National Interest And Domestic Migration

An epistemic gap risks being filled by demagogues

In the wake of all the recent sabre-rattling over Russia and Ukraine, and the now seemingly quite real prospect of America withdrawing some or all of its security umbrella from Europe, I’ve been puzzling over what happens next. Specifically: when, or how, or in what respect, will the return of national-interest geopolitics out in the world echo back into politics domestically? And, in particular, will it ever rebound into domestic policies on migration?

This is one of those frustrating topics that’s difficult to discuss at all, let alone in good faith, because perspectives are so polarised and the political asymmetry between the two poles so stark and heavily-enforced. The respectable view will get you plaudits and invitations from Question Time; the deprecated one will, if you state it crudely enough, get you arrested. But the difficulty is that, while well-intentioned, the respectable view rests ultimately on a version of geopolitics from which the American regime has just unilaterally withdrawn its founding sponsorship. And, absent that sponsorship, the deprecated view is once again rearing its head.

In very crude summary, the respectable view is that everyone is the same deep down, thanks to our common humanity, and therefore anyone can live anywhere and contribute on equal terms to any nation. This is possible because the nature of “nations” as such is purely administrative: these entities just manage a basket of services such as taxes, regulation, welfare, public order and so on, on behalf of their residents and to their overall collective benefit. This all happens within an overall frame of peaceful international cooperation, whose aim to enable the beneficially frictionless global movement of goods, money, and people.

The deprecated view is that this is unworkable in practice, because “nation” also maps onto a tangle of less tangible commonalities of shared culture, history, and ethnicity. In this context, people are not in fact interchangeable individually, and at scale the interests of different nations sometimes come into conflict. From this it follows, or so the argument goes, that having large numbers of foreigners in your country could at least potentially be security risk, especially where these come from polities that are potentially or actually hostile. A great many border security and home affairs consequences flow from accepting this framing: during the Second World War, for instance, German citizens of polities resident in Britain were interned in camps, lest their national loyalties prompt them to sabotage the war effort.

Let me state my own position clearly. I think the borderless vision is a genuinely well-intentioned and utopian one, but maps less than perfectly onto the world as it is and, at scale, can itself be a vector for cruelty and injustice. Conversely the deprecated vision is closer to an accurate picture of the world as it is, but has the scope to legitimise limitless cruelty and injustice of a different kind, up to and including genocide.

We don’t need to look very far into the recent past to find examples of the deprecated view being mobilised, by demagogues, to justify atrocities. This contributes, not without reason, to a general reluctance to grant it any airtime. But in what follows I want to argue that we will have to; for the unhappy reason that its still currently higher-status competitor worldview rests on a core enabling condition that has evaporated.

The utopian view survived as long as it did through a tangle of historic, cultural, economic, and political factors, some of which I’ll try and explore below. But under Trump, the American hegemon has withdrawn sponsorship from that view, and it has already begun to dissolve from the top down. The world as it is will inexorably reassert itself. In this context, it behooves those who aspire to upholding humanist ideals, in the context of what the world is actually like, to think through the practical implications of this reality. What does it look like, within our specific polities, to try and plot a line of best fit between honouring our common humanity, and accepting the reality that groups of humans sometimes have divergent political interests? In order even to ask this question in a non-demagogic register we need to address the epistemic gap between the opposing viewpoints.