One of the casualties of immigration control is inevitably going to be the rule of law. The pressure to meet immigration targets has everywhere led to the rewriting of legislation, the pressuring of courts, the pressuring of police to act in ways that get around the legal process in order to achieve particular objectives. Immigration control isn’t the only area of the law where this might be the case, but it’s a very important one, and it’s one that we really ought to be aware of and take very seriously. Now all of that said, someone might say, “Well, OK, we understand that there are these risks that come with immigration control, but nonetheless we need to control immigration because there are, at least, significant benefits to be had from controlling immigration. There are economic benefits, there may be cultural benefits, and ultimately there may be benefits in terms of protecting our own society and enjoying a measure of self-determination.”

"[O]ne of the casualties of immigration control is inevitably going to be the Rule of Law."

Do any of these arguments stand up? Should we dismiss, or at least play down, the concerns about freedom because of the gains that come from immigration control? I want to suggest these arguments don’t stand up, and I’m going to run through them very, very quickly. In the first instance, let me look at economic arguments, which are probably the arguments that you’re most familiar with. Here, the arguments are, firstly, that immigration control is important because the economic benefits of reduced immigration are significant and perhaps outweigh any losses that you might have economically. Here, the general consensus among economists who study immigration and labor markets is that this just does not stand up. This is not to say that it’s uncontroversially the case that immigration brings with it enormous benefits. They may to some people—that’s true—but whether it’s overall a benefit to society in terms of the wealth that is generated, it’s, in the economics literature, a bit of a wash. Some economists thinks it’s marginally improving, some thinks it’s marginally costly. No one thinks that there’s a massive loss that comes with immigration.

But what is more often argued is that immigration has deleterious effects for certain groups within society, in particular for the poor, those who are out-competed for work by immigrants, and especially those who are on the lowest rung of the ladder. This is an argument that needs to be taken a bit more seriously, but there are two responses here that are important to make. One is an argument that Bryan Caplan has made very effectively, that if there is a small group of people who are disadvantaged by economic migration, perhaps what we need are something like keyhole solutions. [vi] Let’s address the problems faced by those people rather than use this very, very clumsy tool of complete immigration restriction just in order to take care of some people who are doing poorly as a result of immigration.

But the other thing I would point out also is that one of the benefits of immigration that is less contested overall is that, in the long term, immigration has very, very positive benefits. It raises GDP, it increases the level of wealth in society, it increases incomes. The objection that this is not helping the current poor is a limited argument because what is not taken into account is the gains made by the future poor. What you’re really saying is, “Well, we realize that many people will be gaining by immigration. We realize that many people in the future, including the very poorest, will be much better off as a result of immigration. But we’re going to only take into account the fact that, among the current poor, there is a small cohort that are going to do really badly out of immigration.”

Why is it that you’re discounting your future Americans because you want to protect some contemporary poor Americans? Because they’re both people who will be in the lowest rung. So the distributional argument has relatively limited application. Keyhole solutions would be better. And it’s not clear why it is that you want to favor one particular class of people to the detriment, not only of the well-to-do in society, but of other people who are poor. There’s much more to be said on this economic issue because it’s a complicated question which has many dimensions to it. I haven’t got the time or space to go into all of these arguments now, but these are the two central ones that I want to draw your attention to.

A very different kind of argument, though, is one that says, “No, it’s not about the economics. The problem with immigration is that it’s something that threatens the integrity of our culture.” The reason for immigration control is, in a sense, cultural preservation. There are a couple of dilemmas that then arise. If what you want to do is to preserve cultural integrity, the question is, what kind of degree of cultural integrity do you want? If you want to preserve your national identity, for example, what kind of conception of national identity or of your culture are you going to go with? Because, especially in a county like the United States, or Australia, or Britain, or France, you’ve got a very diverse society. Different religions, different ethnicities, different ethical views. What is the conception of national identity or culture that you’re going to work with?

Let’s say you work with a very thin one, which encompasses everybody already in the United States. That’s fine, but then it’s hard to see how an immigrant is going to make a difference because you’ve got a very, very broad conception of your culture. It’s not a narrowly focused one which just picks out the fact that, say, it’s predominately Catholic or it’s predominantly this or that. But let’s say you say, “No, no, we’re not working with a thin conception of culture. We’re going to work with a robust, thick conception of culture. We’re going to put some substance into the definition of what it is to be an American, or a Brit, or an Australian.” If you do that, then your problem is, what are you going to put into this? If you’re going to say, “We are fundamentally a Protestant country,” an argument that was made for example by Samuel Huntington about 10 years ago in his book on immigration called Who Are We? [vii]

But I’m not sure what that means for, let’s say, the Kennedys, who are Catholics. Are they not Americans? How are you going to account for the fact that you live in a society whose diversity is such that a thick conception of identity, a thick conception of what’s your culture, is going to exclude them? It’s going to exclude some of your own citizens. You can do this, but then what you’re going to do is have to engage in a very, very deep culture war within your own society. This is the dilemma you face if you’re going to try to control immigration and defend it by saying it’s to protect our culture. What is that culture you want to protect?

But there’s another aspect to this as well, which is often not noticed. If you want to preserve culture integrity, you’ve got two options, really, in terms of immigration control. One is to just completely cut out immigration or reduce it by numbers, and the other is to have selective immigration to preserve your culture integrity, assuming that you’ve solved the problem of what is the cultural content of your society. If you go for the first option—you’re just going to reduce the numbers of immigrants—well, that’s not going to have any impact because you’ll still have the same cultural differences being repeated by the incoming immigrants because you’re not being selective. You may still get people coming in from France, and Britain, and Somalia, and South Africa, and Mongolia, and so on.

You’re going to get all these cultural influences. But let’s say you that you decide, “No, we’re going to be culturally selective.” You’ve got two problems then. First is that, if you’re going to be culturally selective in a liberal democracy and you’ve got strong principles of racial equality—for example, nondiscrimination—well, you’re flying in the face of those principles. Do you really want to abandon those principles? That’s your first dilemma. The second thing is that if you do do this, you’ll be selectively importing immigrants, but you’ll have to say to some of your people, some of your own citizens, “Look, we’ve decided that we’re only going to restrict immigration to Western European males, so no Chinese. I know Chinese Americans have been here for hundreds of years, I know you’re all Americans, but I’m afraid we can’t treat you equally with your own citizens because we’re going for cultural integrity.” Now, leaving aside this whole question of whether we have a coherent conception of cultural integrity, using the cultural argument to defend immigration control is really going to have to mean treating your own citizens unequally.

And the question is, are you prepared to do that? If you’re not, then immigration control cannot be defended by appealing to the cultural argument. What about then the final kind of argument that people might make, which is that this is an argument ultimately for national self-determination? We want to control immigration because what we want to do is, we want to be determining the future of our society for ourselves. We don’t want to relinquish that power that we have. This is our society. This is what we want to control. Well, the first problem you’ve got here is really the question that Samuel Huntington asked but with a different kind of answer to it. Who are we? Who is the we that’s going to do this controlling? It’s very, very easy to assume that when you say we, it’s easily understood by everyone what it is that is meant. But of course it’s not because, if we understand the way in which national politics operates, any decision that’s taken by political society is the result of a complex working of a democratic process, which has political winners and losers.

So when policy is made, it’s not necessarily a reflection of what everybody wants, about what some collective we desires. It’s the outcome of a process of bargaining in which, sometimes, one particular view simply loses out. Let me give you a kind of analogy to explain what is odd about this demand that we control our own society. The Australian senator who was strongly against Asian immigration many years ago, Pauline Hanson, once said in Parliament, “What I want to do is just say, ‘I’m an Australian, and as an Australian, I should be able to say who comes into my home.’” That’s what it comes down to. And I thought, “Well, that’s fair enough.” When I’m living in my flat by myself, I think I should have absolute right to say who comes into my home, except maybe a fireman when there’s a fire. I’ll give him that. But otherwise, I think I should be completely sovereign. Now supposing I’m sharing the flat with my son, Sam, which I am now. I could also say, “Look, I have a complete veto.” Actually I do, but I’m not going to say to him every time he wants to have a guest, “Look, you’ve got to ask my permission.” I say, “Look, if you want to bring anybody home, that’s fine.”

Supposing you’re living in a house and you’ve got kids. Do you say to your kids, “No, no one can come to the house unless we say so”? That may be fine when they’re six or seven. I don’t think you want to live in a house with 18-year-olds with those rules. If you have that kind of attitude, it’s going to make living a kind of unpleasant proposition. But OK, let’s make this a bit more complicated. Imagine that you’re living in a condo. Should you live in a condo which had a rule that everybody had a veto over who came into the condominium, I suspect that you will not have a healthy condo. It would not be a healthy way of organizing your housing. Let’s extend it further. Let’s say that we’re not talking about a condominium, we’re talking about a neighborhood. Every neighbor has a veto on who comes into the neighborhood. It’s clearly going to become unworkable. And as you expand it to cities, so does it become unworkable that way. So the demand that we control who comes into our home can’t mean that everybody has a veto because that simply is unworkable. If you say that there’s got to be majority rule, that’s actually not much better because you don’t want to live in a house where that’s the case, especially if you happen to be in a minority.

But when you’re looking at something the size of a country, it’s actually very difficult to say that, when a decision is taken to exclude or not exclude people from any kind of policy outcome, that this is actually a decision that’s taken by us. It is in some formal sense, but in another sense, of course, it’s not. Which is why we have institutions in a liberal democratic state that don’t just make everything decided by democratic rule, by majority rule, we give people certain rights. We ensure that there are certain things that they have the right to do, regardless of what the majority think. In a certain way, that’s got to be true for the way we relate to people outside of our own societies.

We need to live in a society where those of us who want to relate to people outside are able to do so without having to turn and ask for permission from our neighbors, even if they say that we need to do this in the name of self-determination because it’s not any particular real self that’s doing the determination. What’s doing the determination is a complex and elaborate political process whose outcomes have, in a certain way, a kind of random quality to them. It’ll change from generation to generation, from decade to decade, from election to election, sometimes from year to year, and even from month to month if we look at the intricacies of immigration policy. So the self-determination argument, in the end, is not one that is going to turn out to be particularly convincing.

Let me wrap up by saying that in the end, as I said before, the message I want to present here is that immigration control is control on people. But it’s not just control on outsiders, it’s control on insiders. To live in a society that’s heavily controlled with respect to immigration will have to mean living in a society that’s very heavily controlled with respect to ourselves. And one has to ask that, if we are creating a society in which we find ourselves so heavily controlled, why would you call this self-determination? It seems to me it’s anything but that. This is not really an ideal that one ought to be convinced by. In the end, I think, what we see in the political world today, and perhaps this has been true for many hundred years of history, is a world in which there’s a certain tension between the state on the one hand and what we could call civil society on the other.

These two aspects of our existence have very different imperatives. In the world of civil society there is, of course, conflict and disagreement, but there’s also an enormous amount of cooperation. And the cooperation and the conflict take place at a certain individual level as people try to figure out how to live together. This thing called society does not exist within a state. It exists across the planet, to varying degrees, because people trade, interact, culturally exchange, write, fall in love with people from all over the place. This is the world of civil society. It’s not something that’s found in different clumps in different parts of the world. It’s found across the world.

On the other hand, states exist as different kinds of entities with different sorts of imperatives. And their imperatives are to stay in power and to serve those constituents which allow them to continue in power. They’re important institutions because they serve particular functions, but they also have different imperatives. And sometimes they get captured by parts of society that want to gain certain benefits that they can only gain by getting access to the power that’s held by these states. This is the way the world is. I don’t think there’s much prospect of this ever changing, and we need to accept this. But at the same time, I don’t think we should therefore get confused into thinking that what the state determines, or what the state takes from those particular parts of society that are pressing a particular view, is somehow reflective of what we think.

Not just the we who happen to live within a particular society or a particular state, but the we in the broader sense because in the broader sense, we is more than just the people within a certain country. We is humanity. But I don’t want, in the end, to make this argument in favor of a more skeptical approach to immigration control by simply saying, “Look, everybody has the right to move wherever they want to.” Although I would like to see a world in which there was greater freedom of movement, that’s not the point that I want to make here. My point is that we relate to one another and to people outside in ways that mean that if we want to control those interactions that exist, we will have to control people, and that means controlling ourselves as well. And this is something we should view with a great deal of skepticism. And let me leave it at that.

End Notes

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Caplan, Bryan. 2012. "Why Should We Restrict Immigration?" Cato Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1, p. 5-24.

Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons. 1904. "Sessional Papers." Inventory Control Record 1, Vol. 39, p. 399.

Holehouse, Matthew. 2015. "David Cameron blames Calais crisis on 'swarm' of migrants." The Telegraph, July 30.

Huntington, Samuel. 2004. Who are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Kukathas, Chandran. 1989. Hayek and Modern Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kukathas, Chandran. 2003. The Liberal Archipelago. Oxford: Oxford University Press.