I will occasionally be indulging in deep dives into political philosophy or policy. These dives will diverge from the news cycle, and they may not be interesting to everyone. However, I think it’s essential not just to win elections, but to win philosophical arguments. The latter tends to lead to the former, at least to some degree.
Last Friday, I wrote about some positive developments in America on the open borders question. The Republicans seem to have finally gotten tough. Today, I look at the philosophical argument for open borders. It’s nonsense, of course, but it continues to be taken seriously in some circles. With the help of an academic philosopher who wishes to remain anonymous, I refute it.
Overview of the Debate
The controversy over borders is fundamentally a moral one. There is a growing belief on the left that the ability to immigrate, including for economic reasons and for purposes of permanent settlement, is a fundamental human right that governments should not restrict, but actively facilitate. Governments must even do so against the wishes of their own people, and even if the cost is enormous. On this view, open borders are the morally required response to the economic inequalities between countries, the desire of citizens to freely contract with foreigners, or the imperative to maximize global GDP. National citizenship within a bounded community in the Western world, far from being a birthright, is increasingly seen in these quarters as just another form of unfair advantage. As the cosmopolitan philosopher Joseph Carens puts it, Western citizenship is “the modern equivalent to feudal privilege—an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances [that] is hard to justify when one thinks about it closely.”
Opposed to this is the vox populi, where (to put it mildly) we find that this belief is not held by most Western citizens. On the contrary, polling consistently shows that most people in the West want less immigration into their countries, a sentiment that has risen in recent years in the US, UK, France & Germany. Faced with the elite-approved “human right” to unlimited free movement, popular opinion responds with an emphatic no. Nations have rights to borders. These rights are justified by the need to defend cultural cohesion, domestic economic justice, and democracy.
But what if, instead of invading, the Russians had first flooded Ukraine with unwanted immigration and then asked if they would like to merge with the Russian Federation?
This clash of normative perspectives underpins the conflict over the Senate border bill. For Democrats, the problem is not that too many foreigners are abusing asylum claims in order to immigrate illegally. Why would they have a problem with an unending torrent of free voters? Rather, it is that news coverage of chaotic conditions at the border is unhelpful when there’s an election coming up. For the rest of us, the problem is the assumption that everyone in the developing world has a presumptive moral right to be let into the United States to make an asylum claim, (as long as they do so in a way that doesn’t embarrass the Biden Administration too much).
At its core, the reason there cannot be an unlimited right to immigrate is that it is incompatible with the right of a bounded community to durable political self-determination, which in turn is a far weightier moral consideration than the (mere) self-interest of any given economic immigrant. As the political philosopher Christopher Heath Wellman put it, “[n]o collective can be fully self-determining without enjoying freedom of association because, when the members of a group can change, an essential part of group self-determination is exercising control over what the ‘self’ is.” The necessity for borders — or “freedom of association” in Wellman’s terminology — for self-government in turns reflects two predictable effects of immigration upon the receiving society.
Changing the Voters
First, a subsection of the immigrants or their descendants will acquire the right to vote in their new home. When they are admitted to the franchise their presence will over time change the composition of the electorate, or, in other words, the “self” part of “self- determination.” It is also likely that their incorporation will alter the outcome of decisions taken by the demos, for immigrants will not typically share the same preferences or identity as the existing citizenry. Give a large group of outsiders the vote, and you may find the votes start going differently. This makes it clear why self-determination must include the right to control changes to membership of the electorate. After all, a large part of its value is that it gives us control over what happens to our political community now and in the future. This, in turn, can only be protected if the demos has the right to say “no” to radical unwanted alterations to the citizen body so that their decisions cannot be subsequently overturned by new arrivals.
In other words, unwanted immigration can interfere in the self-determination of citizens in much the same way that an unauthorized issue of voting shares can give away control of a company. The directors of Apple may decide they know better than their own shareholders but they cannot be allowed to just replace them with new ones.
The defenders of open borders would seem to have two responses open to them:
Is Immigration Like Organic Electoral Change?
Open-borderers might object that no self-determining group of citizens has the right to protect itself from these kinds of changes. Some members of the current electorate will probably change their minds, and, after all, the next generation will produce a new population whose preferences will be different. Since we cannot disenfranchise citizens who change their minds or our children, we cannot guarantee that they will not overturn our decisions. By the same token, we cannot claim any right to protect our decisions from being thwarted by immigrants with conflicting values or interests.
There are two glaring weaknesses with this response. One is that education and upbringing usually ensure a lot of continuity between the preferences, interests, and identity of one generation and the next — much more continuity than between natives and newly arrived immigrants.
This is especially true under conditions of mass migration across great civilizational distances, and even more so when the state insists on multiculturalism, rather than integration. While new arrivals will be subject to some cultural pressure to adopt the norms of their host society, contemporary liberal democracies like the US or UK encourage immigrants to “celebrate” many of their cultural traits and to nurture their ethnic identities — and, increasingly, their grievances. These groups then ask for policy shifts to accommodate their cultural preferences and ethnic interests.
This may or may not be a good thing for the natives. For present purposes, the point is simply this: continually adding these new members to the citizenry in large numbers is likely to be far more disruptive to the preferences of the natives than the gradual political rise of their own offspring over many decades. The greater the quantity of immigration, the more disruptive the impact will be.
The second problem with this response is that both generational changes in the electorate and voters changing their minds arise from citizens voluntarily exercising their own basic human rights, in this case, the right to form a family and the right to freedom of conscience. By contrast, the replacement of the electorate through unwanted mass immigration occurs wholly involuntarily and is facilitated by governments acting entirely morally ultra vires. This objection can be illustrated quite simply. Most open borders supporters would think it morally impermissible for Russia to forcibly annex Ukraine and flood it with Russian immigrants, presumably because it would violate the latter’s right to self-determination. The same people would almost certainly also intuit that it was fine for one generation of Ukrainians to be gradually politically replaced by their own offspring or to change their minds.
But what if, instead of invading, the Russians had first flooded Ukraine with unwanted immigration and then asked if they would like to merge with the Russian Federation? Given sufficient numbers of immigrants, these relocated Russians could outnumber the native Ukrainians. Thus, the newly reshaped Ukrainian population as a whole would agree to join Russia. According to the logic of those who deny our right to resist involuntary changes to the composition of the citizenry, such an approach would have been fully justified! But this is absurd. As such, it provides a striking illustration of why control over immigration is a vital component of self-determination and how denying a state’s right to such control is wrong for the same reasons that forcibly annexing it would be.
In fact, the intuition can be strengthened for anybody still wavering if they simply consider the phenomenon of decolonization. Why, in the view of those who demand open borders for the West, is it wrong, per the Washington Post no less, for the Indian government to try to involuntarily alter the demographic composition of the Kashmiri people, or for the Moroccan government to do the same to the West Saharan one? Opposition to such transformations only makes sense if you accept the claim that current voters have the right to decide whether or not to import new ones.
Immigrants as Natural Conservatives: Facts & Fictions
The open borders critic might concede all of the above, yet still object that these costs won’t materialize if newly arrived migrants vote the same way as the natives. This echoes the optimistic refrain of those on the right who have for decades predicted an outbreak of natural conservatism among immigrants. It’s possible this will happen eventually but it should be noted in response that, well, it hasn’t yet, and we’re now 60 years into the experiment. In the USA, lopsided voting behavior between different ethnic groups has been the norm for decades, with nonwhites typically supporting Democrats at a rate of 65-70% among Hispanics & Asians and 90% among African Americans, while white voters have supported Republican presidential candidates over recent elections by margins of 55-60%.
One sees something similar in the UK and across Europe, where second generation immigrants vote well to the left of the natives. Given these differences, what mass migration will mean for the self-determination of locals will come down to the question of which yields more votes, mass immigration or the native reaction to it? The answer will vary from one election to the next, but in the long run, if the numbers of immigrants are sufficient and the voting differences persistent and large, mass immigration will win out. As Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew once observed, “in multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”
This is of course a broadbrush generalization and there are exceptions: Cubans, Vietnamese, and other victims of Communism have famously voted Republican for decades. One also sees mostly conservative voting behavior among some minorities elsewhere like Jews in the UK. Nonetheless, ethnopolitics can become a permanent feature of diverse societies rooted in clashing group preferences over redistribution and multiculturalism as is evident in many countries around the world from South Africa to Malaysia.
More diversity means less trust
Social Trust: Precious and Fragile
What’s more, democracies require trust to function, and, as Robert Putnam famously discovered, cultural divisions of the sort caused by mass migration reduce both “horizontal” inter-personal trust and “vertical” trust in political institutions. This does not mean that declining trust will cause democracy to collapse, but it will probably downgrade the way in which it functions. A high trust society can afford the sort of deliberative democracy in which the participants are guided by generalizable principles and there is fair consideration of all affected parties. This system presupposes that political parties play fair, keep their promises, and work together for the common public good. A low trust society is more likely to see a Lebanon-style “consociational democracy” prevail, a system of zero-sum tribal bargaining in which representation is communal. There, political outcomes are determined by the balance of power between representatives of different ethnic and religious communities. Among other things this makes it less likely that non-excludable public goods will be provided, as these aren’t the sort of thing that mutually mistrustful representatives can reserve solely for their own group. It will also tend to reduce support for redistributive economic policies for the same reason.
The inverse correlation between ethnic diversity and social trust has been replicated many times now. More diversity means less trust — pretty much everywhere scientists have looked. America is no different. Social trust has declined almost without interruption since mass non-Western immigration began in 1965, while partisan polarization has steadily increased for the last thirty years. Some have attributed blame for these developments to the rise of cable news or social media. Indeed, those are probably part of the problem. Yet, the timeline of America’s deteriorating social trust and the geographical distribution of that trust — highest in very homogenous places like New England and the Midwest, lowest in the Southwest and in New York — are suspiciously consistent with the diversity-trust hypothesis. As such, the best mass migrationists can do is to add the caveat that the relationship between diversity and trust is not straightforward and will vary with the degree to which immigrants become segregated and inward-facing or socially integrated and patriotic.
Maybe, they might say, the death of trust is worth it. Maybe this heavy cost is outweighed by the benefit of reduced bias. Unsurprisingly, this desperate-sounding claim lacks empirical support. As Eric Kaufmann has pointed out, not only is there no compelling evidence that homogenous societies perform worse for democracy or basic rights, the correlations are, in fact, the other way around. There is a substantial body of evidence showing that the most diverse countries (concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic world) are poorer, unhappier, more conflict ridden and have worse human rights records than the more homogenous societies found mostly in northern Europe & north east Asia.
Overall, then, this suggests not that immigration should be stopped entirely, but that we should at least include declining trust and democratic functionality among the likely costs associated with mass migration. Why restrict our analysis to purely economic factors? This, in turn, strengthens the claim that policy decisions that will reshape the electorate should be decided upon through informed democratic decision-making rather than the fiat of a cosmopolitan elite.
I have more to say on the matter of border subversion. Indeed, I have more to say about what to do about it. I think I also need to say more about the special cases of refugees and asylum-seekers. Those articles are all coming. For now, I think, it is enough to have clarified one simple point: The argument for open borders is nonsense.