Kukathas on Immigration and Freedom

Sure, the costs of the surveillance needed to segregate out an immigrant class are undoubtedly huge, and mostly hidden. But, surely, the feeling of superiority of social standing that maintaining such a class distinction affords to ordinary people is both priceless and obvious. Obvious enough to be used to win elections.

If you want the rulers to quit oppressing immigrants, all you have to do is restore massive social distinctions within society so that they will not have to be sought between our society and foreigners. Go back to, say, the War of the Roses era, and have a socially distinct class of rulers lording it over the common masses. The rulers will be quite content to let the masses, native or foreign born, suffer a common oppression in magnificent equality with one another, if only because their real attention will be diverted to slaughtering each other over title to the throne.

But no, the UK had to go and try to make a (relatively) classless society. Well, throw nature out the door and it will come back in through the window. Feeling entitled by birth to social superiority over some group of other people is just too delightful to pass up. We must have our social hierarchies, one way or the other, and there is a lot to be said for a social order that results in the rulers slaughtering each other.

Chris Bertram’s summary convinced me that immigration control is costly and harmful to citizens. I’m not going to read the book, but a question: does Kukathas draw any conclusions from this? Is he further arguing that immigration control is morally wrong? Or that the costs exceed the benefits of immigration control? Or that the costs of immigration control should be mitigated? Or something else?

JQ: I do of course agree that some aspects of immigration are advantageous to all concerned, and that sometimes government attempts to regulate immigration are carried out in a clumsy, mindless way (that being an aspect of larger truths: that sometimes attempts by anybody to do anything are carried out in a clumsy and mindless way, and that the penalties for a government official being c&m are often less than they would be elsewhere).

But I don’t think that we’re exactly dealing with “a law that says citizens can’t marry, and live with, someone of whom the government disapproves”. Rather it is, as CB wrote, that “If a citizen wants to marry a foreigner and live with that person on the territory of the state, they have to prove to the authorities that their relationship is genuine”. This is, surely, intended to block sham marriages, in which one partner tries to become a resident under false pretences. It would be the falsehood, not the person, of which the government disapproves. Are they wrong?

CB also deplores that “To enter into employment, or to rent a place to live, or to open a bank account or acquire a driving licence, you have to prove your right to live in the country”. Is it suggested that people with no right to live in the country should be free to do these things? Unless you believe that everyone has a right to live in whatever country they please … bit of a problem there, though.

Stephen: “There’s some sort of logical legerdemain going on here. Are you arguing that the degree required of monitoring and control over citizens is comparable to that required for immigrants? Or that states have no right to monitor and control their own citizens? Do you think nobody should need a driving licence if they want to drive?”

The original post answered your questions.

To condense the answers down for you, I will use an example as already mentioned above:

The state may or may not monitor rentals of living spaces, but if it wants to keep illegal immigrants from renting living spaces, the state will need such monitoring.

CB: I am of course very well aware that people have always married for reasons other than romantic love, and still do, particularly in countries which I would regard as unenlightened: I don’t know what you think of enforced marriages and polygamy. (Still and all, the concept of romantic love goes back some way. Being an arts professor from Bristol, you may be familiar with Peter Dronke’s “Mediaeval Latin and the rise of the European love-lyric” which traces it back to ancient Egypt.)

I share your doubts about Government officials making infallible decisions, but are you disputing that bogus marriages, for the sole purpose of circumventing restrictions on immigration, have quite often happened? If you are not, what should be done about them?

As for your belief that “immigration control does not justify burdening everyone with the cost and intrusiveness of such checks” (on getting a job or a bank account or a driving licence, or renting somewhere), I as a UK citizen never found these costly (except for the driving licence) or intrusive. But I am no longer young: are things different now? I repeat: do you think illegal immigrants should be given all these for the asking?

Lastly, I don’t understand your assertion that such checks “have highly undesirable side-effects including racial discrimination in employment and housing”. That makes some sort of sense if you assume that illegal immigrants are more likely to be Africans or Asians, which is very likely true, but if so are not those discriminated against being singled out on the basis of their legal status, not their race?

@CB: oh no, I did very much notice the Windrush scandal, and I can’t think why you suppose I didn’t (other than an assumption that anyone who queries your beliefs must be deeply ignorant. Didn’t work well in recent UK politics, did it?)

The quite deplorable problem with the deeply misfortunate Windrush generation, I would suggest, was founded in the confusion between illegal immigrants and undocumented immigrants. This equivalence is something that the open-borders enthusiasts (would I be wrong in classing you among them?) have done their best to establish. That some officials chose to put paper qualifications before reality is of course despicable, but far from unprecedented.

I would appreciate, but do not entirely expect, replies from you to some of the questions I asked earlier, instead of attempts to change the subject.

“You are of course free to argue that states have no right to control immigration at all, which is rather another matter and not an obvious path to popular approval.”

I would in fact argue this. I’ll also note that “popular approval” is a problem here, are you counting also the wanna-be immigrants in the “populus” or not?

The justification about modern day nation states is a supposed pre-existent community of people who are part of the same populus: e.g. supposedly, there are “italians” but, alas! Italy was dominated by the evil foreigners until the 19th century, at which point heroic italians runified/freed the fatherland and founded united Italy during the “risorgimento”.
Unfortunately they took too much of a liking to this so shortly after they were around conquering the balcans and force-italianizing the locals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italianization), however the locals were not Italians but “Yugoslavs” so they heroically chased out the invaders during WW2.
Ultimately in the 90s the Yugoslavs discovered that they weren’t really Yugoslavs, but Sebs, Croats, Bosnians, Montenegrins, and Slovenes, and they chased out each other a lot until they again found a match between a pre-existing “populus” and a geographical entity.

This idea of a pre-existing populus sucks for various reasons:

First of all, if by populus we mean genetic ancestry we end up with some very racist definition of populus, that for very evident reasons can’t work in modern days.

Second, if by populus we mean a common culture, we also get very big problems: suppose for example that most (90%) italians are catholics, but if we define catholicism as being a core part of the identity of italians it follows that non-catholics are less italian than others, which is a problem because we want freedom of religion, and the same work for all cultural definitions.

So do this concept of a populus really mean nothing?
Well, not really, because in some cases like that of the forced italianisation there was an ethnic group that directly oppressed another ethnic group; the division of the world in ethnically omogeneous nation states is supposed to be a defence against this kind of thing.

But in the case of modern day immigration we do not have this kind of ethnicity on ethinicity oppression, so what kind of “populus” are we speaking of?

If a person is pre-excluded from the populus, that person has no democratic rights, so the fact that another group of people democratically decided among themselves to exclude him or her is irrelevant.

So in the end, the concept of the ethnic populus makes no sense and is not acceptable in a modern democratic country, and pre-excluding people from civil rights cannot be accepted in a democracy because the civil right themselves are a presupposition of democracy, hence a democratic country cannot exclude people from citizienship (and therefore from immigration).

While in practice my position is an on extreme of the spectrum and therefore there are small chances of this being implemented anytime soon, the problem is that liberals in general would want more reasonable limits on immigration, but in reality “reasonable limits” are difficult to define because they don’t exist for the above mentioned reasons.
So this is an actual problem.

I’ve wondered, ever since I moved to the UK 14 years ago, how people born here prove their right to residence, since the same politicians who ratchet up the hostile environment oppose national identity cards. As a foreigner I always had adequate documentation (for a high fee), but if I’d been born here the government would not provide me with any official proof of my status, even while demanding ever more frequently that I provide such proof. A passport can be obtained — also for a fee — but I don’t see how people demonstrate their eligibility. Younger people need to show that their parents are or were citizens, and for an increasing number of people that will mean having to demonstrate that their grandparents were born in the UK. How many people can actually organise that? In practice, it seems that people who look right and have the right accent are passed with cursory inspection, while others need to provide reams of paperwork, or, in the worst cases, simply have their rights terminated.

As for burdening, it’ll probably get less so: face recognition software is getting better.

I’d consider omnipresent cameras and facial-recognition algorithms about as burdensome a regime as one can imagine.

@6
‘@Stephen people have married over the centuries for all kinds of reasons, and usually not for those of romantic love’.

YES! and don’t you guys remember how – ‘once upon a time’ – ‘people have been married’ -(by ‘the Grandmother of Europe’) – in order to unite Europe

So we have:
1. Princess Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise married to Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, who became the emperor of Germany. Their son was Kaiser Wilhelm. Their daughter Sophie became Queen of Greece.
2. Prince Albert Edward Wettin – later King Edward VII. married Alexandra of Denmark.
3. Princess Alice Maud Mary married Prince Ludwig of Hesse and their daughter Alexandra, or Alix, married Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia.
4. Prince Alfred Ernest Albert also married a Russian – the Grand Duchess Marie, daughter of Czar Alexander II.
5. Princess Helena Augusta Victoria married Prince Frederick Christian of Schleswig-Holstein.
6. Princess Louise Caroline Alberta married John Douglas Sutherland Campbell – later the Governor General of Canada. the province of Alberta, and its famous Lake Louise.
7. Prince Arthur William Patrick married Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia
8. Prince Leopold George Duncan married Princess Helena Frederica of Waldeck.
9. Princess Beatrice Mary Victoria married Prince Henry of Battenberg and passed the some hemophiliac gene onto her daughter and thusly on to the Spanish royal family.

AND so WE’RE actually ALL related – and any ‘Brexits’ are completely useless and we don’t need no ‘Borders’ or anything silly like that…

Right – Guys?!

@Gorgonzola 16

I never heard the concept of political nation, at least not with these words; I would call the political thingie “state” and the ethnical thingie “nation” (from the latin natione, people of the same birth), and the coincidence of ethnic boundaries with politic boundaries “nation-state”.

@SamChevre 18
For example, if 80% of people in a club say that the remaining 20% of people are now out of the club there is no problem, and the same would be true for a political party that eject 20% of their aderents because the remaining 80% believe that their views are not compatible anymore.
But if 80% of americans say that, for example, libertarians are not compatible anymore with mayority opinion and therefore they are not american anymore and therefore they lose voting rights and are not citizens anymore, that would be unacceptable.
This is because democracy presuppose that everyone can vote, so the right to vote is a prerequisite for democracy, and cannot be refused democratically.
Up to some times ago women could not vote, or people without real estate could not vote etc., but we don’t see this as democratic: in a country where for example only white males who own real estate could vote, even if the mayority of them consistently refused the right to vote to women, non whites or non proprietors, we wouldn’t recognize that as a real democracy because a lot of people would be pre-excluded from the right to vote.
I don’t see why distinction by place of birth or parent nationality is different from distinction by race, gender or social status.

@25,
Hundreds of millions of people self-identify as ‘Americans’, ‘British’, ‘Belgians’. It has nothing to do with their ethnicity (as I understand the word). What they have in common is an affiliation with the same geopolitical entity. And yes, they like to reproduce this identity, to pass it onto their children. Occasionally they even go, willingly, and kill and get killed for the sake of this identity, so it’s quite a strong one. Some of us aren’t really into it all that much, but most people are. So, sure, you can call it “state” if you like, but it seems that you might be missing something.

@
‘Hundreds of millions of people self-identify as ‘Americans’, ‘British’, ‘Belgians’. It has nothing to do with their ethnicity (as I understand the word). What they have in common is an affiliation with the same geopolitical entity. And yes, they like to reproduce this identity, to pass it onto their children’.

Really? –
So for everybody who has more than just one geopolitical entity -(and there are more and more of us not only by marriages) – which one of there identities should they pass on to their children?

Or wouldn’t it be much much ‘better’ -(or even more ‘peaceful’) to pass all of them to their children – or let’s ask: Why are there borders between the different identities I have?
There should be no reason for it?

J-D: I would of course be very happy to receive an answer from you, or anyone else, to the questions I have asked CB; appreciating, naturally, that your views may differ from his, and that my answers to the questions may not be the same as yours.

I see that Chris Bertram has now responded to you. If you can explain how his response is of value to you, I will provide my own response, if you still want one.

There really aren’t obvious or organic distinctions between ethnicity, nationality, and state citizenship. What we have instead is a convoluted and often contradictory web of legal and historical precedents augmented by academic ruminating and the mythmaking of politicians. Even the allegedly defunct categories of race and religion are rarely far from these discussions.

My favorite example of this is the oft repeated line that the Han Chinese are the world’s largest ethnic group. People are quick to mock the Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks for underlining their supposed differences, but to me the Chinese example is far more egregious. None of the conventional definitions of ethnicity based on language, religion, and folk ways really fits for a diverse empire like China — even the name “Han” speaks to an imperialist legacy — but a long history of being in a shared polity and a somewhat superficial veneer of cultural conformity is apparently enough to convince the world, and the Han themselves, that a region as large and diverse as Europe or South Asia is almost entirely homogeneous.

There are blatant political reasons why this has been done, just as many of the “ethnic” divisions of the Balkans are blatantly political, yet both these extremes of ethnic maximalism and minimalism have apparently been accepted simultaneously by the international community because they serve the interests of their respective states and the international community itself largely exists to defend the rights of states, not peoples.

I wonder if Chris Bertram has lived on the “continent”, because I think this way of thinking about things is peculiarly British. I’m Australian and live in Germany. When I moved to Germany I had to register my residence with the local authority. To do this I needed to produce to documents to prove who I was. This is normal, not a strange imposition. Germany has long and effectively (at least pre-covid) open borders.

I would love if there were no borders, but so long as there is a social welfare state and large differences in income between countries I don’t see how it is at all possible, without endangering the social welfare state.

@
‘I would love if there were no borders, but so long as there is a social welfare state and large differences in income between countries I don’t see how it is at all possible, without endangering the social welfare state’.

which reminds me that I just read a few days ago in the Südkurier that the German Welfare State is threatened if Germany doesn’t get a lot more immigration of (fureign) workers, who have to make sure -(with their work and taxes) – that ‘welfare’ in Germany keeps on coming…

@
‘you will have to live in Italy among Italians for several years, and get integrated into the Italian society. Only then you can credibly claim that you ‘feel like Italian’. Otherwise, it’s just a fantasy’.

which could remind US all – that you can become ‘Italian’ by still being ‘British’ or ‘American’ or even ‘German’ -(and especially being ‘German-Italian’) – as it reminds me that I actually don’t have a single Italian friend who isn’t at the same time ‘American-Italian-German’ and so I ask again – what’s the need to put any borders between these
‘geopolitical entities’?

@38,
it’s not the habits. Different French have different habits. It’s something else. Pride, loyalty, the sense of belonging, the way of thinking. I’m not sure how to describe it. You went to Italian school at your tender age, perhaps together with a kid whose parents just arrived from Albania. You both watched Italian TV, read the same books, celebrated the same holidays (the Fourth of July in the US, the Ninth of May in Russia). Day after day, year after year. And voila: both of you are conditions to be Italians. It’s been a long time since I read Benedict Anderson, but it should all be there.

@EnkeGap 44
According to this logic, in a country where only people who have a certain amount of property can vote and thus enjoy full citizenship rights (as was the case in most places in the 19th century) the voting citizens could simply never extend voting rights to the others and this would be democratic.
This is indeed how ‘democracies’ worked in the ancient world and up to the 19th century, but is not what we call democracy today, and in fact we would call such country an oligarchy, not a true democracy.
The point is that in current democracies most of the rights that we see as fundamental rights and as the foundation of democracy are embedded in citizenship, so it is not a club like any other, it is the very foundation of the political order.

@ Gorgonzola 43
I get what you mean but I still think that it is a descriptive definition of what “feeling italian” mean, I don’t see how you get from the descriptive concept of identity to the normative concept of who gets italian citizenship, the right to vote in italian elections etc.

As a comparison, in Italy there is a strong sense of identity difference between southern italians and northern italians, for various historical reasons.
But if I live in Milan (north) I vote for the mayor of Milan, if I then transfer to Neaples I vote for the mayor of Neaples. Nobody is going to check if I’m ‘really’ a napoletano, I would just be a milanese who happens to live in Neaples.
I don’t see why it is different if, instead of going from Milan to Neaples, I go from Italy to France or the USA (or if one goes from Libya to Italy).

Incidentally since southern Italy is much poorer than northern Italy, there is a century long migration from south to north in Italy (Neaples to Milan). This is the reason the southener/northener identity divide is important, and up to two decades ago there was a party, the Lega, whose stayed purpose was secession of the north and in some cases general disliking for southeners, bordering on racism. The Lega got a lot of votes in the north but very few in the south, so some time ago they changed from being racist against southern italians to being racist against non italian immigrants. This way they got a lot of votes in the south and are now the main italian party of the right. They also changed their slogan from “secession” to “Italy first” (copying Trump, whom they generally admire). This is the greatest case of political turnaround that I saw in my life, and convinces me that the actual identity is really fluid and that such identity based movements are mostly a fig leaf on different political interests, in the case of the Lega and of many right wing populist movement opposition to the welfare state, in other situations like the greek debt crisis national identity stereotypes also serve as a screen to hide other economic contrasts (in that case financial, but at the bottom also a problem about the role of the welfare state).

BUT to take it more seriously – and sorry if I already had told this story BUT I have this friend who looks in Germany like ‘some kind of immigrant’ –
or better said: He not only in Germany but also in France and in Italy BUT not in America – looks like ‘somebody who doesn’t belong there’ – as some curious people have told him already in Germany and in France AND even in Italy after they had asked him:

Where are you from?

and after he had told them: ‘Von Schwieberdingen’ and they couldn’t believe him and he had told them – that he had an ‘American Dad’ and he still got asked where his Dad was originally from and then he often just answers in Italian -(where he had spend a lot of time of his youth) that he was from Italy BUT that he doesn’t play ‘the Bongo’ -(as a polite French Lady once accused him)

And is/was this discussion here as absurd as Petrovna telling US that she actually plays –

THE BONGOS?

Attempting to shoe-horn many thousands of ethnic groups into two hundred nation states is a dubious project.

And the costs of policing citizenship aren’t the worst aspect of the Westphalian arrangement. Also baked in are spying, sabotage, sanctions, regime change ops, and warfare.

CB@28: I’m afraid you have entirely misunderstood David Steinsaltz’s question, and my answer to him. He asked: how do people born in the UK prove their right to residence? I answered: birth certificates.

You say that does not appreciate the problem faced by Windrush children who were born outside the UK. That they had problems, and were inequitably treated, I do not dispute. What their by necessity not having UK birth certificates has to do with it, I cannot imagine.

@45 The extension of the franchise to women, non-propertied men and nonwhites was justified by the fact that those people had lives subject to the nation’s laws. If somebody’s life is subject to a country’s laws (not just in the sense that you are subject to a country’s laws while you temporarily visit it, but in the sense that you’ve built their entire life within the country and could have it all destroyed by those laws) then it’s easy to argue that you deserve a say in those laws. It’s hard to argue that somebody in another country whose life isn’t subject to those laws also deserves a vote, even if they aspire to one day immigrate.

@
‘Of course I’m aware of the south/north tensions. So what. Human psyche is complicated, multi-dimensional. Adolescents might wholeheartedly hate and physically attack their counterparts in the next housing project, 500 meters away. No reason at all, just one different digit in the address. That’s one of the dimensions. Certainly much weaker than the one we’re talking about’.

So – do you play ‘the Bongos’? –
Or not?
Talking about ‘playing the Bongos’ as some kind of Parabel for you right(s) of being where
you are – or not?
Or being from ‘the south’ but then suddenly -(and surprisingly?) hanging out in ‘the north’?
Or not?

and let’s NOT forget ‘the loser’ Leylah –
‘Leylah was born on 6 September 2002 in Montreal, Canada to Jorge and Irene Fernandez. Jorge was born in Ecuador but moved to Canada at the age of 4 with his family. He later went on to become a professional footballer representing Ecuador in international matches. Her mother Irene comes from a Philippine family but was born in Canada and grew up there’.

Do you guys think they play the Bongos?
(like our own Petrovna)

@Gorgonzola 48

Actually I had mandatory reading of Gianni Rodari when I was in primary school, but “Favole al telefono” [Fairy tales on the phone], not “Cipollino”.

New citizens come from children automatically being granted citizenship based on their parents, their birth within the nation or (aspirationally) their residence in the nation for a long enough fraction of childhood, or from immigrants being admitted to citizenship by the current citizens. A mushy idea of the nation’s “true” race and national identity may influence how willing the current citizens are to admit those immigrants, but it isn’t required to “justify” the concept of citizenship or the nation itself.

In my experience, it’s very common for people to use scare quotes as a rhetorical device to obfuscate a point they’d like to make but are reluctant to state outright because it would be difficult to defend if they did. Is it possible that’s what’s going on in this case?

Certainly the text of the preceding sentence reflects a confused understanding. It is true that there are many countries which offer unrestricted or nearly unrestricted access to citizenship for people who are born in the country, regardless of the citizenship of their parents; this is the so-called jus soli (‘soil-right’) common in systems deriving from Roman civil law. However, there are many other countries where this is not the case. It is also true that there are many countries which offer unrestricted or nearly unrestricted access to citizenship for people whose parents are citizens, regardless of where they are born; this is the so-called jus sanguinis (‘blood-right’) common in systems deriving from English common law. However, there are many other countries where this is not the case. There are few if any countries where both jus soli and jus sanguinis are generally applicable. This is perhaps made less obvious by the fact that the commonest pattern is for people to be born in the countries where their parents are citizens. However, that doesn’t make it true that there’s a general natural rule for citizenship. Citizenship is, by definition, something defined by law, and citizenship laws vary significantly from country to country; the fact that the majority of people are not affected by these variations doesn’t change the fact the impact on the significant minority who are affected is often large. It is, therefore, meaningful (and important) to inquire into the comparative merits of different citizenship laws. Does the use of scare quotes around the word ‘justify’ imply the despicable opinion that laws, by their nature, are things to which the concept of justification does not apply, because they transcend evaluation? They do not. People make laws, including citizenship laws; they can do it well, and they can do it badly.

If you think that limiting the citizenship by descent rule to one generation (in most cases) makes it “not generally applicable” then I guess the claim is right …

If jus sanguinis were universally limited to a single generation, the position would be different; but it isn’t. The existence of countries with laws which apply a significantly less restrictive form of jus sanguinis justifies treating laws with the one-generation limit as restricted forms. (Conversely, if the children of diplomats are universally excluded from jus soli citizenship, which I suspect is the case, the restriction, given also how few people are affected by it, can be discounted from the analysis.)

Lots of countries–probably most countries, maybe even all countries–have citizenship laws which take some account both of jus sanguinis and of jus soli, but are there any which apply the least restrictive forms of both? I doubt it, but by all means surprise me with an example.

Anyway, the substantial point I was trying to make (and perhaps, I now realise, I made less well than I should have done) was that the comment from EnckeGap to which I was responding was written as if there is a simple general default model for citizenship in which both people born in the country and children of citizens are born citizens; whereas it’s more accurate to say that although citizenship is often available both by birth and by descent, the variations between laws in the restrictions applicable to both principles make it misleading to suggest that there is a simple general default model. This is, as far as I understand it, a point on which we are in agreement, although you are still absolutely right to pull me up over what may be the careless way I expressed myself. I can only hope that I’ve done less poorly this time.

@61
I used quotes around “justify” for the same reason I used quotes around “populus”; because in the comment @15, MisterMr says: “The justification about modern day nation states is a supposed pre-existent community of people who are part of the same populus…”

And I’m aware that not all countries share the exact same laws regarding jus soli and jus sanguinis citizenship citizenship, but as far as I’m aware almost all current democratic nations use at least one and frequently some blend of the two. Very few base citizenship explicitly on the person’s similarity to some racial or cultural national archetype. If they did, we’d call them ethnostates.

MisterMr seemed to me to be arguing that because one can’t define an unambiguous cultural or ethnic group that defines the nation, one can’t exclude people who live in other countries but may aspire to immigrate from the rights of citizenship, that doing so is equivalent to nations previously denying the rights of full citizenship to their female, nonwhite or non-propertied inhabitants. My contention is that a nation is justified not by how congruent it is with an ethnic ideal, but simply by the fact that it can pass and enforce laws within its territory (which everyone but the various types of anarchists and anarcho-libertarians agree is necessary), and that the people whose lives are subject to those laws have a say in them (democracy).

With that framing one can argue that people born in the nation or born to citizens of the nation should have full citizenship rights, as should people who have lived there long enough to have built lives there, but that this does not require the nation to extend citizenship rights to people who may want to come to the nation, but have not up to now been subject to its laws in any respect besides its control of their admission.