Would you consider adding "assimilation" to this discussion?
For a simple example: I feel there has been a lot of Left pushback against wanting immigrants to learn English. But opinion polls show most Americans would even go so far as making English our official language. The common view is as simple as "if you want to become and American, BECOME an American." In the 20th century, most immigrants I knew actually felt this way too! Oh, they might keep some traditions and foods from the old country, but they raised their kids as Americans.
Basically I think the economic argument will only go so far, and people really want assurances that new arrivals will not change the CULTURE of their country.
Assimilation is very important. But it's also a two way street, and immigrants always at least slightly change the culture they immigrate to. Usually that's fine, but if people decide they don't want that change, they're also within their rights.
I think there’s room for a cultural shift around expectations of assimilation. And to be clear, no one should want to go back to the old days where immigrant kids were hyper marginalized in school and immigrant adults had to start their own firms if they wanted to work in certain industries. But I’d say nudging the pendulum back 5% in the direction of expecting immigrants to speak English fluently, to at least pay lip service to American patriotism, to have respect for WASP culture (or whatever the equivalent is now), etc.
English in particular drives my immigrant parents and their siblings crazy, because (in their telling) they killed themselves to learn English when they got here when they were young children, with approximately no dedicated services to help them navigate in a second language. Even if we’re not going to make it The Law that everyone speaks English, there should be a stronger presumption that it’s the responsibility of anyone living here to learn English and to do so quickly.
Maybe Shhh, Not In Front of the Children needs to make a comeback. My grandma told me the way her immigrant parents got their kids speaking English exclusively (aside from a few phrases like “Thank You” “Merry Christmas,” etc.) was to only converse in English to their children, and then reserve their native language (Swedish, for the record) for the private adults-only conversations, discussing topics that the little pitchers with big ears were not meant to hear. Catch a kid trying to eavesdrop? Switch back to English and tell the kid to go outside.
“For a simple example: I feel there has been a lot of Left pushback against wanting immigrants to learn English. But opinion polls show most Americans would even go so far as making English our official language”
A nothing burger of an issue. Even in deepest Hispanic pockets of the country, if the actual immigrant generation doesn’t know English that well the next generation is fine.
A lot of that is the attitude that matters. If I go to a local establishment, and the folks don’t speak English, but are accommodating and tries their darndest to help, I am all for that.
I have also been in places in the US when they respond in a foreign language, and they are visibly annoyed when you don’t know it, I bet a lot of anti immigrant sentiment comes from that…
attitude is indeed important. For example, when I worked in a restaurant the cooks were talking shit about me in Spanish (another server who spoke Spanish relayed this to me).
Importing a competing monoculture on a large scale - whether Mexicans in the US, Pakistanis in Britain or North Africans in France or Spain may also make assimilation harder and an immigrant staying in their bubble easier.
Rather than every employee in the McDonalds speaking Spanish, perhaps we have a system where the employer would more likely have a bunch of nationalities (say, like Poles, Italians, Irish and Jews in turn of the century NY) and where English might actually have to be the lingua Franca of the suburban workplace. (in city neighborhoods there will still be monocultures, but most teens don’t want to limit themselves to employment in their own ghetto).
Part of the way America has historically solve this was through the cultural expanse of English and American media. The other part was through soft bigotry and expectations that were pretty common
I really appreciate this comment, Miles. Immigration debates can get toxic so quickly, but you pointed out something that feels like an almost universally agreed-upon consensus: "raising kids as Americans." That simple desire is such a clear, powerful signal of goodwill.
To build on your point, I wanted to share two quick examples from the East Asian immigrant community that illustrate this strong push for assimilation:
- The Model of the Next Generation: If you read the biographies or interviews of figures like Jensen Huang (Nvidia) or Fei-Fei Li (Stanford/AI pioneer), you see parents who faced brutal language barriers themselves. Yet, they made incredible personal sacrifices precisely so their children could fully adapt and thrive as "true Americans." Their stories continue to inspire countless ordinary immigrant families today.
- Cultural Openness and Faith: Years ago when I lived in Texas, a local pastor asked me a fascinating question. He noticed that many Chinese immigrant parents, despite being firm, lifelong atheists who didn't attend church themselves, were fully supportive of sending their kids to Sunday school or choir practice. In that story, you can see just how deeply many immigrant parents want their children to integrate into the fabric of American community life.
So I completely agree: assimilation—and the willingness to help the next generation assimilate—is essential to making the American "melting pot" work.
At the same time, this thread raises a crucial nuance about turning language or rigid cultural tests into strict baseline policy. Think about those incredible first-generation parents: if we had barred them at the door based on their initial English proficiency, society would have missed out on their immense contributions—and the groundbreaking contributions of their children.
Real assimilation is a story of mutual goodwill, active effort, and generous patience. Turning it into an unyielding policy gate might unintentionally create a tragedy where we lock out the very people most eager to embrace the American dream.
Although left support for linguistic plurality is not motivated by history, that plurality is supported by history.
If you look back to before the 20th century, equating being American with speaking English doesn't hold. Several states were admitted to the union with a majority language that wasn't English, and several more where no language formed the majority.
That linguistic pluralism was quite durable, until it nearly disappeared abruptly, not by organic assimilation, but a campaign of cultural suppression in the early 20th century. For instance, Louisiana was majority French even when that language was outlawed in 1916.
And then of course, there are Indigenous languages.
Nobody cares. It's English now, so if you don't want to learn it you need to be shown the door. There is no benefit to having to support multiple languages in the same country.
It's self-evident that many people care, they are only 'nobody' when you choose to specifically exclude those people. The English exclusivity claim has never been true - lingual pluralism waxes and wanes over time, and is waxing currently.
There are of course a number of benefits to lingual pluralism. It's ironic to make a claim otherwise, given that the success of the US and its history of pluralism, linguistic and otherwise, is a case in point.
So many benefits that you didn't name any. I wouldn't go with the "America did it in the past and we are successful" argument if I were you. That can go to some places I don't think a liberal like you wants to go.
The common language is English, and it would do a disservice to any immigrant to not help them learn English.
Any community that doesn’t speak the common language loses the opportunity for its members to migrate out of the community for various opportunities. That’s harmful to both the isolated community and to the rest of the nation.
That said, speak a second language as well! I live in California and have learned enough Spanish to not embarrass myself with basic conversation because it makes it easier to communicate with some recent immigrants.
Sounds too much like Germans and Brits bleating about 'culture'. To me it's a synonym for race and religion. Immigrants assimilate and always have but happily they bring something from home with them that America benefits from.
Well, I think your last line is how supporters of immigration feel - and I personally agree. But I am asking you to peer into the minds of those opposed to immigration, to understand their concerns and how to change their minds. Does that make sense?
(BTW I agree that there is a race & religion camp, and those people are going to be really difficult. They might not be worth discussing because their concerns can't really be addressed.)
Assimilation is both slow and inevitable. Immigrants never assimilate fast enough to satisfy nativists, but immigrant parents who try to stop their kids from assimilating generally fail. By the third generation, everybody is American.
I'd look at some countries in Europe and ask if it is inevitable. It is common in the states, but without proper policies and incentives, that can change.
Europe started receiving mass immigration from outside the continent too recently for assimilation to have completed. They haven’t gotten to the third generation yet, because they only started coming in large numbers in the 1980s. Give it a few more decades and then check back.
Just want to underscore @seneca's comment -- this is a non-issue, esp. for skilled immigrants. And the next generation of course learns English perfectly fine. But at this point, about the last thing anyone needs to worry about is if enough people speak English.
I think, at the very least, given the territory we acquired during the spanish-american war and the mexican-american war, we should probably consider Spanish a national language too.
The problem is not skilled migration in Europe. All European countries have strict criteria to get work visa if you are coming from outside Europe. The problem is illegal migration and asylum seekers.
You write that ''migration is not a human right'' but that is exactly the issue: European countries signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) which states that everyone can apply for asylum in a European country. Therefore politicians can promise all kind of changes to national laws but as ECHR overrules national laws their hands are tied. And this frustrates voters as they see that politicians are powerless. Basically there is only one solution of you want to stop the continues flow of asylum seekers and that is to leave the ECHR and maybe you would even need to leave the EU as the EU laws on asylum also overrule national laws. The other problem is that if asylum is denied you are expected to leave the country but obviously that hardlly happens or they keep moving around Europe trying their luck somewhere else.
Since this summer a new EU migration pact came into force that addresses some of the problems, but the core problem remains the same: anyone from anywhere in the world can apply for asylum in Europe according to the ECHR and EU laws. Therefore they will keep coming.
Poland is part of the EU and simply refuses to take any refugees, and carries on as normal. Other EU governments do not have their “hands tied” by ECHR, they could do the same as Poland, if they wanted to.
I am not aware of the details of Poland's policy but they have taken in a lot of Ukrainian refugees, though these have a different status in the EU compared to other asylum seekers.
The problem with ignoring the ECHR in North-Western European countries where most of the asylum seekers apply for asylum is twofold: you get tens of thousands, if not more, court cases and the judges will follow the ECHR and EU laws and rule in favor of the asylum seekers and although governments could ignore those court rulings you end up with countries not following the rule of law anymore. Do you as a country want to go into that direction? Governments with mainstream parties will not do this, but I admit they could do a lot more than they do now. In addition to that, judges follow a certain interpretation of the ECHR and EU laws and they could change that but so far judges have been very much siding with asylum seekers in North-Western countries, maybe that is different in Poland.
If parties such as the AFD come into power, I expect them to simply leave the ECHR as this is probably easier than fighting court cases. This is also part of the reason why these parties are against the EU.
We got a fairly useless explanation of what Brexit was about in the US, at the time. As far as I can tell this was the steelman case for it. It just never got told to us by our media. (Or maybe I was just ignorant at the time, I won’t discount that possibility).
Having the whole process of asylum verification set up in places like Albania under strict supervision does not inherently violate the ECHR. Rejecting that solution is just a racist dismissal of a country (Albania) that has come a long way and is now reliably under the rule of law.
What I believe angers people is, that originally this was a system about "political asylum". Safeguard a few freedom fighters, politicians, activists, with the inherent assumption that they are democratic idealists. Now we have large numbers of economically motivated egoists (including drug dealers) and some fanatical islamists.
Many people simply see a system that has lost all control and its original purpose. People will be a lot more accepting of foreigners that have been systematically screened before entering.
I agree with your sentiment, but let's be honest about setting up asylum verification in countries like Albania: that is like putting a plaster on a system that as you say was never meant to function as it does now. The idea is this discourages potential asylum seekers to come to Europe but it does not solve the root cause: the ECHR, or the interpretation of the ECHR is not fit for purpose anymore. How do you change that? Reforming the ECHR is very difficult, as is changing the current interpretation by judges.
I can therefore understand the wish to leave the ECHR altogether so you can make your own asylum laws.
Progressives have bleeding-heart blinders on with immigration and it shows.
They need to learn
- immigration is not a right
- well-meaning refugee /asylum laws can be abused
- not all immigrants are equal in their effects on the host country
- protection of a country's values is a good thing
This is what modern center-left and center-right parties need to embrace, high quality immigrants, pushing hard for assimilation, quicker to deport, less refugees and asylum seekers, values checks. I.e. it makes no sense to bring in people who want "death to America" or "death to the West" into the west - that's just self-destructive behavior and normal citizens don't want that. The progressives won't ever get it, so the other parties just need to embrace common-sense and move on without the progressives.
I don’t see what the argument is supposed to be that immigration is not a right. Sure immigration causes problems, but so do lots of other rights! If you believe in rights at all, then you need an argument to explain why some things are rights but immigration isn’t.
It seems much more plausible to just admit that rights are a fiction, and we should construct them in ways that are useful politically, rather than to just flat footedly say that the thing you already have isn’t a right while other things you want protection for are.
1. The burden is on you to prove that immigration is a right and defend it as such.
2. Of course, rights are fiction; they always have been. A useful one but the reality is that rights have historically been structured in a way that is politically useful, not ones that are universally guaranteed
Immigration isn't a right because you cannot force a host nation to take you. When something is a right, it crates a certain obligation around it. There should be no obligation around receiving immigrants.
I don’t follow this. Admit rights are a fiction => construct them in a politically useful way => the politically useful way to construct rights according to this guy is to exclude immigration. Aren’t we back to square one?
(I’ll separately say that rights have a ton more cultural and political force if they’re rooted in either religious ideas of creation in the image of God, or secular moral ideas piggybacking off of that concept, than if they’re postulated based on political utility. But that’s a separate discussion.)
I think it's not square one, because we could then be talking the pros and cons of various legal regimes, without pretending that some things, like free speech and property, are "rights" to not consider restricting, while others are just up to whatever the voters will vote for.
You are of course correct that rights are a fiction. But those other "rights" are largely agreed upon such that they can generally be asserted and people agree with them.
A right to immigration is disputed.
I don't see why we have to renegotiate all the others if we are renegotiating one.
So this seems like a very indirect form of "whataboutism". (Though without the implied disingenuousness that normally goes with it.)
I absolutely love your point about liberals' tactical retreat - that's exactly what it feels like each time they toughen up a little bit. Nobody is convinced for long because it has this air of just 'classic cunning politics' which views the voters as stupid and with the memory of a gold fish.
But of course, voters have been clear for long all over the Western sphere - they can be okay with immigration, but it has to be done in a controlled and legal way, and no, they don't want this colonial retribution & open borders thing. That's just an elitist, detached-from-reality-and-the-rest-of-the-public thing, and no democracy has ever sanctioned actually.
So yes, it would be nice if immigration finally got a sustainable vision behind it which respects both sides of the aisle and therefore can be maintained. Without such a coherent and sustainable vision it won't be immigrants driving a wedge into our societies but our own lack of agreement on the topic.
I think you correctly identify the issue here that liberals are seen as not really believing in immigration restrictions. I agree with you that it might be electorally convenient if liberals believed in immigration restrictionism in their heart of hearts, or at least if they were more convincing to voters about it.
And yet, I feel compelled to offer my inner liberal some words in defense of liberal skepticism on this issue.
Bigotry is a beast within the human soul. Each of us has a little monster inside us, a dark force that calls for hate and division and xenophobia. Something inside us from our days in the jungle sees every human as a potential enemy or threat, and this inner darkness wants us to hate and fear our fellow humans over every possible difference they have from us. This beast, if fed and left to run unchecked , leads us to obey out darkest impulses. We can carry out unimaginable cruelties in the name of this beast, and feel righteous for it.
If bigotry is a disease, Liberalism is our attempt at a cure. Liberalism is a political philosophy that pushes us against the beast on a societal level. As liberals, we encourage societies to be egalitarian and for people to be open-minded towards our differences. We fight for the rule of law over tribalism, for egalitarian states that don't judge people by their birthplace or identity markers, but by their actions. We starve the beast by reminding ourselves of our better angels. Liberals believe that all men are created equal - not just as some pretty slogan, but fundamentally, in our hearts. Equality under the law is the very core of our ideology.
If the idea that All Men Are Created Equal doesn't stop at skin color, why should it stop at where we draw our arbitrary national borders? If someone having dark skin doesn't make them worthy of being mistreated and dragged away by masked men, why does it become OK because you drew an arbitrary line around a certain group and called that group 'American'?
In other words, what's the actual moral argument under liberalism for tight immigration restrictions? Is there one? Or is the argument simply that it's more convenient to feed the beast in this particular case, and therefore we should do it?
I think the place this post doesn't sit quite right with me is that it feels like it puts aside core liberal values in favor of trying to make compromise with voters. Is it even clear that the compromise will help? Are milquetoast centrist parties who hem and haw about wanting the only the right kind of immigrants beating the pants off AfD or Donald Trump anywhere in the world? Did Biden's eventual triangulation on immigration actually get him anywhere, or did it just intensify support for rightism? What if feeding that dark beast within ourselves only makes it hungrier?
Political parties aren't just coalitions, they're philosophies - moral arguments about the world. If the birthright of liberalism is to fight the beast of bigotry, then we have to do that even when it's hard. Liberals throughout history have fought against their own versions of Trump and AfD in all kinds of terrible conditions.
If that's where the philosophy of liberalism leads us, I think we should be wary of capitulating so quickly and easily. Maybe the answer to "Voters want tight immigration restrictions" is just to fight for what we believe until we find a way to win. Maybe it's about fighting the information war better, changing people's minds and convincing them towards our philosophy.
Whether we win or lose, at a certain point we have to fight for things we believe in. Your post convinces me that liberal distaste for immigration enforcement might be a losing cause, but not that it's a wrong one.
I think this confuses equal human worth with an equal right to live in any country. “All men are created equal” means immigrants are no less deserving of dignity or equal treatment. It does not mean every person has an unlimited right to enter and settle in every nation. I think people have oftentimes forgotten that a core premise of liberalism is the mediation between various different stakeholders' rights through democratic consent.
There is nothing inherently illiberal about borders or immigration enforcement. Liberalism also values democratic self-government, the rule of law, and functioning public institutions. A liberal immigration policy can therefore be generous while still controlling who enters and at what scale.
Treating concerns about immigration as simply “feeding the beast” also dismisses legitimate questions about integration, housing, labor markets, asylum capacity, and democratic consent. Liberals don’t have to choose between open borders and xenophobia. They can defend equal dignity, legal immigration, refugees, humane enforcement, and meaningful immigration restrictions at the same time.
Exactly not to mention, if you want to preserve liberalism, you can't import. A bunch of people from cultures that are inherently illiberal, with no desire to assimilate
I don't think any of this is necessarily wrong - yet as a political philosophy towards immigration, it feels incomplete. I'm not sure how this idea even lands you meaningfully in opposition to Donald Trump.
For example, I'm given to understand that the immigration status of the Haitians in Ohio was recently revoked through legal means. Because we revoked their status, those Haitians (who have done nothing and harmed no one) are now living their lives in the country illegally. Therefore, your and Noah's argument suggest that there is nothing particularly illiberal about enforcing our immigration laws against them - laws which consist of shackling them and their children, then flying them to countries where they have no ties while the official communication channels of the US government mock their suffering on social media.
It seems obvious to me that something illiberal is happening to the Haitian population of Ohio. They are peaceful law-abiding people without clear wrongdoing, being stripped of their lives and livelihoods and sent into war-torn lands for reasons of racism and blood libel. A philosophy of liberalism that says that it's OK to shackle innocent children and put them in detention camps because they are in violation of an immigration law (a law that we just changed specifically to ensure they would be in violation of it) seems fundamentally inadequate to protect human rights.
Perhaps there exists a liberal philosophy of immigration that balances the needs of border enforcement and the rights of individuals not to be put in a situation like the Haitians of Ohio. But it seems to me that this moderate idea of 'We just want people to come here the Right Way' doesn't actually get us there. Doubly so when we reserve our right to change what The Right Way is at any moment, and do almost anything to the people we arbitrarily decide have done it wrong.
The Haitians living in Ohio were not in violation of their TPS until the Trump administration changed the rules and arbitrarily decided that they were.
Can you see why people who believe in liberal forms of government might be uncomfortable with the idea of a system in which the government can tell a bunch of racist lies about you, change the law, declare you and your family retroactively in violation of said law, and then ship you off to a foreign country that you've never been to without due process?
Do you believe the treatment of the Haitians of Ohio is correct and justified under a liberal government?
I think Kira makes the right point. Yes, you don't have the right to live in the US. But how can the US exclude you on the base of your race if it proclaims to be blind regarding their citizens' race? How can the US exclude you on the basis of religion if religion doesn't matter when it comes to American citizens? By allowing immigration law to exclude, as Noah writes, those "who don’t embrace American culture" we are undermining our own liberal tradition of not dictating what our culture should be.
I agree with your moral foundations. Bigotry and tribalism are real dangers, and one of liberalism’s great achievements has been extending equal treatment regardless of race, religion, ancestry, and other inherited characteristics.
But believing that all people have equal moral worth does not imply that people therefore have an equal right to enter and become members of any country they choose.
Liberalism has always operated through political communities. Citizens create laws, pay taxes, provide public goods, vote, redistribute resources, and accept reciprocal obligations toward one another. Citizenship itself is conventionally understood as membership in a political community carrying distinctive rights and duties. And a boundary around that community does not imply that outsiders are lesser human beings.
I think this is true on some level. Obviously, there are rules you have to follow in every society. Liberalism isn't the same as lawlessness, societies need taxes and identification to function. Illegal immigration isn't an inherent good even when it's sympathetic, and boundaries around a community aren't inherently bigoted.
And yet, it feels obvious to me that Trumpism and AfD aren't really about this. They won't be satisfied no matter how many reasonable immigration restrictions you offer them, they'll only want more. Their goals and motivations are explicitly about using immigration restrictions as a thin excuse to feed the beast. "Our tribe (and specifically our politicians/friends) deserve lavish rewards, everyone else is an enemy who deserves nothing but cruelty and hatred." I look at them and I see enemies of liberalism, a force we have to fight even if it's hard.
And I think it's a mistake to think that this is really about the particulars of enforcing immigration law, any more than the trans sports issue is really about trans sports. Most of this parties supporters don't interact with immigration or trans athletes in their daily lives. These are obvious pretexts, thin excuses for the growing desire to feed the beast of bigotry within our population, because feeding the beast feels good.
I actually think Noah already found the answer here in other posts - social media reorganized our society into faceless online lynch mobs, which made it easier to indulge our darkest impulses. Fixing that just feels more important for liberalism than giving away our morals or changing our fundamental commitments to one another.
But there's a very large majority of people that are not as far right as Trump, but will pick him. If we're forced to choose between that and open borders
I think parties are collections of interests. Using the analogy of baptists and bootleggers, sometime the coalition is one of high principals and baser ones. It is possible that a policy is better for preserving liberalism and to also be supported by racists, or woke commies, or whatever.
Well said. I would add that citizens also share in a joint project that is their polity. Of course they get to choose who can join their common project - that's as liberal a principle as any.
Well, in a world where virtually everyone is poorer than the median American, 'no immigration enforcement' means you're going to be looking at a *lot* of immigration.
And American citizens, looking at perhaps an additional 100M very poor people in the country, will say "Sorry, I can't afford to pay for {insert your favorite big government program} for the entire world."
There *are* limits to how rapidly a society can assimilate new immigrants, both culturally and economically. It's absurd to pretend that there aren't.
I share your discomfort with Noah’s argument, but I arrive there from a slightly different direction.
One of the statements in the essay that I actually agree with most is Noah’s earlier admission that he is broadly agnostic about immigration policy outside the United States. I think that agnosticism should have been the starting point of a liberal philosophy of immigration, rather than something the essay later moves away from.
I don’t think liberalism needs to decide, in advance, that more immigration is liberal or that tighter immigration control is liberal. Both moves turn liberalism into a justification for a particular exercise of political power.
The deeper problem, for me, is the essay’s political motivation: how can liberals regain power when immigration has become electorally dangerous? Once that becomes the question, there is a temptation to find a specifically “liberal” justification for whatever immigration policy might make liberal parties governable again.
I think liberalism should resist that temptation.
In an essay I recently wrote, Liberalism Must Return to Humanity, I argued that liberals may take power, but liberalism itself should remain permanently in opposition. Its task is not to become the ideology of the ruler, but to question the ruler.
That applies just as much to immigration.
Whether a government calls itself left-wing or right-wing, whether it expands immigration or restricts it, the liberal question should remain the same: What is this exercise of power actually doing?
Does it expand or obstruct human cooperation? Does it respect individual rights or violate them? Who benefits from it, who bears its costs, who can refuse, and who is accountable when power is abused?
Those questions have to be asked case by case. A border restriction is not liberal merely because it was democratically enacted. An open immigration policy is not liberal merely because it allows more movement.
In The Sovereignty Pyramid, I described the recurring problem of the dragon-slayer becoming the dragon: movements created to constrain power eventually capture it and begin constructing reasons why their own exercise of power is legitimate.
I worry that Noah’s essay risks making exactly that move. Instead of asking liberals how to govern immigration, perhaps the more liberal question is how immigration power, whoever exercises it, should be continuously questioned, audited, constrained, and held accountable.
To me, that is the immigration philosophy liberalism actually needs.
Of course we should fight for what we believe in. Fight for open borders. But don’t impose open orders without the consent of the voters. You have to win the support of the voters in order to have a liberal democracy. The problem with the current generation of liberals is that they believe in imposing their views on voters without consent. In other words, the current generation of liberals has strong currents of anti-democracy. At this tendency is at least partly responsible for the strong swing to the right on the part of the voters.
“What is the actual moral argument under liberalism for tighter immigration restrictions?”
You didn’t make an actual moral argument yourself. You told a sermon about The Evil Inclination of Xenophobia. The presumption under liberalism is that I am not obligated to associate with someone if I don’t want to associate with them. Including someone in my society is association. It’s you who needs to make an actual moral argument about where my obligation to create a relationship between myself and someone who I don’t want to be in relationship with stems from.
PS yes I am in fact pro-immigration. But this sermon is just not it.
Someone being 'included' in your society is not the same as being made to have a personal relationship with them. And indeed, the guiding principle of liberalism is that we all agree to offer our fellow humans certain rights in society, even the people with whom we disagree.
The assumption under liberalism is not and has never been that you can kick someone out of your society at any point, unperson them, and leave them with no rights or recourse. This is why personal relationships differ from human rights - your human rights do not disappear because a powerful person doesn't like you.
My moral argument is that those the government has deemed "illegal immigrants" are still human and worthy of certain human rights within a liberal society. And that those rights should probably include (among others), not being cast out of the only homes they know after committing no crime, solely because the government arbitrarily changed their immigration status out of capricious cruelty.
I didn’t say “personal relationship”. I said relationship. Yes, I have a relationship with every other American citizen. We owe each other things that we don’t owe to non-citizens, and we are required to accept certain behaviors from each other that we are not required to accept from non-citizens. Or as you put it “the guiding principle of liberalism is that we all agree to offer our fellow humans certain rights in a society” - that’s a relationship, and it operates to the exclusion of those who are *not* members of said society.
Let’s take your example. Note that you haven’t said “illegal immigrants should be granted citizenship”, which is what you were originally claiming (because that’s what immigration restriction is - the UAE has 10 million migrants who live there but are not immigrants, they have no path to citizenship.) You’re saying it’s illegitimate to deport them. Which entails that it’s illegitimate to dictate who lives within the geographical boundaries of a society at all. Do you really believe that under liberalism, a society that defines itself geographically is illegitimate?
Well, this gets into the interesting questions a liberal immigration framework has to try to answer! What, specifically, are the human rights of (alleged) illegal immigrants?
Can the government, in its pursuit of immigration enforcement, imprison alleged illegal immigrants without cause or trial indefinitely? Can it punish them arbitrarily for their speech or religion or appearance? Can it torture them for fun? Can it make a contract with them (for example, that they'll be permitted to stay in the country for X time so long as they commit no crimes) and then change the rules of the contract arbitrarily, leaving the illegal immigrant no recourse but to have their life destroyed?
I think building any kind of liberal approach to immigration enforcement probably needs to start from answering these questions. We'd need to determine what are the rights of the alleged illegal immigrant, where those rights start and end. Immediately, this idea stands in contrast to the Trump/AfD framework of immigration, in which supposed immigrants hold essentially no human rights ("They aren't part of our society"), and exist essentially to be abused for the host country's sadistic amusement.
Once we agree within our framework that illegal immigrants are human and possess certain human rights, we can start to decide how a liberal society might balance those rights against the needs of government enforcement.
And I think this stands out to me as the thing that is lacking from Noah's formulation. Noah talks about the host country enforcing its laws as the first principle, but a liberal society is a negotiation between the government enforcing its rules and the human rights of individuals.
So to answer your question ("Is it legitimate for the UAE to deport 10 million migrants with no path to citizenship"), I think we'd first need to determine what the rights of those 10 million people actually are, and then we can start to determine whether it is legitimate to deport them and how we might approach doing that.
As you point out, one should have very good reasons to prevent people from seeking a better life.
OP eventually argues that some restrictions are required (otherwise nation states could not exist i guess). But then immigration should only be limited to the maximal amount compatible with the healthy existence of the nation state - an amount probably much greater than what most countries practice.
There is an earth and there are a lot of people on it. We seek to define the circumstances in which people can move over the face of that earth and stay wherever they arrive.
Let's defer taking sides for a bit and see if there is some underlying morality.
If immigration is not a right, then exclusion is. Exclusion is projected by previous arrivals, with a couple of defined exceptions in countries like the US whose history is essentially a vivid expression of immigration being a right or exclusion not being a right.
If there is a morally sound reason for saying "I wish to deny to others the opportunities given to, and challenges faced by, me or my arriving ancestors, that would be lovely.
If there isn't a moral reason for saying that, please don't assume that "action on immigration" will actually be enough for its proponents. It is helpful to think clearly about what will happen if an AfD, or One Nation, or RefUK, causes the desired pain to people whose faces don't fit but the economic climax doesn't follow.
States are not a construct of morals, but one of power. The question is not of the right to immigrate, but of the power to exclude. Immigration was never a right, but rather something allowed by the controlling power, or taken by force by the immigrating one.
That sounds like it would be simpler to just say “rights don’t exist - only power does”. Why insist that immigration is the only claimed right that isn’t a right?
Rights don't exist, only power does, and in our society the people, through their representatives, get to determine what right have power backing them up.
Asserting that something is or is not a right doesn't magically make it so, but if enough of your fellow citizens agree, power gets applied to make it effectively true.
Democracy is messy and makes things that could be simple a lot more complicated. The engineer in me hates it, but it is better than the alternative.
Correct. That's why you should make damn sure the wrong people don't get power, like the people who are going to let in millions of immigrants from cultures that don't have any rights.
Unfortunately, here in the US, any discussion of immigration policy faces the extremely stiff headwinds of GOP racism and xenophobia. Literally two decades of sometimes nightly FOX News and Newsmax segments on the hordes of brown- and black-skinned rapists, killers and junkies pouring across the border has pickled the conservative brain. These illegals will rape your womenfolk before your very eyes, then eat your dogs and cats; and for dessert, slit your throat.
Any attempts at rational discussion of the net benefits of immigration are simply not possible in the face of decades of constant anti-immigrant RW propaganda.
As David Frum once said "If Liberals Won't Enforce Borders, Fascists Will" If any person who is not on board with open borders is called a fascist, nazi, bigot, etc... then the only people openly talking about immigration limits will be nazis and bigots.
There has been very interesting research that in Germany _all_ parties' politicians were to the left of where the median voter was on immigration. And so AfD gained their adherents.
Until the political class and mainstream media shift their narrative the discussion will be on the fox and newsmax terms because they are the only ones who are "on the side" of those who want to make immigration sane(r)
Good points. But except in states bordering Mexico lacking a Wall (i.e., California), there is nothing to compare with migration in Germany and the EU, which has ostensibly been "oversaturated" with immigrants. That was certainly my perception when I'd visit my then g/f in Germany and Holland.
Before the CA wall was built on the SoCal border, California was actually pretty anti-immigrant. But after it was in place, migrants were forced to attempt the crossing in AZ, NM, and TX--where it became those states' problem.
Secondly, a majority of immigrants to the EU are Muslim, and are said to face a more difficult time culturally assimilating. Many are also war refugees, a significant portion of whom have PTSD, and thus additional psychological needs. Whereas Catholic Latinos make up the vast majority of immigrants to the US, for whom assimilation is relatively easy.
Ironically, a significant portion of immigrants seeking refuge in the EU are there because of America's--and Israel's--wars in the Middle East, that have uprooted millions in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, etc.
Saturation? No. Gradient of visible immigrants? Very much so. Remember how the mood changed in NYC when less than 8k showed up from Texas?
Looking at Germany, I don't think the issue with refugees is ptsd. Their psychological needs are mostly related to them being majority male (~60%) and young. In the US the issue for assimilation is not a religion, its a language and just a sheer concentration of immigrants in certain places. Not something insurmountable, but problematic and the refusal of the media and politicians in both cases to acknowledge the issues is what led to what we observe now.
Finally, I can kinda see how you could blame Syrian civil war (the cause of 2015 spike) on the US. But blaming Israel for that is a bit ridiculous.
Is there a morally sound reason for exclusion? Of course there is, just as there’s a morally sound reason for excluding someone from joining you in a relationship via marriage. No one is obligated to enter into a long term relationship with someone they don’t want to do that with.
A lot of facile thinking in this thread stems from difficulty distinguishing between moral obligations and supererogation; yes, the optimally right thing to do in certain circumstances can be to say add someone to your high school friend group that you don’t actually want to be friends with. That doesn’t entail that you’re acting immorally if you don’t hang out with them once a week. By same token, the “opportunities” you’re referring to all stem from the opportunity *to be in a particular relationship with other people*, with all the obligations that imposes on those other people. They have every right to say no.
I can't speak for the rest of Europe but the right to exclusion is quite literally baked into our First Amendment through the right of free association. Of course there are limits based off of protected characteristics but they do not extend to people who do not live in the United States or immigrants seeking to come
I think your last point is especially important: we need to think not only about what a policy is supposed to achieve, but what actually happens when it is carried out.
It is relatively easy to design an immigration policy that sounds reasonable in principle. Implementation is much messier, because policy becomes administrative power, and that power can impose consequences on real people that are extremely difficult to bear.
That is increasingly how I understand the “road to serfdom.” The danger is not simply having the wrong policy. It is becoming so convinced that a policy is justified that we stop examining the power exercised in its name.
Seizing political power may look exciting. Exercising power is what we should really be watching.
No sane discussion on immigration policies between the left and the right (or the centre) can happen when one side just does not want to enforce any policy agreed upon and effected (even by its own side!) That, coupled with humanitarian concerns due to which immigrants already inside the country are, in effect, naturalised; means that the whole debate is largely one-sided in favour of the left.
Yes it is a one-way ratchet in favor of more immigration.
The left wins, immigration increases massively.
The right wins, deportation increase modestly and at high cost.
The center wins and compromises are made, legal immigration goes up permanently, and when the left eventually wins again they refuse to enforce the laws and immigration increases even more.
I think the important part is to give a bounded and conditional, but sincere and thought-through, explanation of why immigration can be a good thing, rather than "I don't like immigration either, but I'm not as crazy about it as those guys are". Between the right wing of the CDU in Germany, the Gaullist centre-right in France, and the Blue Labour bunch within the Labour party in the UK, we have no shortage of the latter in Europe.
But despite these people existing, and often introducing substantial immigration restrictions when in power, they're just not beating the extremists. It's impossible, factually, to deny that there has been a real recent tightening of migration policy in all three of those countries, especially the UK and Germany. It is just not carrying the day, however, against people who want ICE-scale deportations in the UK, or who want to permanently separate refugee children in schools from German children in Germany.
A partial counterexample is Switzerland, which is why I think making the case for immigration alongside the case for border control is important. There, a referendum that would have introduced substantial restrictions on immigration failed, narrowly but clearly. It did so in large part because the opponents of the measures made the case: migrants in Switzerland are economically necessary in large parts of the economy, they are already expected to meet stringent integration requirements if they want to stay and naturalise, and ending free movement with the EU would have led to the end of EU single market access.
If you admit that allowing mass migration of poor unskilled migrants from incompatible cultures was a mistake then you kind of have to concede to "ICE scale" (actually much larger than that) deportations. I don't really see much of a middle ground on this. The number of deportations will need to be the exact number of denied asylum claims from people already in the country. No more and no less. I don't see the argument against deportations anyway. I do not understand the argument that it is no problem to turn someone away at the border, but somehow it becomes a human rights violation to remove them once they have entered the country.
The argument against them is that at that scale, it is almost impossible to avoid cockups affecting otherwise legitimate migrants, and when word of them gets out, it will scare said migrants off.
I can only speak for myself, but I am a skilled non-EU migrant working in France. In the few years I've spent living here, I've been on the receiving end of several blunders that the immigration authorities have made. Most are minor, but one or two were severe enough that they could have affected the renewal process for my residence permit. I also pay a frankly eye-watering amount of tax: in some way shape or form, around half of what I make goes to the state.
The trade-off is that when the French state messes up, I have multiple avenues of recourse. Those are based partly on French constitutional and human rights law, and most of them would be incompatible with a large-scale deportation programme. If I keep paying those taxes and lose that legal security, why stay? I can go to my home country and gain security. I can go to some low-tax jurisdiction and at least not have to pay as much in return for my insecurity.
Maybe you can conclude that if the overall fiscal balance of migration is negative, scaring off the people you want to stay or come is worth it to remove those you don't. Fine, so be it. But that is the reality, not a utopia where you get who you want and not who you don't all the time. At least not in Europe.
Innocent people get thrown in jail every day, but we don't stop enforcing the law because it is not infallible. Mistaken deportation is trivial in comparison because it can be reversed by a plane ticket. And yes, that is reality, not utopia, but that seems to be more in line with my point and not yours.
I think the only argument is that in the past we let them in and let them work and let them raise families with a wink and a nod. Law abiding, productive members of society who speak enough English or whose kids go to school and speak English, should have an ability to get rolling residency permits, IMO.
For new arrivals, rolling permits should only be available to legal entrants.
I have no issue at all with deporting criminals and I agree that if you want to keep pressure lower at the border you probably need to be fairly strict about deportations (for everyone).
I think this is a fair point, and when it comes down to illegal immigration that was generally tolerated by society like the wave in the 90s this seems reasonable. But when you get something like Biden's refusal to enforce immigration law, or a similar situation like Europe now where the government is blatantly acting against the will of the population it seems unfair to turn around and say "well, this was tolerated, so now you can't deport these people even though they are not legally present."
This isn't a strong argument. The rationale against ICE scale raids is that once someone has been here for a long time (5-10 years), they're pretty assimilated, probably parents of either American citizens or someone who spent their entire post-infant life here, and who it would be disruptive to the community and their family to deport.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't enforce borders, but realistically you probably also need an amnesty program for people who've been here a long time, perhaps limited to those with dependent kids.
1. The restrictions are patchy and incredibly leaky.
2. Most European governments still struggle with actually enforcing their restrictions. The UK still has thousands of migrants show up to their shores. France struggles to deport anyone and is bogged down in lengthy legal proceedings.
3. The scale of immigration in the last few years has been gargantuan and there doesn't seem to be any attempt to reverse it. Truly.
The countries that have actually been pretty aggressive on immigration, such as the center-left government in Denmark, have been able to significantly weaken the appeal of the far right
And quite a few countries have governed with the right or “far right” in coalitions - Austria, Finland, Sweden, Italy, Poland, Hungary. The world didn’t end.
It was partly, but not entirely. That was obviously an angle, especially because a neutrality initiative that also looks like an SVP/UDC trojan horse is due up this year. But it sat alongside arguments in favour of immigration on its own terms, with varying levels of intensity depending on where you were in Switzerland.
As someone who lived in the UK during the Brexit referendum, that was a real contrast. Almost nobody on the Remain side was actually willing to defend freedom-of-movement on its own terms. The party-line was instead, more or less, that it was a necessary evil to keep trade with the EU. It didn't work, and I doubt it would have worked if that's what the Swiss opponents of the immigration initiative had done either.
Respectfully, Noah, I think you're missing the forest for the trees on this issue.
Of the many millions of people fleeing for their lives right now, from wars, violence and other disasters, only a very few will ever get refugee status: by design.
And as long as that's the case, the rest of those displaced people will try to find safety where they can. They'll do it the legal way when that's an option for them, and they'll do it illegally when it's not: as we would, too, if we were in their shoes.
As long as only a tiny handful of displaced people have a viable, legal way to make it to safety, we are going to have asylum seekers arriving at our borders, and they're going to cross illegally when that's the only route to safety.
So the fantasy of having the luxury to pick and choose whom we allow within our borders is just that: a fantasy. In the wake of climate change, there are only going to be more people displaced by environmental disasters.
So, as a practical matter, we can collectively step up and set up a process for people to find safety legally. We can make it a viable option for people to apply for refugee status from overseas, and in that way be able to screen for real security risks proactively instead of reactively.
We can collectively make agreements between countries so that the burden of providing for huge numbers of displaced people doesn't fall disproportionately on developing nations with very limited resources, as it does currently (it's laughable when people in countries like the U.K. and the U.S. shriek about being overwhelmed by asylum seekers, considering the situation of places like Turkey). We can use our resources to offer displaced people a real alternative to fleeing across borders illegally.
Or, we can keep throwing our limited resources into making a show of policing and deporting more people. But it will never be enough to satisfy the loudest critics of immigration on the far right, who will still cling to their fantasy of complete control.
Personally, only one of those options makes sense to me: on both a human and a pragmatic level.
''Of the many millions of people fleeing for their lives right now, from wars, violence and other disasters, only a very few will ever get refugee status: by design.''
In the past 10 years many millions of people applied for asylum in Europe, not a small number. And contrary to in develping countries, when accepted here they get housing, income, healthcare and more. This is the reason why they travel through many (safe) countries, even risking their life's, to get to for example Northern Europe.
Right, there are indeed a lot of asylum seekers trying to find refuge in Europe. But of those many asylum seekers, very few are actually granted asylum. My own country, Canada, isn't really any more generous in that regard: we just receive fewer asylum seekers arriving at our borders because of our geographic location.
And it's true that there are many asylum seekers who travel through relatively safe countries seeking refuge in places like Northern Europe.
And that's part of my point: places like Northern Europe complain about being overrun by asylum seekers, when really they're only seeing a small trickle relative to the flood of displaced people who never make it farther than developing countries like Turkey. Right now, the burden of providing safe harbour for displaced people is falling disproportionately on developing countries that don't have the resources that places like Europe and North America have.
I reject the claim very few are granted asylum, in my European country the ratio of accepted applications is around 50% and the process is thorough. The problem is that the people who are not accepted do not return but start roaming around Europe, one of the many reasons who asylum has lost so much popular support.
You already point out a possible solution to the asylum crisis: rich countries give money to developing countries to support refugees that came from neighbouring countries. This already happens with Turkey, they get money from the EU. The endless flows of people looking for a better life need to stop, or I predict that at some point political parties will come in power in Europe that will simply refuse and block all asylum seekers. As you know this political shift is already happening.
I'm surprised the ratio of accepted asylum applications in your country is that high, but I don't doubt that you know the situation in your own country better than I do. I'd be interested to see where those figures come from, to educate myself on the numbers.
When I talked about how relatively few displaced people are ever granted asylum or refugee status, the context was that I very recently read the book We Are Not Refugees by Agus Morales, which emphasizes how few in number successful refugee and asylum claims are relative to the numbers of displaced people worldwide (many of whom don't have the means to get far from the homes they're displaced from). So that's what I was focused on, rather than the ratio of accepted to denied asylum claims per se.
But yes, I was also, in my mind, assuming a low ratio of accepted to denied asylum claims, and I was basing that assumption mainly on my legal background and my understanding of the high legal bar that applicants have to meet: I should educate myself more on the specific numbers.
I should add that all of the above broadly applies to economic migrants, as well: the only practical way to truly stem the number of illegal economic migrants, in the long run, would be to collectively create the conditions where people don't feel they need to become illegal economic migrants. And no country can really do that in isolation, without working together.
I should also add: you're not wrong that some countries have had a poor experience with legal immigration, because their governments didn't use the tools they had to be selective about giving residency to people who don't belong to the desperate groups I talked about above.
And I do agree with you that it should be easy for liberals to agree to be selective about immigration when it's not a matter of life and death: if even measures like Canada's points system are a bridge too far for some people, I agree with you that those people are being naive and shortsighted.
I’m pro immigration, provided we control the borders and enforce the law (yes, meaning ICE and deportations, prioritizing criminals) and can be selective but inclusive about who gets to come here (meaning it should not be based upon who can walk here, which gives us an immigrant monoculture, but rather who from around the world wants to come here, can speak English, has finished high school and isn’t a criminal, with strictly limited admission and the ability to quickly deport those who commit crimes).
There are numerous problems-
Voter and donors/activists on the left don’t want this type of policy
History shows the law will be overridden with lawless decrees (that can take years to overturn) and programmatic non-enforcement (including sanctuary cities), so why even try to write new laws?
The refugee/asylum system is broken. Almost all asylum seekers are economic migrants. Applications for asylum should only be made at a foreign consulate in your own country or at the first country you arrive in (or at a foreign consulate in that country). Passing through five countries to jurisdiction shop for the best job opportunities is not an asylum process. Nor is passing through several countries to live in safe France and then taking a boat to England. There are British consulates in France.
The “skilled” immigration system is a joke. H1Bs are largely granted for low level project analyst and coding/QA jobs Americans can do or can be trained to do by our big tech employers. AI is also supplanting many of these jobs. Companies are starting to ramp up their investments in American high school and college training but we need more of an apprentice/internship model and more vocational training- not just the trades but factory floor management and lower level engineering jobs (skilled/automated manufacturing).
The foreign student system and visa also got a little out of hand- largely it is not “the best” that are staying on (we should encourage high performers to stay) and China has been politically subverting the process.
Finally, the biggest problem is that foreign born population of the US. Canada and much of Europe has quickly risen to record levels over the past decade or so. It may be too high for successful integration and assimilation and is making citizens uncomfortable. I disagree with the view that immigration should be accelerated from these levels. Only be strictly and selectively controlling immigration from here (and deporting criminals) will we be able to rebuild trust with citizens.
Note that I don’t agree with Trump’s decrees on H1Bs and student visas- these issues should be debated in Congress and the rules should be changed by consensus. His objective seems to be to shut almost all of it down, but this will just be reversed by the next guys or gal’s decree.
I do agree with what he has done at the border and also with ICE deporting criminals (and non-criminals incidentally caught up in the process of pursuing criminals), but not his showboating with ICE. His ICE “in residence” programs in sanctuary or permissive cities like Minnie and LA was simply a political stunt to please supporters- just as a sanctuary city and non-cooperation with ICE by local police forces is a political stunt. Note that the latter stunt has killed many more innocent people than ICE has.
The problem faced by conservatives that favor the "grand bargain" approach is that anything they trade away (increased legal immigration for instance) in exchange for border controls, or increased/more rapid deportation of illegal immigrants will remain in place in law, while some future liberal executive can just decide not to enforce the restrictions.
It is a one-way ratchet.
There realistically cannot be any compromise so long as the other party holds increased immigration (of any sort) to be moral/ethical cause and foundational belief.
Well, it is a poltical, transactional cause that has been sold as a moral crusade.
Somehow I think that if we had millions of conservative Polish and Hungarian plumbers streaming across our border the left wouldn’t be so eager to wave them through and put them on the dole.
What a typically lazy, throwaway failed attempt at a dunk. Pure cope. 44% in a parliamentary election with eight parties in the running. The second through fifth place finishers combined didn’t sum to the total of the AfD. That is a crushing landslide. You and the Bluesky leftists need to get your heads out of the sand.
Only in the UK. Most countries are sensible enough to have some form of proportional represenration, where you need to have a majority of the votes to have a parliamentary majority. The last UK election was crazy with Labour securing a huge parliamentary majority, with way less than 40% of the vote. This will have to change in the current multi party situation.
Migration may not be a human right but having somewhere to go when you are in danger of your life very much is. This is why what is happening to the Haitians is so appalling. This community worked hard and played by the rules and is being set back to a country that fundamentally has no government. This is also why the illegal immigration issue on the southern border is so hard. Some of these people are criminals, some have a definite right to asylum and some took such enormous risks to get here, increasing every year, that they fall under "people who see this country as the frontier" without any question. (A poll recently done by Pew showed that 52% of all Latinos in the United States (clearly immigration status was not asked about) thought that it was possible to achieve the American dream.) Only a policy of shared prosperity for both the United States and at least Mexico and Central America is going to solve this.
Noah writes that ''migration is not a human right''. Most charitably, we could consider this to mean immigration to a specific nation is not a human right because it is a right of a nation to restrict immigration. Emigration, its counterpart, should be a human right so that people can protect themselves from harm within their original nation. But unless the two acts are paired, we have stateless people, a huge problem. So we have here a conflict of rights claims.
The European Convention on Human Rights harmonizes these. What is your proposed solution, Noah? Allowing high-skilled economically-beneficial immigrants in is like skimming the cream: you still have the vast volume of milk left over to deal with. You are dealing only with the fraction of the problem that you want to deal with and dropping the rest on the floor.
You are quite right that a selective immigration policy amounts to skimming, yes. But it is not for any single nation to solve the problems of other nations. If some country is ruled by an intolerable regime, and many are, people will want to emigrate, yes. But nation A is not there to solve nation B's problems. This is not to say that B's citizens are inferior in any way to A's citizens, but A's government has a primary mandate to look after its own citizens, not after global welfare. Noah is not exactly treading new ground here, it's much more the definition of a well-run nation that he is articulating.
The Governor of She asked about government. The Master said, ‘Ensure that those who are near are pleased and those who are far away are attracted'. (Analects XIII/16).
Your comment also only deals with a fraction of the problem, and drops the rest on the floor. Reminds me of Cato the Elder and his solution for old slaves. The question isn't whether a nation is "well run", it is how to solve for these externalities due to a combination of desire to emigrate and desire to restrict immigration. The European Convention on Human Rights does a far better job than Noah's dropping the problem on the floor.
You seem to be dealing with a different problem statement than Noah. His problem is framing a liberalist philosophy of immigration that can stand up against (ultra)right pressure. Your problem is “how do we provide for the wretched of the Earth”? This is no doubt an important problem, and one that the solution offered by Noah to his problem “drops on the floor” as you say. But focusing on an overly broad issue makes all unlimited dogoodniks actually part of the problem, people distrust left-wingers precisely because they suspect them of an agenda that equates the well-being of your own citizens with those of non-citizens. Perhaps there is a beautiful transnational solution, but we don’t live in a transnational world.
A liberalist philosophy of immigration would be concerned with individuals, not just nation states. Liberalism is very concerned with “how do we provide for the wretched of the Earth”. That's Noah's failing here: it is very neoliberal or merchantilist in its attitude.
And of course, there ARE other second best solutions to choose from. For example, asylum claims could be validated without granting asylum, but rather with assisting refugees in finding an accepting nation and transporting them there without the abuses of ICE. It would be far cheaper. Likewise, would-be immigrants who desire the economic benefits could also be assisted with getting to a welcoming nation.
None of these ideas conflict with Noah's ideas: they merely extend them to encompass the problems Noah ignores.
No, the stateless problem only exists if ALL nations refuse immigration. Immigrants can go to the nations that do allow them, and those are typically nations with proximate cultures where cultural assimilation is easier anyway.
The European Convention on Human Rights does NOT create a general right to immigrate into another signatory country, nor does it impose a general duty on signatories to accept immigrants.
The European Court of Human Rights states the rule quite explicitly:
“The right to asylum is not contained in either the European Convention on Human Rights or its Protocols.”
And, as a general principle, states retain the right to control “the entry, residence and removal of aliens.”
And, yes, “skimming the cream” is a highly-effective immigration policy. I wish that the United States had that policy.
Because immigrants can teleport instantaneously for free to the nations that will accept them? Because immigrants have instant and certain knowledge of whether they will be allowed in at the border? Because immigrants don't care about the opportunities in the nation they are trying to enter? There are plenty of would-be immigrants in transit who are effectively stateless here in the real world despite your claim.
And of course, there is also the problem of distributing the burdens of immigration: if immigration posed no burdens, then everybody would be open to any amount any time any where. This is a basic Prisoner's Dilemma coordination problem between nations. The ones that defect from allowing immigration are most likely to bear the fewest burdens.
I live in Ecuador, where we have recently welcomed roughly 400,000 Venezuelan immigrants who comprise roughly 2.5% of the population. All immigrants are likely twice as many. Yes, there are strains and many of them are living in poverty. Ecuador is not rich like the most developed nations, and yet it can afford that. Illegal immigrants in the USA are less than 2% of the population.
I see that you are right about the European Convention on Human Rights. Yet the European Union is doing far better, with nearly 7% of the population being non-citizen
''“The right to asylum is not contained in either the European Convention on Human Rights or its Protocols.”'
but it is used (together with the Geneva convention on refugees) by European governments and judges (at least in my country) in all kinds of cases to grant refugees asylum.
"Immigration should be a human right." Says who? More importantly who has the power to enforce it on a country that does not want to?
It is not a conflict of rights or claims. Nation-states have a fundamental fiduciary duty to their citizens. If their citizens decide they want less immigration, those rights supersede the claims of individuals who are not a part of that political group
As far as dealing with the problem, Noah was quite charitable but the response is "keep the cream, dump the milk."
"If their citizens decide they want less immigration, those rights supersede the claims of individuals who are not a part of that political group"
Gee, that carries all the moral weight of slaveowners in slave states declaring that the federal government shouldn't abolish slavery. I trust I don't have to explain the analogy?
Nobody here is saying that immigration should be a human right: go ahead, quote us. But denying it as a human right does NOT solve the problem of emigrants needing to go someplace.
Noah is not a hero here for dropping that problem on the floor. It's a selfish "solution" that doesn't grant any weight to the misery it causes.
My father in law is a professor of social science in the UK. I recently asked him what the substantive policy debate about immigration should be, as it is completely lacking from public discourse.
His response: identity cards and labour laws.
This might be entirely relative to the UK, which has its own rising far right (Reform) with similar levels of crooks.
I personally never say myself supporting ID cards. But if it’s a choice between that and the country being run by Reform’s crooks, then I’d prefer to see a liberal government roll it out. The relevant safeguards are more likely to go in if it’s done by a liberal government.
I agree that a liberal philosophy of immigration would be economic in nature. But the point of having it, I suspect, is the translate it into policy choices that get put to the electorate.
I think the debate is absent from public discourse because there tends to be a slippery slope: the state gets nasty when it tries to enforce this kind of stuff. The most humane version of it is letting people rot in the gutter because their status chokes them off from access to things (like healthcare or shelter). Typically, it’s necessary to go further and start enclosing people in places that ultimately could look a bit like concentration camps.
But if liberals keep avoiding the issue we’ll all be reminded of the phase “evil succeeds when good people do nothing”.
Would work in the US, but refugees in Europe are legal. Some can work, some cannot work legally pending disposition of their application. In the US they can generally work.
Note I employed a number of Bosnians; Serbs, Croatians and Kosovars under the table (cleaners, nannies) in the UK during the 1990s Yugo pogroms. Still lots of cash jobs like that plus “buying” someone’s food delivery or uber shift. No ID needed.
Yes and I personally like taking my car to the car wash and paying the industrious Albanians in cash. If we have old clothes, we put them in bags in the boot and ask them if they’re interested in taking them.
It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life that I went to Sg/HK instead of the US. I hope Americans do whatever it takes to restore your greatness. I will always be wishing for it.
I had a pretty good time in Singapore and am having a great time in Hong Kong but it’s abundantly clear that citizenship is primarily seen from an ethnicity lens here and you do get excluded a lot, mostly in subtle ways. I do believe it’s a lot harder now for immigrants than it ever was but the ethos of the US as an immigrant nation, I believe, should endure. Noah is probably right that they want skilled immigrants. With some effort, I could qualify but I have a whole life here now. Thanks for the question!
The use of the word frontier here is a bit unfortunate.
Even within the American context, the frontier is where you go to be free of the laws of wherever you came from and to take what you want from the people who are already there.
Would you consider adding "assimilation" to this discussion?
For a simple example: I feel there has been a lot of Left pushback against wanting immigrants to learn English. But opinion polls show most Americans would even go so far as making English our official language. The common view is as simple as "if you want to become and American, BECOME an American." In the 20th century, most immigrants I knew actually felt this way too! Oh, they might keep some traditions and foods from the old country, but they raised their kids as Americans.
Basically I think the economic argument will only go so far, and people really want assurances that new arrivals will not change the CULTURE of their country.
Assimilation is very important. But it's also a two way street, and immigrants always at least slightly change the culture they immigrate to. Usually that's fine, but if people decide they don't want that change, they're also within their rights.
I think there’s room for a cultural shift around expectations of assimilation. And to be clear, no one should want to go back to the old days where immigrant kids were hyper marginalized in school and immigrant adults had to start their own firms if they wanted to work in certain industries. But I’d say nudging the pendulum back 5% in the direction of expecting immigrants to speak English fluently, to at least pay lip service to American patriotism, to have respect for WASP culture (or whatever the equivalent is now), etc.
English in particular drives my immigrant parents and their siblings crazy, because (in their telling) they killed themselves to learn English when they got here when they were young children, with approximately no dedicated services to help them navigate in a second language. Even if we’re not going to make it The Law that everyone speaks English, there should be a stronger presumption that it’s the responsibility of anyone living here to learn English and to do so quickly.
Maybe Shhh, Not In Front of the Children needs to make a comeback. My grandma told me the way her immigrant parents got their kids speaking English exclusively (aside from a few phrases like “Thank You” “Merry Christmas,” etc.) was to only converse in English to their children, and then reserve their native language (Swedish, for the record) for the private adults-only conversations, discussing topics that the little pitchers with big ears were not meant to hear. Catch a kid trying to eavesdrop? Switch back to English and tell the kid to go outside.
Such a waste. Multilingualism is a great asset.
“For a simple example: I feel there has been a lot of Left pushback against wanting immigrants to learn English. But opinion polls show most Americans would even go so far as making English our official language”
A nothing burger of an issue. Even in deepest Hispanic pockets of the country, if the actual immigrant generation doesn’t know English that well the next generation is fine.
I personally agree! It has always been thus. But this is why symbolic alignment can help moderate the immigration issue, lesson the cultural fights.
And ideally people would not wave Mexican flags at immigration protests for the same reason.
At the same time, I don’t think that, 50 years ago, it was viable to not know English even for the immigrant generation. Something has changed.
50 years ago they had just liberalized immigration and there were 60% fewer immigrants per capita then there are now.
I agree - seems like if we’re going to do the bigger immigrant numbers, we have to find a way to nudge people to speak English.
But that still means there are many places you can go that don't speak english
I know i've personally been to a number of stores and restaurants that way
A lot of that is the attitude that matters. If I go to a local establishment, and the folks don’t speak English, but are accommodating and tries their darndest to help, I am all for that.
I have also been in places in the US when they respond in a foreign language, and they are visibly annoyed when you don’t know it, I bet a lot of anti immigrant sentiment comes from that…
attitude is indeed important. For example, when I worked in a restaurant the cooks were talking shit about me in Spanish (another server who spoke Spanish relayed this to me).
That's certainly not helpful
When they don't speak good english at a restaurant, it's normally an excellent sign for the quality.
Importing a competing monoculture on a large scale - whether Mexicans in the US, Pakistanis in Britain or North Africans in France or Spain may also make assimilation harder and an immigrant staying in their bubble easier.
Rather than every employee in the McDonalds speaking Spanish, perhaps we have a system where the employer would more likely have a bunch of nationalities (say, like Poles, Italians, Irish and Jews in turn of the century NY) and where English might actually have to be the lingua Franca of the suburban workplace. (in city neighborhoods there will still be monocultures, but most teens don’t want to limit themselves to employment in their own ghetto).
Part of the way America has historically solve this was through the cultural expanse of English and American media. The other part was through soft bigotry and expectations that were pretty common
I really appreciate this comment, Miles. Immigration debates can get toxic so quickly, but you pointed out something that feels like an almost universally agreed-upon consensus: "raising kids as Americans." That simple desire is such a clear, powerful signal of goodwill.
To build on your point, I wanted to share two quick examples from the East Asian immigrant community that illustrate this strong push for assimilation:
- The Model of the Next Generation: If you read the biographies or interviews of figures like Jensen Huang (Nvidia) or Fei-Fei Li (Stanford/AI pioneer), you see parents who faced brutal language barriers themselves. Yet, they made incredible personal sacrifices precisely so their children could fully adapt and thrive as "true Americans." Their stories continue to inspire countless ordinary immigrant families today.
- Cultural Openness and Faith: Years ago when I lived in Texas, a local pastor asked me a fascinating question. He noticed that many Chinese immigrant parents, despite being firm, lifelong atheists who didn't attend church themselves, were fully supportive of sending their kids to Sunday school or choir practice. In that story, you can see just how deeply many immigrant parents want their children to integrate into the fabric of American community life.
So I completely agree: assimilation—and the willingness to help the next generation assimilate—is essential to making the American "melting pot" work.
At the same time, this thread raises a crucial nuance about turning language or rigid cultural tests into strict baseline policy. Think about those incredible first-generation parents: if we had barred them at the door based on their initial English proficiency, society would have missed out on their immense contributions—and the groundbreaking contributions of their children.
Real assimilation is a story of mutual goodwill, active effort, and generous patience. Turning it into an unyielding policy gate might unintentionally create a tragedy where we lock out the very people most eager to embrace the American dream.
This point about rigidity with baseline policy is, unfortunately, poorly understood when it isn't ignored completely.
Although left support for linguistic plurality is not motivated by history, that plurality is supported by history.
If you look back to before the 20th century, equating being American with speaking English doesn't hold. Several states were admitted to the union with a majority language that wasn't English, and several more where no language formed the majority.
That linguistic pluralism was quite durable, until it nearly disappeared abruptly, not by organic assimilation, but a campaign of cultural suppression in the early 20th century. For instance, Louisiana was majority French even when that language was outlawed in 1916.
And then of course, there are Indigenous languages.
Nobody cares. It's English now, so if you don't want to learn it you need to be shown the door. There is no benefit to having to support multiple languages in the same country.
It's self-evident that many people care, they are only 'nobody' when you choose to specifically exclude those people. The English exclusivity claim has never been true - lingual pluralism waxes and wanes over time, and is waxing currently.
There are of course a number of benefits to lingual pluralism. It's ironic to make a claim otherwise, given that the success of the US and its history of pluralism, linguistic and otherwise, is a case in point.
So many benefits that you didn't name any. I wouldn't go with the "America did it in the past and we are successful" argument if I were you. That can go to some places I don't think a liberal like you wants to go.
The common language is English, and it would do a disservice to any immigrant to not help them learn English.
Any community that doesn’t speak the common language loses the opportunity for its members to migrate out of the community for various opportunities. That’s harmful to both the isolated community and to the rest of the nation.
That said, speak a second language as well! I live in California and have learned enough Spanish to not embarrass myself with basic conversation because it makes it easier to communicate with some recent immigrants.
Sounds too much like Germans and Brits bleating about 'culture'. To me it's a synonym for race and religion. Immigrants assimilate and always have but happily they bring something from home with them that America benefits from.
Well, I think your last line is how supporters of immigration feel - and I personally agree. But I am asking you to peer into the minds of those opposed to immigration, to understand their concerns and how to change their minds. Does that make sense?
(BTW I agree that there is a race & religion camp, and those people are going to be really difficult. They might not be worth discussing because their concerns can't really be addressed.)
Assimilation is both slow and inevitable. Immigrants never assimilate fast enough to satisfy nativists, but immigrant parents who try to stop their kids from assimilating generally fail. By the third generation, everybody is American.
I'd look at some countries in Europe and ask if it is inevitable. It is common in the states, but without proper policies and incentives, that can change.
Europe started receiving mass immigration from outside the continent too recently for assimilation to have completed. They haven’t gotten to the third generation yet, because they only started coming in large numbers in the 1980s. Give it a few more decades and then check back.
They don't have the luxury of waiting another generation.
Just want to underscore @seneca's comment -- this is a non-issue, esp. for skilled immigrants. And the next generation of course learns English perfectly fine. But at this point, about the last thing anyone needs to worry about is if enough people speak English.
I came over at age 13 when assimilation and “melting pot” are the slogan, and I am all for it. We should bring it back.
I think, at the very least, given the territory we acquired during the spanish-american war and the mexican-american war, we should probably consider Spanish a national language too.
Should, but wont.
The problem is not skilled migration in Europe. All European countries have strict criteria to get work visa if you are coming from outside Europe. The problem is illegal migration and asylum seekers.
You write that ''migration is not a human right'' but that is exactly the issue: European countries signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) which states that everyone can apply for asylum in a European country. Therefore politicians can promise all kind of changes to national laws but as ECHR overrules national laws their hands are tied. And this frustrates voters as they see that politicians are powerless. Basically there is only one solution of you want to stop the continues flow of asylum seekers and that is to leave the ECHR and maybe you would even need to leave the EU as the EU laws on asylum also overrule national laws. The other problem is that if asylum is denied you are expected to leave the country but obviously that hardlly happens or they keep moving around Europe trying their luck somewhere else.
Since this summer a new EU migration pact came into force that addresses some of the problems, but the core problem remains the same: anyone from anywhere in the world can apply for asylum in Europe according to the ECHR and EU laws. Therefore they will keep coming.
Poland is part of the EU and simply refuses to take any refugees, and carries on as normal. Other EU governments do not have their “hands tied” by ECHR, they could do the same as Poland, if they wanted to.
I am not aware of the details of Poland's policy but they have taken in a lot of Ukrainian refugees, though these have a different status in the EU compared to other asylum seekers.
The problem with ignoring the ECHR in North-Western European countries where most of the asylum seekers apply for asylum is twofold: you get tens of thousands, if not more, court cases and the judges will follow the ECHR and EU laws and rule in favor of the asylum seekers and although governments could ignore those court rulings you end up with countries not following the rule of law anymore. Do you as a country want to go into that direction? Governments with mainstream parties will not do this, but I admit they could do a lot more than they do now. In addition to that, judges follow a certain interpretation of the ECHR and EU laws and they could change that but so far judges have been very much siding with asylum seekers in North-Western countries, maybe that is different in Poland.
If parties such as the AFD come into power, I expect them to simply leave the ECHR as this is probably easier than fighting court cases. This is also part of the reason why these parties are against the EU.
You are helping me understand why the AFD had so much support. The Asylum policies are not subject to consent of the voters.
We got a fairly useless explanation of what Brexit was about in the US, at the time. As far as I can tell this was the steelman case for it. It just never got told to us by our media. (Or maybe I was just ignorant at the time, I won’t discount that possibility).
Having the whole process of asylum verification set up in places like Albania under strict supervision does not inherently violate the ECHR. Rejecting that solution is just a racist dismissal of a country (Albania) that has come a long way and is now reliably under the rule of law.
What I believe angers people is, that originally this was a system about "political asylum". Safeguard a few freedom fighters, politicians, activists, with the inherent assumption that they are democratic idealists. Now we have large numbers of economically motivated egoists (including drug dealers) and some fanatical islamists.
Many people simply see a system that has lost all control and its original purpose. People will be a lot more accepting of foreigners that have been systematically screened before entering.
I agree with your sentiment, but let's be honest about setting up asylum verification in countries like Albania: that is like putting a plaster on a system that as you say was never meant to function as it does now. The idea is this discourages potential asylum seekers to come to Europe but it does not solve the root cause: the ECHR, or the interpretation of the ECHR is not fit for purpose anymore. How do you change that? Reforming the ECHR is very difficult, as is changing the current interpretation by judges.
I can therefore understand the wish to leave the ECHR altogether so you can make your own asylum laws.
Progressives have bleeding-heart blinders on with immigration and it shows.
They need to learn
- immigration is not a right
- well-meaning refugee /asylum laws can be abused
- not all immigrants are equal in their effects on the host country
- protection of a country's values is a good thing
This is what modern center-left and center-right parties need to embrace, high quality immigrants, pushing hard for assimilation, quicker to deport, less refugees and asylum seekers, values checks. I.e. it makes no sense to bring in people who want "death to America" or "death to the West" into the west - that's just self-destructive behavior and normal citizens don't want that. The progressives won't ever get it, so the other parties just need to embrace common-sense and move on without the progressives.
I don’t see what the argument is supposed to be that immigration is not a right. Sure immigration causes problems, but so do lots of other rights! If you believe in rights at all, then you need an argument to explain why some things are rights but immigration isn’t.
It seems much more plausible to just admit that rights are a fiction, and we should construct them in ways that are useful politically, rather than to just flat footedly say that the thing you already have isn’t a right while other things you want protection for are.
1. The burden is on you to prove that immigration is a right and defend it as such.
2. Of course, rights are fiction; they always have been. A useful one but the reality is that rights have historically been structured in a way that is politically useful, not ones that are universally guaranteed
Immigration isn't a right because you cannot force a host nation to take you. When something is a right, it crates a certain obligation around it. There should be no obligation around receiving immigrants.
Because non citizens don't have any right to be in a particular country
I don’t follow this. Admit rights are a fiction => construct them in a politically useful way => the politically useful way to construct rights according to this guy is to exclude immigration. Aren’t we back to square one?
(I’ll separately say that rights have a ton more cultural and political force if they’re rooted in either religious ideas of creation in the image of God, or secular moral ideas piggybacking off of that concept, than if they’re postulated based on political utility. But that’s a separate discussion.)
I think it's not square one, because we could then be talking the pros and cons of various legal regimes, without pretending that some things, like free speech and property, are "rights" to not consider restricting, while others are just up to whatever the voters will vote for.
You are of course correct that rights are a fiction. But those other "rights" are largely agreed upon such that they can generally be asserted and people agree with them.
A right to immigration is disputed.
I don't see why we have to renegotiate all the others if we are renegotiating one.
So this seems like a very indirect form of "whataboutism". (Though without the implied disingenuousness that normally goes with it.)
I absolutely love your point about liberals' tactical retreat - that's exactly what it feels like each time they toughen up a little bit. Nobody is convinced for long because it has this air of just 'classic cunning politics' which views the voters as stupid and with the memory of a gold fish.
But of course, voters have been clear for long all over the Western sphere - they can be okay with immigration, but it has to be done in a controlled and legal way, and no, they don't want this colonial retribution & open borders thing. That's just an elitist, detached-from-reality-and-the-rest-of-the-public thing, and no democracy has ever sanctioned actually.
So yes, it would be nice if immigration finally got a sustainable vision behind it which respects both sides of the aisle and therefore can be maintained. Without such a coherent and sustainable vision it won't be immigrants driving a wedge into our societies but our own lack of agreement on the topic.
I think you correctly identify the issue here that liberals are seen as not really believing in immigration restrictions. I agree with you that it might be electorally convenient if liberals believed in immigration restrictionism in their heart of hearts, or at least if they were more convincing to voters about it.
And yet, I feel compelled to offer my inner liberal some words in defense of liberal skepticism on this issue.
Bigotry is a beast within the human soul. Each of us has a little monster inside us, a dark force that calls for hate and division and xenophobia. Something inside us from our days in the jungle sees every human as a potential enemy or threat, and this inner darkness wants us to hate and fear our fellow humans over every possible difference they have from us. This beast, if fed and left to run unchecked , leads us to obey out darkest impulses. We can carry out unimaginable cruelties in the name of this beast, and feel righteous for it.
If bigotry is a disease, Liberalism is our attempt at a cure. Liberalism is a political philosophy that pushes us against the beast on a societal level. As liberals, we encourage societies to be egalitarian and for people to be open-minded towards our differences. We fight for the rule of law over tribalism, for egalitarian states that don't judge people by their birthplace or identity markers, but by their actions. We starve the beast by reminding ourselves of our better angels. Liberals believe that all men are created equal - not just as some pretty slogan, but fundamentally, in our hearts. Equality under the law is the very core of our ideology.
If the idea that All Men Are Created Equal doesn't stop at skin color, why should it stop at where we draw our arbitrary national borders? If someone having dark skin doesn't make them worthy of being mistreated and dragged away by masked men, why does it become OK because you drew an arbitrary line around a certain group and called that group 'American'?
In other words, what's the actual moral argument under liberalism for tight immigration restrictions? Is there one? Or is the argument simply that it's more convenient to feed the beast in this particular case, and therefore we should do it?
I think the place this post doesn't sit quite right with me is that it feels like it puts aside core liberal values in favor of trying to make compromise with voters. Is it even clear that the compromise will help? Are milquetoast centrist parties who hem and haw about wanting the only the right kind of immigrants beating the pants off AfD or Donald Trump anywhere in the world? Did Biden's eventual triangulation on immigration actually get him anywhere, or did it just intensify support for rightism? What if feeding that dark beast within ourselves only makes it hungrier?
Political parties aren't just coalitions, they're philosophies - moral arguments about the world. If the birthright of liberalism is to fight the beast of bigotry, then we have to do that even when it's hard. Liberals throughout history have fought against their own versions of Trump and AfD in all kinds of terrible conditions.
If that's where the philosophy of liberalism leads us, I think we should be wary of capitulating so quickly and easily. Maybe the answer to "Voters want tight immigration restrictions" is just to fight for what we believe until we find a way to win. Maybe it's about fighting the information war better, changing people's minds and convincing them towards our philosophy.
Whether we win or lose, at a certain point we have to fight for things we believe in. Your post convinces me that liberal distaste for immigration enforcement might be a losing cause, but not that it's a wrong one.
I think this confuses equal human worth with an equal right to live in any country. “All men are created equal” means immigrants are no less deserving of dignity or equal treatment. It does not mean every person has an unlimited right to enter and settle in every nation. I think people have oftentimes forgotten that a core premise of liberalism is the mediation between various different stakeholders' rights through democratic consent.
There is nothing inherently illiberal about borders or immigration enforcement. Liberalism also values democratic self-government, the rule of law, and functioning public institutions. A liberal immigration policy can therefore be generous while still controlling who enters and at what scale.
Treating concerns about immigration as simply “feeding the beast” also dismisses legitimate questions about integration, housing, labor markets, asylum capacity, and democratic consent. Liberals don’t have to choose between open borders and xenophobia. They can defend equal dignity, legal immigration, refugees, humane enforcement, and meaningful immigration restrictions at the same time.
Exactly not to mention, if you want to preserve liberalism, you can't import. A bunch of people from cultures that are inherently illiberal, with no desire to assimilate
I don't think any of this is necessarily wrong - yet as a political philosophy towards immigration, it feels incomplete. I'm not sure how this idea even lands you meaningfully in opposition to Donald Trump.
For example, I'm given to understand that the immigration status of the Haitians in Ohio was recently revoked through legal means. Because we revoked their status, those Haitians (who have done nothing and harmed no one) are now living their lives in the country illegally. Therefore, your and Noah's argument suggest that there is nothing particularly illiberal about enforcing our immigration laws against them - laws which consist of shackling them and their children, then flying them to countries where they have no ties while the official communication channels of the US government mock their suffering on social media.
It seems obvious to me that something illiberal is happening to the Haitian population of Ohio. They are peaceful law-abiding people without clear wrongdoing, being stripped of their lives and livelihoods and sent into war-torn lands for reasons of racism and blood libel. A philosophy of liberalism that says that it's OK to shackle innocent children and put them in detention camps because they are in violation of an immigration law (a law that we just changed specifically to ensure they would be in violation of it) seems fundamentally inadequate to protect human rights.
Perhaps there exists a liberal philosophy of immigration that balances the needs of border enforcement and the rights of individuals not to be put in a situation like the Haitians of Ohio. But it seems to me that this moderate idea of 'We just want people to come here the Right Way' doesn't actually get us there. Doubly so when we reserve our right to change what The Right Way is at any moment, and do almost anything to the people we arbitrarily decide have done it wrong.
When they came here under TPS, it was with the understanding that it was, you know, temporary.
Not too different from giving someone a time-limited visa.
If they stay here after the terms of the agreement expire, they are here illegally and ought to be removed.
The fact that they may not have "done anything wrong" is irrelevant.
The Haitians living in Ohio were not in violation of their TPS until the Trump administration changed the rules and arbitrarily decided that they were.
Can you see why people who believe in liberal forms of government might be uncomfortable with the idea of a system in which the government can tell a bunch of racist lies about you, change the law, declare you and your family retroactively in violation of said law, and then ship you off to a foreign country that you've never been to without due process?
Do you believe the treatment of the Haitians of Ohio is correct and justified under a liberal government?
Your position is much more likely to preserve liberalism in any particular example of a liberal democracy.
I think Kira makes the right point. Yes, you don't have the right to live in the US. But how can the US exclude you on the base of your race if it proclaims to be blind regarding their citizens' race? How can the US exclude you on the basis of religion if religion doesn't matter when it comes to American citizens? By allowing immigration law to exclude, as Noah writes, those "who don’t embrace American culture" we are undermining our own liberal tradition of not dictating what our culture should be.
What a wonderful and well thought out comment.
I agree with your moral foundations. Bigotry and tribalism are real dangers, and one of liberalism’s great achievements has been extending equal treatment regardless of race, religion, ancestry, and other inherited characteristics.
But believing that all people have equal moral worth does not imply that people therefore have an equal right to enter and become members of any country they choose.
Liberalism has always operated through political communities. Citizens create laws, pay taxes, provide public goods, vote, redistribute resources, and accept reciprocal obligations toward one another. Citizenship itself is conventionally understood as membership in a political community carrying distinctive rights and duties. And a boundary around that community does not imply that outsiders are lesser human beings.
I think this is true on some level. Obviously, there are rules you have to follow in every society. Liberalism isn't the same as lawlessness, societies need taxes and identification to function. Illegal immigration isn't an inherent good even when it's sympathetic, and boundaries around a community aren't inherently bigoted.
And yet, it feels obvious to me that Trumpism and AfD aren't really about this. They won't be satisfied no matter how many reasonable immigration restrictions you offer them, they'll only want more. Their goals and motivations are explicitly about using immigration restrictions as a thin excuse to feed the beast. "Our tribe (and specifically our politicians/friends) deserve lavish rewards, everyone else is an enemy who deserves nothing but cruelty and hatred." I look at them and I see enemies of liberalism, a force we have to fight even if it's hard.
And I think it's a mistake to think that this is really about the particulars of enforcing immigration law, any more than the trans sports issue is really about trans sports. Most of this parties supporters don't interact with immigration or trans athletes in their daily lives. These are obvious pretexts, thin excuses for the growing desire to feed the beast of bigotry within our population, because feeding the beast feels good.
I actually think Noah already found the answer here in other posts - social media reorganized our society into faceless online lynch mobs, which made it easier to indulge our darkest impulses. Fixing that just feels more important for liberalism than giving away our morals or changing our fundamental commitments to one another.
But there's a very large majority of people that are not as far right as Trump, but will pick him. If we're forced to choose between that and open borders
Again, well said.
I think parties are collections of interests. Using the analogy of baptists and bootleggers, sometime the coalition is one of high principals and baser ones. It is possible that a policy is better for preserving liberalism and to also be supported by racists, or woke commies, or whatever.
Well said. I would add that citizens also share in a joint project that is their polity. Of course they get to choose who can join their common project - that's as liberal a principle as any.
Well, in a world where virtually everyone is poorer than the median American, 'no immigration enforcement' means you're going to be looking at a *lot* of immigration.
And American citizens, looking at perhaps an additional 100M very poor people in the country, will say "Sorry, I can't afford to pay for {insert your favorite big government program} for the entire world."
There *are* limits to how rapidly a society can assimilate new immigrants, both culturally and economically. It's absurd to pretend that there aren't.
This is a bit old, but as of 2009, roughly a third of Mexicans would immigrate to the US if it were legal to do so.
A third of Mexicans would migrate to US -survey | Reuters https://share.google/ciYzkvYiSIqGDy0XI
I share your discomfort with Noah’s argument, but I arrive there from a slightly different direction.
One of the statements in the essay that I actually agree with most is Noah’s earlier admission that he is broadly agnostic about immigration policy outside the United States. I think that agnosticism should have been the starting point of a liberal philosophy of immigration, rather than something the essay later moves away from.
I don’t think liberalism needs to decide, in advance, that more immigration is liberal or that tighter immigration control is liberal. Both moves turn liberalism into a justification for a particular exercise of political power.
The deeper problem, for me, is the essay’s political motivation: how can liberals regain power when immigration has become electorally dangerous? Once that becomes the question, there is a temptation to find a specifically “liberal” justification for whatever immigration policy might make liberal parties governable again.
I think liberalism should resist that temptation.
In an essay I recently wrote, Liberalism Must Return to Humanity, I argued that liberals may take power, but liberalism itself should remain permanently in opposition. Its task is not to become the ideology of the ruler, but to question the ruler.
That applies just as much to immigration.
Whether a government calls itself left-wing or right-wing, whether it expands immigration or restricts it, the liberal question should remain the same: What is this exercise of power actually doing?
Does it expand or obstruct human cooperation? Does it respect individual rights or violate them? Who benefits from it, who bears its costs, who can refuse, and who is accountable when power is abused?
Those questions have to be asked case by case. A border restriction is not liberal merely because it was democratically enacted. An open immigration policy is not liberal merely because it allows more movement.
In The Sovereignty Pyramid, I described the recurring problem of the dragon-slayer becoming the dragon: movements created to constrain power eventually capture it and begin constructing reasons why their own exercise of power is legitimate.
I worry that Noah’s essay risks making exactly that move. Instead of asking liberals how to govern immigration, perhaps the more liberal question is how immigration power, whoever exercises it, should be continuously questioned, audited, constrained, and held accountable.
To me, that is the immigration philosophy liberalism actually needs.
Of course we should fight for what we believe in. Fight for open borders. But don’t impose open orders without the consent of the voters. You have to win the support of the voters in order to have a liberal democracy. The problem with the current generation of liberals is that they believe in imposing their views on voters without consent. In other words, the current generation of liberals has strong currents of anti-democracy. At this tendency is at least partly responsible for the strong swing to the right on the part of the voters.
“What is the actual moral argument under liberalism for tighter immigration restrictions?”
You didn’t make an actual moral argument yourself. You told a sermon about The Evil Inclination of Xenophobia. The presumption under liberalism is that I am not obligated to associate with someone if I don’t want to associate with them. Including someone in my society is association. It’s you who needs to make an actual moral argument about where my obligation to create a relationship between myself and someone who I don’t want to be in relationship with stems from.
PS yes I am in fact pro-immigration. But this sermon is just not it.
Someone being 'included' in your society is not the same as being made to have a personal relationship with them. And indeed, the guiding principle of liberalism is that we all agree to offer our fellow humans certain rights in society, even the people with whom we disagree.
The assumption under liberalism is not and has never been that you can kick someone out of your society at any point, unperson them, and leave them with no rights or recourse. This is why personal relationships differ from human rights - your human rights do not disappear because a powerful person doesn't like you.
My moral argument is that those the government has deemed "illegal immigrants" are still human and worthy of certain human rights within a liberal society. And that those rights should probably include (among others), not being cast out of the only homes they know after committing no crime, solely because the government arbitrarily changed their immigration status out of capricious cruelty.
I didn’t say “personal relationship”. I said relationship. Yes, I have a relationship with every other American citizen. We owe each other things that we don’t owe to non-citizens, and we are required to accept certain behaviors from each other that we are not required to accept from non-citizens. Or as you put it “the guiding principle of liberalism is that we all agree to offer our fellow humans certain rights in a society” - that’s a relationship, and it operates to the exclusion of those who are *not* members of said society.
Let’s take your example. Note that you haven’t said “illegal immigrants should be granted citizenship”, which is what you were originally claiming (because that’s what immigration restriction is - the UAE has 10 million migrants who live there but are not immigrants, they have no path to citizenship.) You’re saying it’s illegitimate to deport them. Which entails that it’s illegitimate to dictate who lives within the geographical boundaries of a society at all. Do you really believe that under liberalism, a society that defines itself geographically is illegitimate?
Well, this gets into the interesting questions a liberal immigration framework has to try to answer! What, specifically, are the human rights of (alleged) illegal immigrants?
Can the government, in its pursuit of immigration enforcement, imprison alleged illegal immigrants without cause or trial indefinitely? Can it punish them arbitrarily for their speech or religion or appearance? Can it torture them for fun? Can it make a contract with them (for example, that they'll be permitted to stay in the country for X time so long as they commit no crimes) and then change the rules of the contract arbitrarily, leaving the illegal immigrant no recourse but to have their life destroyed?
I think building any kind of liberal approach to immigration enforcement probably needs to start from answering these questions. We'd need to determine what are the rights of the alleged illegal immigrant, where those rights start and end. Immediately, this idea stands in contrast to the Trump/AfD framework of immigration, in which supposed immigrants hold essentially no human rights ("They aren't part of our society"), and exist essentially to be abused for the host country's sadistic amusement.
Once we agree within our framework that illegal immigrants are human and possess certain human rights, we can start to decide how a liberal society might balance those rights against the needs of government enforcement.
And I think this stands out to me as the thing that is lacking from Noah's formulation. Noah talks about the host country enforcing its laws as the first principle, but a liberal society is a negotiation between the government enforcing its rules and the human rights of individuals.
So to answer your question ("Is it legitimate for the UAE to deport 10 million migrants with no path to citizenship"), I think we'd first need to determine what the rights of those 10 million people actually are, and then we can start to determine whether it is legitimate to deport them and how we might approach doing that.
Wholeheartedly agree with you.
As you point out, one should have very good reasons to prevent people from seeking a better life.
OP eventually argues that some restrictions are required (otherwise nation states could not exist i guess). But then immigration should only be limited to the maximal amount compatible with the healthy existence of the nation state - an amount probably much greater than what most countries practice.
There is an earth and there are a lot of people on it. We seek to define the circumstances in which people can move over the face of that earth and stay wherever they arrive.
Let's defer taking sides for a bit and see if there is some underlying morality.
If immigration is not a right, then exclusion is. Exclusion is projected by previous arrivals, with a couple of defined exceptions in countries like the US whose history is essentially a vivid expression of immigration being a right or exclusion not being a right.
If there is a morally sound reason for saying "I wish to deny to others the opportunities given to, and challenges faced by, me or my arriving ancestors, that would be lovely.
If there isn't a moral reason for saying that, please don't assume that "action on immigration" will actually be enough for its proponents. It is helpful to think clearly about what will happen if an AfD, or One Nation, or RefUK, causes the desired pain to people whose faces don't fit but the economic climax doesn't follow.
States are not a construct of morals, but one of power. The question is not of the right to immigrate, but of the power to exclude. Immigration was never a right, but rather something allowed by the controlling power, or taken by force by the immigrating one.
That sounds like it would be simpler to just say “rights don’t exist - only power does”. Why insist that immigration is the only claimed right that isn’t a right?
Rights don't exist, only power does, and in our society the people, through their representatives, get to determine what right have power backing them up.
Asserting that something is or is not a right doesn't magically make it so, but if enough of your fellow citizens agree, power gets applied to make it effectively true.
Democracy is messy and makes things that could be simple a lot more complicated. The engineer in me hates it, but it is better than the alternative.
Correct. That's why you should make damn sure the wrong people don't get power, like the people who are going to let in millions of immigrants from cultures that don't have any rights.
Because rights don't exist, only power does. Sudanese currently have "universal human rights." How is that working out for them?
Unfortunately, here in the US, any discussion of immigration policy faces the extremely stiff headwinds of GOP racism and xenophobia. Literally two decades of sometimes nightly FOX News and Newsmax segments on the hordes of brown- and black-skinned rapists, killers and junkies pouring across the border has pickled the conservative brain. These illegals will rape your womenfolk before your very eyes, then eat your dogs and cats; and for dessert, slit your throat.
Any attempts at rational discussion of the net benefits of immigration are simply not possible in the face of decades of constant anti-immigrant RW propaganda.
As David Frum once said "If Liberals Won't Enforce Borders, Fascists Will" If any person who is not on board with open borders is called a fascist, nazi, bigot, etc... then the only people openly talking about immigration limits will be nazis and bigots.
There has been very interesting research that in Germany _all_ parties' politicians were to the left of where the median voter was on immigration. And so AfD gained their adherents.
Until the political class and mainstream media shift their narrative the discussion will be on the fox and newsmax terms because they are the only ones who are "on the side" of those who want to make immigration sane(r)
Good points. But except in states bordering Mexico lacking a Wall (i.e., California), there is nothing to compare with migration in Germany and the EU, which has ostensibly been "oversaturated" with immigrants. That was certainly my perception when I'd visit my then g/f in Germany and Holland.
Before the CA wall was built on the SoCal border, California was actually pretty anti-immigrant. But after it was in place, migrants were forced to attempt the crossing in AZ, NM, and TX--where it became those states' problem.
Secondly, a majority of immigrants to the EU are Muslim, and are said to face a more difficult time culturally assimilating. Many are also war refugees, a significant portion of whom have PTSD, and thus additional psychological needs. Whereas Catholic Latinos make up the vast majority of immigrants to the US, for whom assimilation is relatively easy.
Ironically, a significant portion of immigrants seeking refuge in the EU are there because of America's--and Israel's--wars in the Middle East, that have uprooted millions in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, etc.
Saturation? No. Gradient of visible immigrants? Very much so. Remember how the mood changed in NYC when less than 8k showed up from Texas?
Looking at Germany, I don't think the issue with refugees is ptsd. Their psychological needs are mostly related to them being majority male (~60%) and young. In the US the issue for assimilation is not a religion, its a language and just a sheer concentration of immigrants in certain places. Not something insurmountable, but problematic and the refusal of the media and politicians in both cases to acknowledge the issues is what led to what we observe now.
Finally, I can kinda see how you could blame Syrian civil war (the cause of 2015 spike) on the US. But blaming Israel for that is a bit ridiculous.
Is there a morally sound reason for exclusion? Of course there is, just as there’s a morally sound reason for excluding someone from joining you in a relationship via marriage. No one is obligated to enter into a long term relationship with someone they don’t want to do that with.
A lot of facile thinking in this thread stems from difficulty distinguishing between moral obligations and supererogation; yes, the optimally right thing to do in certain circumstances can be to say add someone to your high school friend group that you don’t actually want to be friends with. That doesn’t entail that you’re acting immorally if you don’t hang out with them once a week. By same token, the “opportunities” you’re referring to all stem from the opportunity *to be in a particular relationship with other people*, with all the obligations that imposes on those other people. They have every right to say no.
I can't speak for the rest of Europe but the right to exclusion is quite literally baked into our First Amendment through the right of free association. Of course there are limits based off of protected characteristics but they do not extend to people who do not live in the United States or immigrants seeking to come
I think your last point is especially important: we need to think not only about what a policy is supposed to achieve, but what actually happens when it is carried out.
It is relatively easy to design an immigration policy that sounds reasonable in principle. Implementation is much messier, because policy becomes administrative power, and that power can impose consequences on real people that are extremely difficult to bear.
That is increasingly how I understand the “road to serfdom.” The danger is not simply having the wrong policy. It is becoming so convinced that a policy is justified that we stop examining the power exercised in its name.
Seizing political power may look exciting. Exercising power is what we should really be watching.
I ended up writing a longer response to Noah’s essay around this distinction: A New Road to Serfdom: What Philosophy of Immigration Does Liberalism Actually Need?https://deepbitcheesebrew.substack.com/p/a-new-road-to-serfdom-what-philosophy
No sane discussion on immigration policies between the left and the right (or the centre) can happen when one side just does not want to enforce any policy agreed upon and effected (even by its own side!) That, coupled with humanitarian concerns due to which immigrants already inside the country are, in effect, naturalised; means that the whole debate is largely one-sided in favour of the left.
Yes it is a one-way ratchet in favor of more immigration.
The left wins, immigration increases massively.
The right wins, deportation increase modestly and at high cost.
The center wins and compromises are made, legal immigration goes up permanently, and when the left eventually wins again they refuse to enforce the laws and immigration increases even more.
Rinse and repeat.
I think the important part is to give a bounded and conditional, but sincere and thought-through, explanation of why immigration can be a good thing, rather than "I don't like immigration either, but I'm not as crazy about it as those guys are". Between the right wing of the CDU in Germany, the Gaullist centre-right in France, and the Blue Labour bunch within the Labour party in the UK, we have no shortage of the latter in Europe.
But despite these people existing, and often introducing substantial immigration restrictions when in power, they're just not beating the extremists. It's impossible, factually, to deny that there has been a real recent tightening of migration policy in all three of those countries, especially the UK and Germany. It is just not carrying the day, however, against people who want ICE-scale deportations in the UK, or who want to permanently separate refugee children in schools from German children in Germany.
A partial counterexample is Switzerland, which is why I think making the case for immigration alongside the case for border control is important. There, a referendum that would have introduced substantial restrictions on immigration failed, narrowly but clearly. It did so in large part because the opponents of the measures made the case: migrants in Switzerland are economically necessary in large parts of the economy, they are already expected to meet stringent integration requirements if they want to stay and naturalise, and ending free movement with the EU would have led to the end of EU single market access.
If you admit that allowing mass migration of poor unskilled migrants from incompatible cultures was a mistake then you kind of have to concede to "ICE scale" (actually much larger than that) deportations. I don't really see much of a middle ground on this. The number of deportations will need to be the exact number of denied asylum claims from people already in the country. No more and no less. I don't see the argument against deportations anyway. I do not understand the argument that it is no problem to turn someone away at the border, but somehow it becomes a human rights violation to remove them once they have entered the country.
The argument against them is that at that scale, it is almost impossible to avoid cockups affecting otherwise legitimate migrants, and when word of them gets out, it will scare said migrants off.
I can only speak for myself, but I am a skilled non-EU migrant working in France. In the few years I've spent living here, I've been on the receiving end of several blunders that the immigration authorities have made. Most are minor, but one or two were severe enough that they could have affected the renewal process for my residence permit. I also pay a frankly eye-watering amount of tax: in some way shape or form, around half of what I make goes to the state.
The trade-off is that when the French state messes up, I have multiple avenues of recourse. Those are based partly on French constitutional and human rights law, and most of them would be incompatible with a large-scale deportation programme. If I keep paying those taxes and lose that legal security, why stay? I can go to my home country and gain security. I can go to some low-tax jurisdiction and at least not have to pay as much in return for my insecurity.
Maybe you can conclude that if the overall fiscal balance of migration is negative, scaring off the people you want to stay or come is worth it to remove those you don't. Fine, so be it. But that is the reality, not a utopia where you get who you want and not who you don't all the time. At least not in Europe.
Innocent people get thrown in jail every day, but we don't stop enforcing the law because it is not infallible. Mistaken deportation is trivial in comparison because it can be reversed by a plane ticket. And yes, that is reality, not utopia, but that seems to be more in line with my point and not yours.
I think the only argument is that in the past we let them in and let them work and let them raise families with a wink and a nod. Law abiding, productive members of society who speak enough English or whose kids go to school and speak English, should have an ability to get rolling residency permits, IMO.
For new arrivals, rolling permits should only be available to legal entrants.
I have no issue at all with deporting criminals and I agree that if you want to keep pressure lower at the border you probably need to be fairly strict about deportations (for everyone).
I think this is a fair point, and when it comes down to illegal immigration that was generally tolerated by society like the wave in the 90s this seems reasonable. But when you get something like Biden's refusal to enforce immigration law, or a similar situation like Europe now where the government is blatantly acting against the will of the population it seems unfair to turn around and say "well, this was tolerated, so now you can't deport these people even though they are not legally present."
Agreed!
This isn't a strong argument. The rationale against ICE scale raids is that once someone has been here for a long time (5-10 years), they're pretty assimilated, probably parents of either American citizens or someone who spent their entire post-infant life here, and who it would be disruptive to the community and their family to deport.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't enforce borders, but realistically you probably also need an amnesty program for people who've been here a long time, perhaps limited to those with dependent kids.
Is mostly because:
1. The restrictions are patchy and incredibly leaky.
2. Most European governments still struggle with actually enforcing their restrictions. The UK still has thousands of migrants show up to their shores. France struggles to deport anyone and is bogged down in lengthy legal proceedings.
3. The scale of immigration in the last few years has been gargantuan and there doesn't seem to be any attempt to reverse it. Truly.
The countries that have actually been pretty aggressive on immigration, such as the center-left government in Denmark, have been able to significantly weaken the appeal of the far right
And quite a few countries have governed with the right or “far right” in coalitions - Austria, Finland, Sweden, Italy, Poland, Hungary. The world didn’t end.
The Swiss failure was a lot about people in Switzerland seeing as a trojan horse to mess up Switzerland's relationship with the EU.
It was partly, but not entirely. That was obviously an angle, especially because a neutrality initiative that also looks like an SVP/UDC trojan horse is due up this year. But it sat alongside arguments in favour of immigration on its own terms, with varying levels of intensity depending on where you were in Switzerland.
As someone who lived in the UK during the Brexit referendum, that was a real contrast. Almost nobody on the Remain side was actually willing to defend freedom-of-movement on its own terms. The party-line was instead, more or less, that it was a necessary evil to keep trade with the EU. It didn't work, and I doubt it would have worked if that's what the Swiss opponents of the immigration initiative had done either.
I flagged the Trojan Horse thing because that was the one bit that wasn't in your initial para, not because it was the entire reason for the failure.
Respectfully, Noah, I think you're missing the forest for the trees on this issue.
Of the many millions of people fleeing for their lives right now, from wars, violence and other disasters, only a very few will ever get refugee status: by design.
And as long as that's the case, the rest of those displaced people will try to find safety where they can. They'll do it the legal way when that's an option for them, and they'll do it illegally when it's not: as we would, too, if we were in their shoes.
As long as only a tiny handful of displaced people have a viable, legal way to make it to safety, we are going to have asylum seekers arriving at our borders, and they're going to cross illegally when that's the only route to safety.
So the fantasy of having the luxury to pick and choose whom we allow within our borders is just that: a fantasy. In the wake of climate change, there are only going to be more people displaced by environmental disasters.
So, as a practical matter, we can collectively step up and set up a process for people to find safety legally. We can make it a viable option for people to apply for refugee status from overseas, and in that way be able to screen for real security risks proactively instead of reactively.
We can collectively make agreements between countries so that the burden of providing for huge numbers of displaced people doesn't fall disproportionately on developing nations with very limited resources, as it does currently (it's laughable when people in countries like the U.K. and the U.S. shriek about being overwhelmed by asylum seekers, considering the situation of places like Turkey). We can use our resources to offer displaced people a real alternative to fleeing across borders illegally.
Or, we can keep throwing our limited resources into making a show of policing and deporting more people. But it will never be enough to satisfy the loudest critics of immigration on the far right, who will still cling to their fantasy of complete control.
Personally, only one of those options makes sense to me: on both a human and a pragmatic level.
''Of the many millions of people fleeing for their lives right now, from wars, violence and other disasters, only a very few will ever get refugee status: by design.''
In the past 10 years many millions of people applied for asylum in Europe, not a small number. And contrary to in develping countries, when accepted here they get housing, income, healthcare and more. This is the reason why they travel through many (safe) countries, even risking their life's, to get to for example Northern Europe.
Right, there are indeed a lot of asylum seekers trying to find refuge in Europe. But of those many asylum seekers, very few are actually granted asylum. My own country, Canada, isn't really any more generous in that regard: we just receive fewer asylum seekers arriving at our borders because of our geographic location.
And it's true that there are many asylum seekers who travel through relatively safe countries seeking refuge in places like Northern Europe.
And that's part of my point: places like Northern Europe complain about being overrun by asylum seekers, when really they're only seeing a small trickle relative to the flood of displaced people who never make it farther than developing countries like Turkey. Right now, the burden of providing safe harbour for displaced people is falling disproportionately on developing countries that don't have the resources that places like Europe and North America have.
I reject the claim very few are granted asylum, in my European country the ratio of accepted applications is around 50% and the process is thorough. The problem is that the people who are not accepted do not return but start roaming around Europe, one of the many reasons who asylum has lost so much popular support.
You already point out a possible solution to the asylum crisis: rich countries give money to developing countries to support refugees that came from neighbouring countries. This already happens with Turkey, they get money from the EU. The endless flows of people looking for a better life need to stop, or I predict that at some point political parties will come in power in Europe that will simply refuse and block all asylum seekers. As you know this political shift is already happening.
I'm surprised the ratio of accepted asylum applications in your country is that high, but I don't doubt that you know the situation in your own country better than I do. I'd be interested to see where those figures come from, to educate myself on the numbers.
When I talked about how relatively few displaced people are ever granted asylum or refugee status, the context was that I very recently read the book We Are Not Refugees by Agus Morales, which emphasizes how few in number successful refugee and asylum claims are relative to the numbers of displaced people worldwide (many of whom don't have the means to get far from the homes they're displaced from). So that's what I was focused on, rather than the ratio of accepted to denied asylum claims per se.
But yes, I was also, in my mind, assuming a low ratio of accepted to denied asylum claims, and I was basing that assumption mainly on my legal background and my understanding of the high legal bar that applicants have to meet: I should educate myself more on the specific numbers.
I should add that all of the above broadly applies to economic migrants, as well: the only practical way to truly stem the number of illegal economic migrants, in the long run, would be to collectively create the conditions where people don't feel they need to become illegal economic migrants. And no country can really do that in isolation, without working together.
I should also add: you're not wrong that some countries have had a poor experience with legal immigration, because their governments didn't use the tools they had to be selective about giving residency to people who don't belong to the desperate groups I talked about above.
And I do agree with you that it should be easy for liberals to agree to be selective about immigration when it's not a matter of life and death: if even measures like Canada's points system are a bridge too far for some people, I agree with you that those people are being naive and shortsighted.
I’m pro immigration, provided we control the borders and enforce the law (yes, meaning ICE and deportations, prioritizing criminals) and can be selective but inclusive about who gets to come here (meaning it should not be based upon who can walk here, which gives us an immigrant monoculture, but rather who from around the world wants to come here, can speak English, has finished high school and isn’t a criminal, with strictly limited admission and the ability to quickly deport those who commit crimes).
There are numerous problems-
Voter and donors/activists on the left don’t want this type of policy
History shows the law will be overridden with lawless decrees (that can take years to overturn) and programmatic non-enforcement (including sanctuary cities), so why even try to write new laws?
The refugee/asylum system is broken. Almost all asylum seekers are economic migrants. Applications for asylum should only be made at a foreign consulate in your own country or at the first country you arrive in (or at a foreign consulate in that country). Passing through five countries to jurisdiction shop for the best job opportunities is not an asylum process. Nor is passing through several countries to live in safe France and then taking a boat to England. There are British consulates in France.
The “skilled” immigration system is a joke. H1Bs are largely granted for low level project analyst and coding/QA jobs Americans can do or can be trained to do by our big tech employers. AI is also supplanting many of these jobs. Companies are starting to ramp up their investments in American high school and college training but we need more of an apprentice/internship model and more vocational training- not just the trades but factory floor management and lower level engineering jobs (skilled/automated manufacturing).
The foreign student system and visa also got a little out of hand- largely it is not “the best” that are staying on (we should encourage high performers to stay) and China has been politically subverting the process.
Finally, the biggest problem is that foreign born population of the US. Canada and much of Europe has quickly risen to record levels over the past decade or so. It may be too high for successful integration and assimilation and is making citizens uncomfortable. I disagree with the view that immigration should be accelerated from these levels. Only be strictly and selectively controlling immigration from here (and deporting criminals) will we be able to rebuild trust with citizens.
Note that I don’t agree with Trump’s decrees on H1Bs and student visas- these issues should be debated in Congress and the rules should be changed by consensus. His objective seems to be to shut almost all of it down, but this will just be reversed by the next guys or gal’s decree.
I do agree with what he has done at the border and also with ICE deporting criminals (and non-criminals incidentally caught up in the process of pursuing criminals), but not his showboating with ICE. His ICE “in residence” programs in sanctuary or permissive cities like Minnie and LA was simply a political stunt to please supporters- just as a sanctuary city and non-cooperation with ICE by local police forces is a political stunt. Note that the latter stunt has killed many more innocent people than ICE has.
The problem faced by conservatives that favor the "grand bargain" approach is that anything they trade away (increased legal immigration for instance) in exchange for border controls, or increased/more rapid deportation of illegal immigrants will remain in place in law, while some future liberal executive can just decide not to enforce the restrictions.
It is a one-way ratchet.
There realistically cannot be any compromise so long as the other party holds increased immigration (of any sort) to be moral/ethical cause and foundational belief.
Well, it is a poltical, transactional cause that has been sold as a moral crusade.
Somehow I think that if we had millions of conservative Polish and Hungarian plumbers streaming across our border the left wouldn’t be so eager to wave them through and put them on the dole.
“A large landslide”
They didn’t even get a majority of the votes! More people voted against 56% than for the AFD 44%.
What a typically lazy, throwaway failed attempt at a dunk. Pure cope. 44% in a parliamentary election with eight parties in the running. The second through fifth place finishers combined didn’t sum to the total of the AfD. That is a crushing landslide. You and the Bluesky leftists need to get your heads out of the sand.
That’s just how parliamentary elections work. Tony Blair won a crushing majority in 1997 with less than 44% of the vote.
The current Labour majority was built on closer to 30 percent of the vote.
Only in the UK. Most countries are sensible enough to have some form of proportional represenration, where you need to have a majority of the votes to have a parliamentary majority. The last UK election was crazy with Labour securing a huge parliamentary majority, with way less than 40% of the vote. This will have to change in the current multi party situation.
A tiny mudslide 😆
Migration may not be a human right but having somewhere to go when you are in danger of your life very much is. This is why what is happening to the Haitians is so appalling. This community worked hard and played by the rules and is being set back to a country that fundamentally has no government. This is also why the illegal immigration issue on the southern border is so hard. Some of these people are criminals, some have a definite right to asylum and some took such enormous risks to get here, increasing every year, that they fall under "people who see this country as the frontier" without any question. (A poll recently done by Pew showed that 52% of all Latinos in the United States (clearly immigration status was not asked about) thought that it was possible to achieve the American dream.) Only a policy of shared prosperity for both the United States and at least Mexico and Central America is going to solve this.
Noah writes that ''migration is not a human right''. Most charitably, we could consider this to mean immigration to a specific nation is not a human right because it is a right of a nation to restrict immigration. Emigration, its counterpart, should be a human right so that people can protect themselves from harm within their original nation. But unless the two acts are paired, we have stateless people, a huge problem. So we have here a conflict of rights claims.
The European Convention on Human Rights harmonizes these. What is your proposed solution, Noah? Allowing high-skilled economically-beneficial immigrants in is like skimming the cream: you still have the vast volume of milk left over to deal with. You are dealing only with the fraction of the problem that you want to deal with and dropping the rest on the floor.
You are quite right that a selective immigration policy amounts to skimming, yes. But it is not for any single nation to solve the problems of other nations. If some country is ruled by an intolerable regime, and many are, people will want to emigrate, yes. But nation A is not there to solve nation B's problems. This is not to say that B's citizens are inferior in any way to A's citizens, but A's government has a primary mandate to look after its own citizens, not after global welfare. Noah is not exactly treading new ground here, it's much more the definition of a well-run nation that he is articulating.
The Governor of She asked about government. The Master said, ‘Ensure that those who are near are pleased and those who are far away are attracted'. (Analects XIII/16).
Your comment also only deals with a fraction of the problem, and drops the rest on the floor. Reminds me of Cato the Elder and his solution for old slaves. The question isn't whether a nation is "well run", it is how to solve for these externalities due to a combination of desire to emigrate and desire to restrict immigration. The European Convention on Human Rights does a far better job than Noah's dropping the problem on the floor.
You seem to be dealing with a different problem statement than Noah. His problem is framing a liberalist philosophy of immigration that can stand up against (ultra)right pressure. Your problem is “how do we provide for the wretched of the Earth”? This is no doubt an important problem, and one that the solution offered by Noah to his problem “drops on the floor” as you say. But focusing on an overly broad issue makes all unlimited dogoodniks actually part of the problem, people distrust left-wingers precisely because they suspect them of an agenda that equates the well-being of your own citizens with those of non-citizens. Perhaps there is a beautiful transnational solution, but we don’t live in a transnational world.
A liberalist philosophy of immigration would be concerned with individuals, not just nation states. Liberalism is very concerned with “how do we provide for the wretched of the Earth”. That's Noah's failing here: it is very neoliberal or merchantilist in its attitude.
And of course, there ARE other second best solutions to choose from. For example, asylum claims could be validated without granting asylum, but rather with assisting refugees in finding an accepting nation and transporting them there without the abuses of ICE. It would be far cheaper. Likewise, would-be immigrants who desire the economic benefits could also be assisted with getting to a welcoming nation.
None of these ideas conflict with Noah's ideas: they merely extend them to encompass the problems Noah ignores.
No, the stateless problem only exists if ALL nations refuse immigration. Immigrants can go to the nations that do allow them, and those are typically nations with proximate cultures where cultural assimilation is easier anyway.
The European Convention on Human Rights does NOT create a general right to immigrate into another signatory country, nor does it impose a general duty on signatories to accept immigrants.
The European Court of Human Rights states the rule quite explicitly:
“The right to asylum is not contained in either the European Convention on Human Rights or its Protocols.”
And, as a general principle, states retain the right to control “the entry, residence and removal of aliens.”
And, yes, “skimming the cream” is a highly-effective immigration policy. I wish that the United States had that policy.
Because immigrants can teleport instantaneously for free to the nations that will accept them? Because immigrants have instant and certain knowledge of whether they will be allowed in at the border? Because immigrants don't care about the opportunities in the nation they are trying to enter? There are plenty of would-be immigrants in transit who are effectively stateless here in the real world despite your claim.
And of course, there is also the problem of distributing the burdens of immigration: if immigration posed no burdens, then everybody would be open to any amount any time any where. This is a basic Prisoner's Dilemma coordination problem between nations. The ones that defect from allowing immigration are most likely to bear the fewest burdens.
I live in Ecuador, where we have recently welcomed roughly 400,000 Venezuelan immigrants who comprise roughly 2.5% of the population. All immigrants are likely twice as many. Yes, there are strains and many of them are living in poverty. Ecuador is not rich like the most developed nations, and yet it can afford that. Illegal immigrants in the USA are less than 2% of the population.
I see that you are right about the European Convention on Human Rights. Yet the European Union is doing far better, with nearly 7% of the population being non-citizen
immigrants.
''“The right to asylum is not contained in either the European Convention on Human Rights or its Protocols.”'
but it is used (together with the Geneva convention on refugees) by European governments and judges (at least in my country) in all kinds of cases to grant refugees asylum.
Ironic, isn’t it?
"Immigration should be a human right." Says who? More importantly who has the power to enforce it on a country that does not want to?
It is not a conflict of rights or claims. Nation-states have a fundamental fiduciary duty to their citizens. If their citizens decide they want less immigration, those rights supersede the claims of individuals who are not a part of that political group
As far as dealing with the problem, Noah was quite charitable but the response is "keep the cream, dump the milk."
"If their citizens decide they want less immigration, those rights supersede the claims of individuals who are not a part of that political group"
Gee, that carries all the moral weight of slaveowners in slave states declaring that the federal government shouldn't abolish slavery. I trust I don't have to explain the analogy?
Nobody here is saying that immigration should be a human right: go ahead, quote us. But denying it as a human right does NOT solve the problem of emigrants needing to go someplace.
Noah is not a hero here for dropping that problem on the floor. It's a selfish "solution" that doesn't grant any weight to the misery it causes.
My father in law is a professor of social science in the UK. I recently asked him what the substantive policy debate about immigration should be, as it is completely lacking from public discourse.
His response: identity cards and labour laws.
This might be entirely relative to the UK, which has its own rising far right (Reform) with similar levels of crooks.
I personally never say myself supporting ID cards. But if it’s a choice between that and the country being run by Reform’s crooks, then I’d prefer to see a liberal government roll it out. The relevant safeguards are more likely to go in if it’s done by a liberal government.
I agree that a liberal philosophy of immigration would be economic in nature. But the point of having it, I suspect, is the translate it into policy choices that get put to the electorate.
I think the debate is absent from public discourse because there tends to be a slippery slope: the state gets nasty when it tries to enforce this kind of stuff. The most humane version of it is letting people rot in the gutter because their status chokes them off from access to things (like healthcare or shelter). Typically, it’s necessary to go further and start enclosing people in places that ultimately could look a bit like concentration camps.
But if liberals keep avoiding the issue we’ll all be reminded of the phase “evil succeeds when good people do nothing”.
Would work in the US, but refugees in Europe are legal. Some can work, some cannot work legally pending disposition of their application. In the US they can generally work.
Note I employed a number of Bosnians; Serbs, Croatians and Kosovars under the table (cleaners, nannies) in the UK during the 1990s Yugo pogroms. Still lots of cash jobs like that plus “buying” someone’s food delivery or uber shift. No ID needed.
Yes and I personally like taking my car to the car wash and paying the industrious Albanians in cash. If we have old clothes, we put them in bags in the boot and ask them if they’re interested in taking them.
It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life that I went to Sg/HK instead of the US. I hope Americans do whatever it takes to restore your greatness. I will always be wishing for it.
Why do you regret it so? Did you not have a good time in Hong Kong and Singapore?
I had a pretty good time in Singapore and am having a great time in Hong Kong but it’s abundantly clear that citizenship is primarily seen from an ethnicity lens here and you do get excluded a lot, mostly in subtle ways. I do believe it’s a lot harder now for immigrants than it ever was but the ethos of the US as an immigrant nation, I believe, should endure. Noah is probably right that they want skilled immigrants. With some effort, I could qualify but I have a whole life here now. Thanks for the question!
The use of the word frontier here is a bit unfortunate.
Even within the American context, the frontier is where you go to be free of the laws of wherever you came from and to take what you want from the people who are already there.
Luckily the moon doesn't have people there