There have been recent signs of a change of tone in the Labour leadership on the question of freedom of movement. Some have opposed any sort of controls but in recent months John McDonnell has spoken of “managed migration” and Keir Starmer has said that when it comes to freedom of movement within the single market we should be “open to adjustments”. It is time to dig a bit deeper into the underlying assumptions.

Where do rights come from?

Is there a right to free movement across national boundaries? The simple answer is that it depends where you live. If you live in the EU there is such a right because it is established by law. If you live in most other parts of the world there is no such right. People acting as if they had such a right will quickly be reminded of the local regulations.

All of which highlights the viewpoint of Jeremy Bentham, that “leathery-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence” (Marx), who said that talk of natural human rights was “nonsense on stilts”. It is easy to dismiss Bentham on the grounds of the crudity of his utilitarian philosophy but did he have a point? To be clear, Bentham said a right is

the child of law; from real law come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from ‘law of nature,’ come imaginary rights.…Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, nonsense on stilts.”

What we can take from this is that human rights are a human creation and are neither endowed by nature or some divine force. We have rights but only insofar as we make them. This does not mean that there are no human rights but rather that they cannot be imported into politics as something “given” by nature.

Our rights may be enshrined in law, but laws too evolve. It makes sense to demand as a right things which may not yet be recognised by law as such. The law realises rights but it doesn’t originate them. If there were not strong social pressures for given rights to be recognised then they would not become a matter of law. But even with this proviso it remains that rights arise and develop in the process of social evolution. They are not originated by ahistorical moral “principles” any more than they are originated by law.

Stone age man did not have a right to “free school education” or access to a “free at the point of delivery health care system” for obvious reasons. So first, rights depend on real possibilities. Second, they depend on general expectations of at least one significant group in society.

The historical nature of rights does not imply that there are no objective standards. Rather it makes clear that those standards are products of societal evolution and are all the more solidly established for that – rather than a spurious justification in terms of supposed inherent characteristics of the human species.

Migration is a fact of human existence

Human migration is as old as human existence. The “out of Africa” view of human origins is now well established and mass migration ever since is well documented. The continuous arrival of migrant populations in what is now the UK over the last 1600 years is printed in our historical record. Even after the rise of modern European nation states from the 16th century, migration has still been a significant phenomenon especially, as a result of empire and the population movements it promoted in the search for cheap labour.

There are different reasons for mass population movement which can be broadly classified into forced migration (refugees) and free movement where people move because of better opportunities to be found elsewhere. These different causes for movement require different considerations. Even if there is sometimes a grey area between them, the broad distinction still holds. It is only the latter that should be considered in a discussion of free movement. People fleeing war and persecution are not moving freely.

The UN Fund for Population Activities (UNPFA) estimates that currently 3.4% of the world’s population lives in countries other than their countries of origin. That amounts to 243 million people. It also says that the motivation in the majority of cases is the search for better life opportunities and standard of living. At the same time, those fleeing from war and oppression constitute a significant minority of the total. People who believe that migration does not need to be managed should reflect on the number of 243 million.

So what about the “right to free movement”?

The nomadic populations of Central Asia did not burst out across the world because they had the right to do so. The Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Vikings did not establish themselves here on the basis of such a right. These populations moved because they could and jurisdictions to which they migrated were established on the basis of force in more or less the same way as they would extend their domains through migration.

If such historical movements had indeed established a right then the colonial adventures of the twentieth century would have been fully justified. The fact that most of us do not consider them to be so indicates that we have to judge things by the historical circumstances of the time in which they take place. What seems normal in one set of historical conditions ceases to be so in entirely different conditions.

All of this is very different in the context of modern national states.

We, like people in similar societies, now seek to plan social provision for health, housing education and various social services. Does this mean than anyone outside our social context has the right to locate here and exercise some general right to that provision irrespective of the possible scale of that demand? It is not a question of immigrants taking out more than they put in. It is well attested that for a variety of reasons, overall immigrants contribute more per capita than the indigenous population. It is rather that (1) resources and the infrastructure to deliver them takes time to develop and cannot be turned on instantly – it requires planning, (2) the pressure of immigration falls most heavily on the poorest sections of the population and (3) rapid, unmanaged, large-scale population changes can cause social disruption of a more or less serious kind.

If the “principle” of free movement were sacrosanct then would it not include the rights of the rich to pitch up with their millions and buy up local resources e.g. housing? And what do we care about the brain drain from the poorer countries? Also does this so-called principle apply to the whole world or just the EU?

It should noted also that not only is world population still increasing unsustainably alongside extreme international inequality but modern transport has become more rapid, reliable and cheaper than ever before.

This is the setting for thinking about patterns of large-scale migration. A long historical process has brought us to the point of thinking about emergent human rights, democracy and a socialist alternative to present society. Socialists, as least those of them who think that socialism is something beyond managed capitalism, think that a society is possible in which people can democratically plan resources for the benefit of all and that most of the current deep recurrent problems of inequality and hijacking of social processes for private profit can be overcome by a different and rationally planned social order. In that context large-scale unmanaged migration could be one among many factors threatening the stability of any government trying to set its country on a socialist, or even social democratic, course.

Humanist/Liberal ideals can mask private interests

The declaration of universal rights is often an expression of narrower interests. The French Revolution’s declaration of the universal rights of man applied only to men. French women didn’t get the vote until 150 years later. The American declaration of man’s inalienable rights did not apply to blacks.

Considerable scepticism is therefore appropriate when humanistic/liberal ideals are taken as a touchstone for socialist views. It can lead to great confusion. What sense does it make to denounce free market ideology while defending the unplanned and unregulated movement of labour to serve the needs of that market?

It makes no sense to support planning of social resources for housing, education and health and to say at the same time that populations around the world, for whom we cannot plan, have unquestionable right to migrate, with no controls, to take avail themselves of that provision.

It makes no sense to talk about solidarity and at the same time to allow unplanned population movements which have the potential to be on a socially disruptive scale and to hit the poorest in society hardest.

To my knowledge, people asserting an absolute right to migration at any time have not addressed these points. They rely instead on vaguely defined human rights and alleged ethical principles (never fully articulated or defended). Those advocating unmanaged migration must attempt to address the questions and criticisms put to them if their view is to have any real substance.

There is no sensible ahistorical argument for human rights. I cannot see how a rational socialist argument can lead to any other conclusion than that the resources available to society need to be managed for the general good (including the general good of other societies across the globe). Managing those resources and their take-up evidently includes the management of population movements across borders.