Is there too much immigration?

I spoke yesterday at the Oxford Literary Festival in debate with Sunday Times journalist Sarah Baxter on the theme “Is there too much immigration?” Something like the following constituted my opening remarks.

The title of this panel asks whether there is too much immigration? I’m inclined to wonder whether this question is simply a mistake. My own focus in a forthcoming book [Do States Have the Right to Exclude Immigrants?](http://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509521951) is not so much on whether immigration is good or bad for the country, but on whether states have the rights that politicians, pundits and journalists simply assume that they do, to regulate migration according to whether it is good or bad for the economy, strains public services, makes some people better off or worse off, and so on.

My book is a work in political philosophy rather than an intervention in current debates (though it can’t help being that to some extent). Let me just sketch the main argument and then I’ll get on to some further remarks about our current predicament. States are compulsory and coercive bodies. Legitimate states use that coercive force to limit the freedom of people subject to them. But there’s normally a quid pro quo involved: the state limits our freedom but also protects us from the threat that we, as individuals, pose to one another’s freedom. This tradeoff provides us with reasons to comply with the state’s authority. But unlike resident citizens would-be immigrants get all of the coercion with none of the protection. The world is divided into many states, some of which do a much better job for their subjects than others. And mobility is something that human beings have practised since forever. To make the regulation of migration legitimate, states ought to comply with principles that ought to be acceptable to everyone. Insofar as such principles don’t exist, legitimate states need to be working towards creating them (just as they regulate other areas of international life).



Unfortunately, far from doing this, states at the moment are actively trying to subvert or evade even the paltry international conventions that currently exist, such as the Refugee Convention. In doing so, they are locking millions into poverty, exposing hundreds of thousands each year to avoidable death, separating families, and exposing others to statuses that make them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. States that act like this have lost their moral authority to control their borders.

In the UK we have, as everybody is aware, our own obsessions with immigration. Since 1968, racist criteria have governed British immigration law and policy. In recent years, concern with EU migration was weaponized by politicians with the, for some of them, unwelcome consequence of the decision to leave the EU. In opinion poll after opinion poll people tell us that immigration is too high. But though politicians run to respond to this “concern”, it is very unclear (to say the least) whether the ideas that the general public has about who immigrants are or what immigration control involves are well-informed. From my own experience, I know that many Leave voters in rural Leicestershire, for example, explained their referendum vote by the fact that there were “no white faces” in Leicester any more. Not only is this obviously false, but the people they were referring to are in large number the descendants of South Asian people who were expelled from East Africa in the 1970s, and most of them are not “immigrants” at all but people born in the UK with UK citizenship. I’m told that in the 1990s net migration from the Caribbean was negative; opinion polls revealed that the British thought there was too much of it.

Much has been made of the supposed downward pressure on wages that migration causes. But the evidence on this is weak and contradictory at best. Often people express a concern about the impact of migration on public services, on our schools and hospitals. As Brexit looms we are becoming more conscious of how far those services actually depend on the very migrants who were stigmatized as draining them. It also looks as if we are missing the real issue. I heard it remarked recently that Tesco does not find it to be a problem, but rather an opportunity, when new and different people with diverse needs move into an area. That’s because those new customers bring with them the means to pay for the goods they consume and thereby contribute to Tesco’s profits. In the public sector, however, new people are not accompanied by additional resource in the same way. Their taxes go to the Treasury but local government finance is not increased to match. This isn’t a problem about immigrants, but about how we manage our public finances.

But perhaps the most worrying side of Britain’s obsession with immigration is the way it is undermining our liberal democratic values and the rule of law itself. People being what they are, they have a tendency to work together, play together, to truck and barter, to fall in love and have families. The control of immigration requires not only that people are stopped at the border but that the entire population is subjected to supervision and surveillance. This is what Mrs May’s hostile environment policy is designed to achieve, with its punishment for citizens who hire or let their property to “illegals”, its attempt to turn health and education professionals into border guards, and now its exceptions from data protection laws for immigration control (a gap that permits or even mandates surveillance of the entire population: your bank account is being checked by a private government contractor to check that you are not “illegal”).

Equality before the law is undermined as people who look or sound different from the white Anglo norm find it more difficult to access services. Citizenship laws are being enforced and priced so that young people who are entitled to citizenship are denied it and old people who came as children half a century ago are detained, threatened with deportation or denied access to vital medical care. The preoccupation with “foreign criminals” has meant that young people, functionally and socially British, have been removed from the UK by administrative processes where they are denied the kind of protections usually afforded to those accused to crimes. And, finally, a thought for those unlucky enough to fall in love with a foreigner but who cannot meet the “minimum income requirement” of £18,600. The poor, disproportionately female and non-white, priced out of family relationships which the Home Office thinks they should continue to pursue via “modern means of communication”, i.e. they should talk to their kids on Skype.

Except in the comparatively rare instances where the victims of all these policies are white and “deserving” there has been little coverage in the mainstream press. It has been left to a few campaigning journalists like the Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman and Buzzfeed’s Emily Dugan to write about these injustices. Other newspapers are largely silent: David Aaronovitch in the Times wrote recently about bombings in Kabul killing hundreds, as far as I know he has never written about the fact that the British goverment deports young people there, deeming it “safe”.

A focus on whether there is “too much” immigration damages all of us: migrant and sedentary alike and spawns policies that divide and shame us. Better to recognise that mobility and free association are part of what we are as human beings and then to build a world to match.