenship? Probably, it fits in nicely with Bay’s jingoism.
In Transformers: Prime, the Transformers use proto-forms, the All-Spark and the Autobot Matrix of Leadership are both mentioned, Unicron is living inside Earth (and is not happy to learn about the organic lifeforms infesting him) and the Autobots and Decepticons came to Earth in the present (though there are many ancient Autobot artifacts hidden on Earth). The Autobots’ presence is kept secret by the US government; the Autobots live in a decommissioned missile silo, have an FBI agent minding them, and seek to prevent letting the public know about their existence. Do they have citizenship? I’d guess not, but the show has never brought the matter up. Megatron has recently blown the Autobots’ cover by publicly invading Earth and transforming part of Nevada into a Cybertronian citidel.
In all continuities the Transformers are sentient, feel emotion and have ways of making new Transformers. The Autobots are generally presented as law-abiding (with prominent exceptions, such as the Dinobots, Hot Rod and the Wreckers) and would definitely seek citizenship if it were available. The Decepticons have almost never been shown to view humans as equals. The sole exception, the Decepticon Headmaster partners, are human aliens from a more advanced civilization. Generally, the Decepticons respond to human attempts at coexistence with agression, and human agression with greater levels of agression. However, if push came to shove, and the Decepticons were being deprived of their rights, they would turn to Optimus Prime and beg for his intercession. And Optimus would intercede, because that’s the kind of ‘bot he is.
I’m not sure about the comic books, but in the G1 cartoon, the Autobots certainly have some kind of legal status in the United States. They were taken to court based on false evidence in “Megatron’s Master Plan” and Perceptor won a National Scientific Achievement award in “Cosmic Rust”, so my guess would be that, in that continuity at least, they count as people.