Immigration as Collective Punishment: Part II

Steelmanning the Moral Argument for Immigration-as-Reparations

It is tempting to conclude that demographic retributivism is exhaustively reducible to the ulterior motives of ethnic ressentiment and tribal self-interest among would-be immigrants, on the one hand, and pathological guilt among white liberals on the other. But aside from the problem of evidencing these motives in individual cases, the more fundamental inadequacy of this response is that it fails to show there is anything wrong in principle with the argument for immigration as collective punishment. The act of adopting a policy for a bad motive can be morally objectionable even if the policy itself is innocent, after all. So, to be maximally charitable to the other side, is there a morally credible argument in favor of immigration-as-punishment?

1) The Compensation Principle: if someone wrongly harms another person, then he incurs a moral obligation to compensate his victim for the harms that he has wrongfully caused.
2) The Historical Claim: in the past, Western countries wrongfully harmed previous generations of non-Westerners by engaging in slavery and imperialism.
3) The Causal Claim: the acts by which Western countries wrongfully harmed previous generations of non-Westerners continue to cause harmful consequences for the currently living generations of non-Westerners.
4) The Surviving Racial Obligation Claim: if a racial group incurs a moral obligation as a result of the acts or omissions of some of its members, then this obligation doesn’t cease to exist when the individuals in question die but rather endures until it is discharged or released.
5) The Unpaid Balance Claim: Western governments have not yet fully compensated the currently living generations of non-Westerners for the harmful consequences they continue to incur as result of slavery and empire.
6) The Open Borders Claim: the only adequate compensation is in the form of quantitatively unlimited global-south immigration to the West, forever.

Despite being the best moral case that can be made out to underpin the views surveyed earlier, this argument is fatally flawed on at least three levels.
The logical problem is that it is applied with self-serving inconsistency by its exponents to all and only Western countries, but never to anybody else. Hence Ireland and Sweden, neither of whom ever had non-European slaves or empires, are told they must open their borders to the global south, while Arabs, Turks, Persians, Chinese, and myriad other non-European peoples who had, or even still have, empires and slaves are let off the hook. If it were to be consistently generalized such that, say, Bosnian Muslims were told they had to have open borders to Serbs as punishment for Ottoman imperialism and slavery, or if the Palestinians were told they had to allow unlimited Jewish immigration to the West Bank as punishment for the historic Arab imperialism that brought them there, how many people who are tempted by this argument when applied to the West would be willing to stick with it? Not many, I’ll wager.

The Indian-American professor cited earlier vividly illustrates the point. He’s been living in the USA, not Britain, ever since his Gujarati family moved to Queens in 1977, yet he sums up his manifesto as follows: “I claim the right to the United States, for myself and my children and my uncles and cousins, by manifest destiny…. It’s our country now.” Why exactly Americans deserve to be punished in this way for the real or imagined faults of the British Raj isn’t fully explained; nor do we have any account of why India ought not be subject to collective punishment for the continuing Brahmin caste-system in which his own family is implicated. (If anything, he seems intensely relaxed about hailing from one of the world’s most rigidly inegalitarian cultures, regaling us with stories like this: “It was a fine day at the subcaste picnic. All my caste-fellows, young, old, were playing cricket, eating, strolling by the New Jersey lake, and the old ladies were pleased that not one of us had yet married an American.”) But those are footling details; the point is, America is a rich country and the mostly white people who built it must pay, whoever they are, for every historical act or omission of their race anywhere as imagined by Professor Mehta, but no such standard should apply to him on account of the historical or contemporary abuses of his own group. One can only infer from such shameless inconsistency that we are dealing here with ulterior motivations, not sincere moral commitment.

There is also a second, historical problem with the argument for open borders presented above, namely that its central empirical assumption is probably false. It assumes that there is a large overall continuing developmental harm from the West to the Rest arising from the legacy of empires and slavery, such that developmental gaps between first-world countries and the rest are proof of an unpaid debt for which punitive compensation is due. Against this I posit what has actually happened over the last 250 years of European expansion: more developmental progress for the human species than in the rest of history combined. You can see this for yourself below, in a remarkable visualization that imagines this period as the history of a group of 100 people to see how their lives would have changed if they lived through this transformative quarter-millennium.

Can Westerners really claim most of the credit for this? Bluntly, yes. The unprecedented rise and global diffusion of the scientific method, the industrial revolution, and democratic capitalism from the mid-eighteenth century that coincided with those improvements in global living standards has to get the majority of the credit, and those came from the West. As Charles Murray explained in his book Human Accomplishment, “What the human species is today it owes in astonishing degree to what was accomplished in just half a dozen centuries by the peoples of one small portion of the northwestern Eurasian land mass.”

There have, after all, been many empires and many slaves throughout world history, but none of them produced Western innovations like the industrial, atomic, genomic, space, computer, and green revolutions; most of modern engineering and medicine, from vaccines and antibiotics to transplants and chemotherapy; and the bulk of modern communications, transportation, and consumer white goods technologies. Without these advances our species wouldn’t have gone from a world in which, as of 1820, 90% of the global population lived in extreme poverty to one in which only 10% do so today; or from 88% global illiteracy in 1820 to only 15% today; from 0% global vaccination against diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus then to 86% today; from 43% of the world’s children dying before age five then compared to only 4% today; and so on.

Thanks to its hugely disproportionate contributions to scientific and technological innovation and their globalization, the West has more than made up for any harms historically inflicted on the rest of the world through slavery and imperialism. As a result, there is in fact a net developmental benefit flowing from the West to the Rest, not a net continuing harm as assumed by demographic retributivists. There is as such no unpaid debt to be discharged.

Finally, there are glaring moral problems with the sort of collective guilt that it presupposes. On this point, all members of a wrongdoer’s group, including those who we would not hesitate to call civilians and even children, can be held responsible for a wrong committed by any one of them. On the version required here, this is true even if the wrongdoers in question died many generations ago, and even if the group membership in question is one defined by race rather than, say, beliefs or citizenship. As such, the argument goes powerfully against the grain of what has hitherto been seen as a tremendously important form of moral and legal progress, namely our evolution beyond ruthless practices of collective sanctioning in times of war and peace.

There are at least two sorts of weighty reasons to think we should keep the taboo against collective punishment intact. The first holds that it is wrong because its general acceptance would have negative consequences overall. These in turn would take at least three forms: its intended beneficiaries would be harmed because it saps their agency and stokes painful feelings of envy and resentment to continually attribute all of their problems to somebody else; its intended victims would of course be harmed by design, ultimately with statelessness, expropriation, and in the very long-term even ethnic extinction; and both of them would be harmed by the retaliatory reaction it will predictably elicit from its intended victims.

The second sort of reason holds that even in the unlikely event that a world with generalized blood-guilt had positive effects overall, we should reject it anyway because it violates one or more of the moral rights of those who are so punished. In this case the right in question is obvious and familiar to all heirs of the Anglo-American legal tradition: the right of an individual not to be punished for things for which he is not casually or morally responsible.

One might object that this right wouldn’t be violated if the individual consented to accept responsibility for every historical act or omission of their race, but as an argument for immigration-as-retribution any such appeal to consent fails both because it wouldn’t then really be an argument for collective responsibility at all, and because it cannot on any reasonable interpretation of the facts be said to actually apply to anyone living. It might alternatively be objected that the right isn’t violated if all group members have, in some way, contributed to the group’s wrongdoing. But while some contemporaneous group members could be considered aiders and abettors for providing political or economic support, or not protesting vigorously enough if we (say) reintroduced slavery today, this wouldn’t be true of all members. And the contributions of many of those who are causal contributors would be minimal and indirect. And in the case of those born long after the wrongs in question, they cannot plausibly be considered causal contributors at all, let alone to a degree sufficient to justify the degree of harm involved in unlimited open borders. One must therefore conclude that this argument also fails, as the degree of punishment imposed should be proportional to the degree of one’s causal contribution and that requirement has clearly not been met in the case of inter-generational responsibility for historic offences.

In conclusion, then, demographic retributivism is a rotten argument even when presented in its best possible light. Moreover, its exponents for the most part don’t even appear to believe it themselves, instead using it as pseudo-moral camouflage for the bigoted or venal ulterior motives or pathological guilt complexes that really move them.

What Can Be Done?

First, we should avoid artificially stimulating racial envy and resentment. As seemingly permanent features of the human condition, we cannot eliminate them altogether, but we can at least remove direct incitements to them such as critical race theory in schools. As distance can diminish the effects of envy, we should also be wary of a regime of forced and micro-managed association in the name of compulsory diversification, as this makes it impossible to achieve. And, given that by far the best way to overcome envy is to have goals of one’s own, a rigorous traditional pedagogy, and meritocratic culture focused on achieving through one’s own efforts will help dispel the distraction of invidious comparisons from which ressentiment springs.

Second, we should not take too literally the accusations about slavery and colonialism constantly cast in our teeth by postcolonial and critical-race theoretic historiography. No one would care about the sins of the West’s great-great-grandfathers, real or imagined, if they were not still more successful than other parts of the world today. It is observed superiority that inspires resentment, not the wrongs of past centuries, which are at most post facto ways of rationalizing resentment. We should never forget that they are mining history selectively with this goal in mind, not presenting a balanced and dispassionate accounting of the West’s past.

But, perhaps the most important lesson for us to learn, third and finally, is the futility of appeasement and the need for demographic prudence. Owing to the enduring power of ressentiment in human affairs, it is unlikely that those who insist on considering themselves victims will ever be persuaded by the arguments presented here, not least because this would require them to take a greater share of the responsibility for their own problems. To the extent this is true, it finally suggests that we should think long and hard about the wisdom of allowing so much immigration, so quickly, as to give the proponents of demographic retribution the political power to make their “imagined revenge” a reality. The posterity of all groups who see the West as their permanent home will thank us for our caution.

Lest this seem alarmist, remember finally that there is, sadly, a long tradition worldwide of successful but less numerous groups being expropriated and scapegoated by more numerous but less successful groups; Jews, Armenians, and the Chinese diaspora in south-east Asia are but a few prominent examples. Multiethnic democracies in which political power is determined by the number of people you can get out to vote, and in which voting behaviour is mostly split along ethnic lines, are particularly at risk. Whether we face a future of mass interracial score-settling against such groups or something resembling a functioning multiethnic democracy will in substantial part depend on how we deal with demands for immigration as punishment.