Immigration and “impact”

Problem with open borders: people are sticky. They have linguistic, cultural and family ties to their homes that hold them there even if there is an apparent advantage to moving.
eg: 19th century Scandinavia – very poor. Lots of Swedes left for the US to build better lives in the upper Midwest, and succeeded in doing so. Why didn’t they all go?

Problem with your hypothesis that research pointing in a politically favourable direction will get funded: you get given the money before you do the research. So, in fact, what you’d have would be a situation where people who had produced popular results in the past would get funding for their next project, and people who hadn’t wouldn’t.

I find a comparison of current immigration laws and policies with the Poor Laws to be extremely informative.

A study of the old settlement cases with those of today’s immigration cases is also interesting.

“Impact” is a term that means different things in different places, even as regards research evaluation. In some circles, it means citation impact, derived from an iterative evaluation of which journals are cited by which other journals.

In recent Australian development, it means something like what Chris described but not quite. Effectively, it came in to avoid the outcome (likely otherwise) where second-tier universities were evaluated as doing essentially no high-quality research. “Impact” was brought in as a way of rewarding not-very-original applied research that could be claimed to be useful for local communities etc (I’m not bagging this kind of thing, I do a fair bit of it myself). My impression is that claims are not going to be evaluated too closely, since the aim is to ensure that every player wins a prize. In particular, I doubt that the government will want to get into rewarding research that yields the right conclusions. OTOH, there will almost certainly be picking of winners in terms of research fields. For example, I suspect, ethical philosophers would be well advised to look at the ethics of organ banks, and not those of aggressive war.

Overall, then I don’t know that it’s a good idea, but I don’t think it’s as scary as the picture drawn by Chris for the UK.

4: it’s a ‘problem’ in the sense that it means open-border policies are unlikely to have all the benefits that their advocates claim.

“Henceforth, research in the UK will be funded not just for its intrinsic quality (..)”

Tha would be indeed very bad if there were a non-controversial way to determine what has intrinsic quality (& what not) determinable without recourse to the public domain.

I’m certain individual politicians will tend to abuse their power also here but I’m not so certain that the alternative of non-involvement of politicians is any better.

It should be at least thinkable for researchers to convince the population that what they do has intrinsic quality; or that the process for determining intrinsic quality of research is a fair one (& not one that e.g. will favour pro-cannabis & pro-immigration research).

“I had a citizenship test … that was rather tricky”

Interesting how knowledge is used as a “legitimate” reason for discriminating against people.

Rather than what it perhaps should be used for … discriminating between people.

British policy is therefore, like the policy of many other countries, based on the idea that sovereign states have the right to exclude whoever they like and that they can therefore limit inward migration to people who can benefit “us”. There’s no thought given to the rights human beings have to freedom of movement, to the benefits of allowing people to escape poverty and build new lives. No, this is our place, and we’ll let in those whom we choose to. The poor, the huddled masses, can get stuffed.
But that’s the largely the same logic people (presumably including you) use to exclude others from their homes, freedom of movement and huddled masses be stuffed too. It’s not so obvious to me why this has to work different on a state level.

14: “What you have to remember Chris is that politicians are elected to represent/protect the interests of citizens, not potential citizens.”

That suggests that a democracy will be inherently unjust. Is someone such as an asylum seeker less deserving of protection in the UK purely because they can’t vote?

15: an asylum seeker in the UK gets the same protection under law that a citizen would; it’s just as illegal to rob an asylum seeker, sell him unsafe goods, hit her on the head with a shovel, etc as it is a citizen, even though one of them can vote and the other can’t.

What is the economic logic behind identifying skill shortages that would be used to select immigrants? Isn’t this just another example of picking winners?

20: No, as it would be unworkable — but there’s a systematic problem there that seems in part to derive from the fact that they have little recourse to any method of influencing the system. And that itself may be partly due to the notion that a democracy should represent only the interests of its citizens, and that any largess extended to others is an optional extra.

“No, as it would be unworkable—but there’s a systematic problem there that seems in part to derive from the fact that they have little recourse to any method of influencing the system. And that itself may be partly due to the notion that a democracy should represent only the interests of its citizens, and that any largess extended to others is an optional extra”

The great thing about democracy is that if you feel the system should be different you are fully entilted to either voting for candidates that share your views or run for office yourself.

On citizenship tests, this is one area where my intuitions are very much in line with Joseph Carens’, that such tests are largely pointless. They might also be harmless, if, like the one for the US, they have very little substance. (Carens’ article “why naturalization should be easy” is very good on this topic.) (The US test has a list of 100 questions, available with answers beforehand, 10 of which are asked at the examination, and you must get 6 right. It’s not plausibly a test of anything serious or much of a test at all. As with the English test [also not much of a test], waivers are available in many cases.) Still, all of that sounds much better than the proposed “integration contracts” in Germany. See:

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2009/11/integration-through-contract.html

When you use the phrase “labor shortage” or “skills shortage” you’re speaking in a sentence fragment. What you actually mean to say is: “There is a labor shortage at the salary level I’m willing to pay.” That statement is the correct phrase; the complete sentence and the intellectually honest statement.

Some people speak about shortages as though they represent some absolute, readily identifiable lack of desirable services. Price is rarely accorded its proper importance in their discussion.

If you start raising wages and improving working conditions, and continue doing so, you’ll solve your shortage and will have people lining up around the block to work for you even if you need to have huge piles of steaming manure hand-scooped on a blazing summer afternoon.

Re: Shortage caused by employees retiring out of the workforce: With the majority of retirement accounts down about 50% or more, most people entering retirement age are working well into their sunset years. So, you won’t be getting a worker shortage anytime soon due to retirees exiting the workforce.

Okay, fine. Some specialized jobs require training and/or certification, again, the solution is higher wages and improved benefits. People will self-fund their re-education so that they can enter the industry in a work-ready state. The attractive wages, working conditions and career prospects of technology during the 1980’s and 1990’s was a prime example of people’s willingness to self-fund their own career re-education.

There is never enough of any good or service to satisfy all wants or desires. A buyer, or employer, must give up something to get something. They must pay the market price and forego whatever else he could have for the same price. The forces of supply and demand determine these prices — and the price of a skilled workman is no exception. The buyer can take it or leave it. However, those who choose to leave it (because of lack of funds or personal preference) must not cry shortage. The good is available at the market price. All goods and services are scarce, but scarcity and shortages are by no means synonymous. Scarcity is a regrettable and unavoidable fact.

Shortages are purely a function of price. The only way in which a shortage has existed, or ever will exist, is in cases where the “going price” has been held below the market-clearing price.

“But there’s not so much protection from injustices arising from the nature of the asylum system itself, which in most other cases would be somewhat counteracted (at least in principle) by the notion that the politicians responsible could be turfed out of office by the victims of those injustices.”

No, there aren’t really enough refugees in Britain to make much of a political difference. According to this survey, there’s only about 21,000 of them. There are, I would imagine, a lot more former refugees who have become naturalised – not to mention children of former refugees, far less other immigrants! – but obviously they can already vote, and they haven’t been taking poor refugee treatment as a critical factor in their political decisions. Neither has the rest of the population, really.

I’ve have often heard the rationale for citizenship tests, and for similar hoops for immigrants to jump through, is that it promotes ‘social inclusion’ by making sure that no-one find themselves outside of the mainstream of British life just for the lack of the sort of everyday knowledge which we hard-working, ordinary Brits have. If this is true, perhaps we ought to have similar tests for other marginalised groups, such as, I dunno, out-of-touch corporate CEOs and investment bankers? There could be questions about everything from the price of Tesco ‘Value’ sausages to the current level of the UK minimum wage to the procedure for claiming a low-earning exemption for National Insurance in Tower Hamlets. To be re-tested at regular intervals. Fail to score at least 70% and it’s off to the off-shore detention for you, Mr Hester…

31: there should be. Every aspiring Briton should know whether King Edward I was a) a Good Thing b) a Good King, not to mention whether the Spanish Armadillo was or was not a stronger swimmer than the Great Seal.

30: Could it be extended to MPs as well? That might have amusing consequences…

in fact, what you’d have would be a situation where people who had produced popular results in the past would get funding for their next project, and people who hadn’t wouldn’t

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Actually, there are no questions on British history on the UK citizenship test…

There are quite a few questions on one spec1alised branch of history, How Long Have Things Been This Good? All would-be citizens need to know the date when men got the vote, the date when women got the vote, the date of the Married Women’s Property Act, usw.

This strikes me as a rather simplistic posting. Freedom of movement good, decisions to exclude bad. Academic freedom good, incentives to do ‘useful’ research bad. Slippery slope arguments without much effort to demonstrate that the slope is in fact slippery. Lazy accusations that those who are on the other side of the argument are not even ‘intellectually respectable’.
On the last point, try some of Scheffler’s stuff (a collection called Boundaries and Allegiances, from memory), or if you want something more easily digestible, David Goodhart in Prospect magazine. You may not agree with them (indeed Scheffler doesn’t agree with a lot of the arguments he explores), but to dismiss them as not even intellectually respectable is wrong.
One of the things which academics could usefully bring to debates over policy and political choices – because the media by and large won’t – is a bit of subtlety, a bit of light and shade. And I’d say that when they do, there are enough people inside government who will read them and learn from them. Sure, there will be some who read them with too much of an eye to finding things they already agree with – but that is true of other academics, too.
More widely you might want to consider what role the media play in this dynamic. Here is just one example, in the area of immigration. The government commissioned an academic estimate of the numbers of migrants who would come to the UK from the accession countries in 2004. The estimate was implausibly low. The government published the estimate (freedom of information rules made it hard not to), but explicitly distanced itself from it. 5 years later, the estimate is still cited as ‘the government’s estimate’, in attacks on the Government’s (too lax) immigration policy.
This is an example of the kinds of reasons why governments might be reluctant to commission research they can’t influence, if not control. I agree that that isn’t ideal, but I hope this example shows the various factors that help make it so (other than the venality of the political class). The impossibility of keeping research or advice private is one factor; excitable, sometimes irresponsible media coverage is another.
Both these factors also apply to the recent case you cite, of the drug adviser. I don’t think it is right to describe his sacking as a ‘punishment’; it was based on a judgment that, as an academic who was also an adviser, he had strayed over the line (hard to define, but surely not hard to understand in general terms) that obliges him to keep his advice, and the manner of its presentation, calm, cooperative and sometimes, private.

But CB, do those arguments have to be of a high intellectual standard? The question is whether people have a right to exclude other people from the country if they chose so. If they have that right, the reasons they might have to want to exclude others are in their personal space, and less open to universal arguments. On that level you can try to convince people to allow foreigners on charitable grounds, or for non-economic welfare enhancing reasons, but at that personal level “Crowded” and “I don’t particularly like foreigners” are OK arguments to bring forward.

re: 44

It’d undermine it if it was true. We have the book in the house at the moment, and it’s clearly not primarily a test of English comprehension/vocabulary.

47: but does it say at the beginning that “the primary intent of the test is to evaluate people’s English language skills”, as Laleh says it does?

Of course, if the claim is that the test is supposed to evaluate grasp of English, and it clearly isn’t, then that would be problematic in another way….

50: OK, I see what you mean…

“but the system of territorial exclusion coerces some to the benefit of others without such reciprocity.”
Is this really the case? Mexico has the same right to prevent Americans from entering their territory as the US has to prevent Mexicans from entering theirs.

56:
This is actually not that unusual. In Canada an applicant for citizenship can take the test in either French or English, despite the fact the French is useless in pretty much the entire country outside of Quebec and sections of Nova Scotia. It is more of a symbolic gesture than anything.

Even if it was a way to test English language ability, I question its fairness. Is really the ability to speak English a reliable or fair measure of the right to become a citizen? Is really “you must be educated enough” a good way to discriminate between those that can and cannot become citizen?

I speak as somebody who can, with studious application, probably pass the test, mainly because I am in the privileged position to be allowed to live here. I know damn well that there are many, more virtuous, hard-working, and desirable than me, that do not have the ability to pass the test.

BTW, wasn’t there something in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights about freedom of movement?

BTW, wasn’t there something in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights about freedom of movement?

As such? No. There’s a right to free movement within the borders of each state., which has largely been taken to apply to citizens and mean that they can’t be forced to live in certain areas only, and there’s a right to leave any country and to return to one’s own country. These rights were put in place primarily to poke the communist countries, as they regularly violated all of them with propiska systems, exit restrictions, and exile. There’s also a right to seek asylum, but it, also, isn’t a right to free movement.

I should add as well that I’d not buy, at least fully, the account of sovereignty that Myles SG points to above. While I think that states have legitimate authority to place many restrictions on immigration I don’t think this authority is unlimited.

let’s just, for this thought experiment, leave out the Muslim factor!

I would say this is a no-brainer. A legitimate sovereign state and its citizens have the rights to determine who is permitted entry to their space and who is not. In comparison, the non-citizen has no rights whatsoever to entry, let alone living there. As it should be.

It seems to me that international migration has to be considered within the concept of federalism; the matter to be addressed at levels above the national. People attempting to migrate to escape poverty or danger should be (as they are already) assisted by various international entities; they certainly should be fed and protected, but their predicament doesn’t give them the right to enter any state they choose.

Same as a homeless person: he has to be able to obtain food and shelter from the city government, but not to enter and stay at any private residence he likes.

“(on second thought: I’m not joking on the latter; don’t imprison Madoff’s, expel them)”

That is fully ludicrous. His citizenship is his right of birth; no crime should be great enough for him to be stripped of this most sacrosanct of rights. I should note that, indeed, in Great Britain only high treason has justified the forfeiture of even peerages and titles of nobility, and the rights of citizenship logically operates upon even stricter and more immutable principles.

“But you can’t use that argument to justify coercing foreigners for the benefit of the domestic population (preserving their way of life, preventing overcrowding etc), because there’s no quid pro quo.”

I am sorry Chris, but that is a completely unsupportable assertion. The relationship is the exact inverse of what you have described. When a person travels from a foreign land, and wishes to settle, in Britain for example, the burden of proof is on him that his settlement ought be allowed on whatever grounds. Now there are some grounds which are irrefutable, and can only be restricted on grounds of practicality and physical constraints. But it is he who must petition the prince under whom he wishes to live, that he has a right to disturb, and to change, by his arrival, the condition and pattern of settlement in this new land. The burden of proof is on him to demonstrate that he has a right, over and above the discrete feelings of the population that could justifiably override those discrete feelings, i.e. prove that he ought be allowed to settle even if the majority of the British oppose his settlement. Now, that’s a completely legitimate process, but that is certainly coercion. He is, in effect, coercing the British population to let his natural right override the full, unlimited application of their own rights to sustain their present condition. And that, indeed, is a form of coercion without reciprocity, indeed even less reciprocity than the state’s coercion of the would-be settler. But my argument seems incredible, because it is difficult to imagine the settlement-seeker, in some tangible way, actually coercing his visa authority.

That is because your argument is, in effect, not based on individual rights of freedom, but rather communitarian notions of aggregate good, which has no relationship whatsoever with most pro-immigration arguments. You aren’t arguing that the settlement-seeker has an unlimited natural right; rather, you are arguing that the lack of reciprocity when the state, say, Great Britain, exercises exclusion, is bad because it is to the detriment of aggregate good. That while domestic coercion justified on the provision of greater common good, international coercion is unjustified on the basis of lack of the same provision.

How is that even an argument? First of all, we are completely blurring the lines between actual, state-sponsored coercion, which is a concept arising from the fact that the state exercises force superior and above the individual being coerced, with what is being called coercion but actually an equal relationship. As there is no world government, the capacity of Home Office to act, in this area, does not amount to anything more than exclusion from its purview.

But more importantly, you are subtly suggesting the superiority of communitarian, overall good (on a global basis) overrides the sovereignties and rights of the individual parties; that is the basis of your argument, really, not coercion or whatever. But that isn’t a valid argument at all. The only meaningful limitation, since Westphalia, is that sovereignties of a of people forming a party on the international theatre cannot override the human rights of individuals within that specific party. (War between Iraq and Kuwait is between sovereign parties) But there has been no suggestion, whatever, that the good of the entire community can somehow justify overriding the sovereignties of both the groups of parties forming parties, and that of the people thereby being represented. Unless you are willing to argue that the global order runs on that basis, your argument cannot stand.

That’s why speaking of reciprocity on anything beyond a national level when talking about sovereign actions, is, frankly, a bit bizarre. There is no obligation of reciprocity, because there is no obligation of the states, which are individual actors, to somehow sacrifice their own rights and the rights of their people in the pursuit of the common good. Because that is exactly what you are asking them to do when asking them to allow unrestrained immigration. People fought Thirty Years’ War to conclude upon that very principle, which is the whole basis of modern Western nation-state civilization.

I quote:

“The point about reciprocity is key here, because domestic coercion is often justified on the grounds that it is mutually beneficial, or it assures equal freedom, etc. But you can’t use that argument to justify coercing foreigners for the benefit of the domestic population (preserving their way of life, preventing overcrowding etc), because there’s no quid pro quo.”

You mention mutual benefit. I will note that in many respects, a quid pro quo is not possible, so it degenerates into a question about balance of globular benefits and harms (i.e. aggregate good), rather than “is that a quid pro quo/mutual benefit?” Past a certain point, immigration is problematic for the existing population. We haven’t reached that point, on a policy level, yet in North America (although arguments vary as to the effects of illegal aliens in the U.S.); accounting for cultural inertia and resistance (and sometimes xenophobia, let’s not fool ourselves), Europe is probably nearing that point.

But your point isn’t “let’s allow immigration until it reaches that point past which British people don’t like (they already don’t, for god’s sakes); it is “let’s allow immigration because excessively restricting immigration is not mutually beneficial.”

That’s where Impact comes in. Where are we on that curve? Are we at the point where immigration is mutually beneficial, or at the point where immigration benefits the immigrant at (partial; it’s not an zero-sum game) expense of the existing population? Because whatever the Home Office does, if we are at the latter point (probably not there yet) then the argument about reciprocity and quid pro quo and mutual benefit is completely moot, because whatever it does will benefit one at the expense of the other, whether it’s restriction or not.

Chris Bertram said:

British policy is therefore, like the policy of many other countries, based on the idea that sovereign states have the right to exclude whoever they like and that they can therefore limit inward migration to people who can benefit “us”. There’s no thought given to the rights human beings have to freedom of movement, to the benefits of allowing people to escape poverty and build new lives. No, this is our place, and we’ll let in those whom we choose to. The poor, the huddled masses, can get stuffed.

Sovereignty is to the state as property is to the household. The Crown has the lawful power and duty to regulate the passage of people through the land.

As Bentham remarked, talk of abstract rights is nonsense, and natural rights is “nonsense on stilts”. Rights exist , of course, but they are constructed and assigned after due (utilitarian) consideration of the public interest. And they are always complemented by duties which is part and parcel of the evolving social contract.

There is no such social contract with any and everyone beyond the borders.

Its false to claim that foreigners have terrible constraints on ” freedom of movement” to the UK. HM government is signatory to international refugee conventions which oblige it to take in some legitimate asylum seekers.

There is plenty of freedom of movement for foreigners to the UK. They can cross borders to work, study and play on various visas.

More to the point, a democratic government is morally obliged to account for its actions to its principals (in this case the voting citizens). Immigration policy, like all other policies, should be framed to promote the national interest. So in general the UK government, like most others, reserves itself the power to “decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”.

If you dont like the results of democratic elections you can, like Brecht or Neather, recommend that the government “elect a new people”. That appears to be the agenda of the multicultural/sweated labour Open Border brigade.

This experiment has been tried in diluted form and on the whole the results have been unsatisfactory to the principals ie citizens of the state. Its bizarre to suggest that all we need to do is try it in a pure concentrated form. You would quickly end up having civil war which would not exactly favour “free movement of peoples”.

Once upon a time middle class intellectuals at least pretended to care about the interests of their working class fellow citizens. I guess its more important to have a caste of foreigners to do the jobs that working class citizens want decent wages to do. Plus the usual muti-culti formula of gaudy threads, spicy nosh and funky vibes to keep the festival industry on its feet.

Chris Bertram@#76 11.29.09 at 10:23 am passim:

Have to marvel at the facts you present and logic you deploy to deal with the substance of my argument, which is that Open Borders is an ideological fantasy which is both morally unjustifiable, economically unsustainable and politically unpopular.

My modest proposal that the national interest should be taken the major consideration when framing national policy in a democracy is “an unsupported assertion” alright. One of those things that “should go without saying” to most people who make it to majority (in both senses of the word).

My statement that post-modern liberalism, both Left-liberal and Right-liberal versions, is an “ideology of elites” is not an “ad hominum slur“. It is a trivial statement of social psychology abundantly substantiated by empirical research and anecdotal tale. This cap fits all-too snugly.

Granted the crack about “middle intellectuals” was below the belt. Note to self: stop channelling Orwell.

Hey Chris, you’re most unfair. 78 is a strawman if ever there will be. You imply that we only account for poorer nation’s wishes if we open our borders to their citizens. Which is genuinely laughable and you won’t escape that by trying to make your interlmocutor the laughing stock on your thread.

PS: yes, the more I read of you – the more I understand where the left gets the popular opinion against it; as if you live iu another world (which certainly is NOT the world for the people you so magnanimously have chosen to ‘defend’)

I have been trying to reconcile my desire to support a radical open borders policy, and my severe distaste for policies like the one Chris protests here, with what I understand the Israeli settlements in Palestine to be. While that’s an ambiguous case currently, one can thought-experiment — if there did exist a stable two-state solution enacted and upheld, it would be hard for me to formulate an argument in favor of Palestinian open borders.

If it wasn’t for the existence of examples like Palestine-Israel, I would dismiss the potential for — what I understand to be — mass immigration of a hostile population, with the intent to collectively undermine the sovereignty of an established state over the settlements — as ludicrously implausible scenario. But given even that one example, it’s at first tempting, to naive me, to suggest some kind of clause in open borders policy which requires, somehow, perhaps indirectly, for potential immigrants to be immigrating ‘in good faith’ (whatever that means). But what does that mean? A desire to participate in the economy? That criteria is clearly problematic. A respect for the legitimacy and sovereignty of the state? A little better in the sense of being more ethically defensible, I think, but how does one measure such ‘respect’ meaningfully?

I think a state has a legitimate interest in confirming that immigrants are immigrating in good faith, that is, their intent is not to disturb the stability of the state or undermine its legitimacy. (This obliquely acknowledges and accommodates ajay’s point at #48, I think.) But the potential for abuse in determining what constitutes good faith is on display in the policy mentioned in this post, and that’s deeply unfortunate.

81- a one state solution with normal democracy (including saveguarding minority right for traditional minorities) would solve your issue.

Have fun, enjoy never sinking to ad hominem ;-)

81- a one state solution with normal democracy (including saveguarding minority right for traditional minorities) would solve your issue.

I remain unconvinced, and suspect “minority right for traditional minorities” would be construed so as to accommodate expansion of the settlements and prohibit any of their dissolution. But I didn’t mean to focus on the current situation in Israel, which isn’t pertinent, so much as to explore the legitimate possibility of hostile mass immigration and how this complicates advocacy for open borders.

87- yes, but it could also be construed as a right to return; and it is pertinent because it demonstrates exactly why open borders are an issue, as seen from the people living on either side of it.

Although I will note that Chris, your comment struck me as having almost Mirror-esque tone-deafness for someone who lives in Great Britain. You don’t exactly have the excuse of being some North American detached from the whole fervid and charged debate in Europe and making an offhanded comment about the merits of more open immigration. I mean, you could have been a bit more considerate, and a lot less dismissive, of the exceedingly unfavourable feelings current in Britain…

Salient@88: One can imagine a population claiming to acknowledge the legitimacy of a state, with the express intent of recolonizing it and overthrowing the government over the course of a few generations.

One can also imagine a population claiming in good faith to acknowledge the legitimacy of a state, while not having been adequately educated concerning what that acknowledgment properly entails. So what? And in what specific way does your understanding of the Israeli/Palestinian situation impact on this topic (I’m asking not because I think it’s an interesting direction to pursue, but to mildly point out that you haven’t made your meaning clear)?

Chris Bertram@#78 11.29.09 at 11:08 am said:

Nothing remotely “post-modern” about me Jack, liberal, in a certain sense, I’ll grant you.

I accept your good faith on that. The problem is that so many modern liberals, especially academics such as yourself, are unwittingly exposed to near lethal doses of the post-modern radiation in the course of every day life. Very often they are asymptomatic sufferers.

A telling sign of the dread disease is obsessive talk about rights to the exclusion of duties (“liberal, in a certain sense”?). Modernist liberalism is not a philosophy of individual (still less corporal) rights. Rights are the ideological superstructure, not anthropological foundation, of civil society.

Modernist iberalism is not even always about the freedom of the individual, who, as Rousseau plaintively observed, is “born free but always in chains”.

Modernist liberalism is an intellectual attempt to reconcile responsible individual autonomies to accountable institutional authorities. Whether the autonomies/authorities be children/households, shareholders/companies or citizen/states. This philosophy was emerged from the medieval marriage of principal/agent law and double entry accounting. Philosophy had little to do with it.

I dont see much talk of responsibility/accountability or rights/duties (which emerge by evolution of tradition rather than dictated by abstract reason) in your argument. Therefore j’accuse post-modernist liberalism.

Chris Bertram@#78 11.29.09 at 11:08 am said:

It seems obvious, to me at least, that whatever the obligations of the citizens of rich nations to poorer ones are, the right answer can’t be “whatever the citizens of rich countries want them to be.” Yet that’s the answer that your prioritization of sovereignty and democracy generates.

Be wary of what “seems obvious to” yourself before you try to sell it the rest of the world. Any “right answer” that does not prioritize foundational practices such as “sovereignty and democracy” is suspect.

Rich citizens (or indeed any citizens) have a moral obligation to help those less fortunate who cannot help themselves wherever they are, within or without the border. But prospective immigrants are not the most likely candidates to fall into that category.

Your “global humanitarianism => open borders” argument rests on a gigantic non sequitur. Citizens of nation states may be an obligation to help foreign people in distress. But it does not follow that obligation extends to providing them a place to live in our midst. We have a foreign aid and refugee budget for such humanitarian purposes.

If the individual citizen of a nation state chooses to provide assistance or sanctuary to foreigners then this in the nature of an ex gratia payment. If the individual chooses to delegate that duty to his institutional agents then he must be a party to that decision through due process. In either case he is not bound to do it by apriori axiom, but does it out of the goodness of his heart.

More generally, inviolable rights and binding duties (or the more extravagant entitlements and less onerous obligations that we Baby Boomers have created for ourselves) typically evolve through civil evolution, sometimes facetiously known as the “social contract”. Aliens are not a material party to the national version of that contract, the case of externalities excepted. The long line of ancestors are, which is why constitutions should be made hard to change. And it seems reasonable to consider the interests of descendants in the bargain.

To put it bluntly, nation statists remind us that nation states have a history, a tradition built and bequeathed to us by our forefathers and which we bestow to our children. (Your philosophy is ahistorical, another warning sign of post-modernism.) Aliens do not share in that history and therefore have no presumptive rights to claim on the state, still less any abstract rights dreamt up ex nihilo by speculative philosophers.

Chris Bertram said:

Rather, the attitude that politicians have to research is to latch onto it when it supports the view they already hold and to ignore (or punish) it when it tells them something uncomfortable. Research that supports tighter border controls (or harsher drug laws) will have “impact” and research that favours more immigration or legalizing weed won’t. And the money will follow.

It’s true, and perhaps lamentable, that “politicians… latch onto research..when it supports the view they already hold”. Unfortunately this is a character flaw not exclusive to that “crafty animal”. No names, no pack drill.

Your working assumption is that political elites are eager to embrace xenophobic populism. Far from being frothing-at-the-mouth reactionaries, most of the Euro political establishment are bought-and-paid-for cultural liberals. (eg the Swiss) Its the general public which is wary of these policies, or at least the free-for-all that they unleash.

Chris Bertram said:

researchers with one view would be more likely to benefit from the British government’s “impact” criterion

The political class already sponsor much research and advocacy for “more immigration” and “legalizing weed” (interesting that you link the two!).

Look at the case of Andrew Neather, speech writer for the Blair government . He more or less admitted that in 2000 the Blair government had commissioned research suggesting that it would be good politics for the BLP to open the floodgates of immigration. Its worth examining his admissions, which constitute a smoking gun for the existence of an academia-media-apparatchik complex dedicated to “electing a new people”, in greater detail. They are a testimony to “impact” selected research, of a certain kind:

I wrote the landmark speech given by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls. It marked a major shift from the policy of previous governments: from 1971 onwards, only foreigners joining relatives already in the UK had been permitted to settle here.

That speech was based largely on a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit,Tony Blair’s Cabinet Office think-tank. The PIU’s reports were legendarily tedious within Whitehall but their big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy. Drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was a paranoia about it reaching the media.

Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled “RDS Occasional Paper no. 67”, “Migration: an economic and social analysis” focused heavily on the labour market case. But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.

Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche’s keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote.

This shone through even in the published report: the “social outcomes” it talks about are solely those for immigrants.

There is a reason that “populism” is feared by “elites”. The latter do not want their well-laid plans for making over the country and feathering their own nest to be upset by anything as smelly as “working class voters”, wallowing in the past out in the “provinces” or “sticks”.