Failing to Think About Immigration

A case study of academic bias and its consequences

‘If…one thinks but does not learn from others, one is in peril.’

-Confucius

It is normal for academics to have (loud) opinions. Unfortunately, though, as most people now know, these opinions are tending increasingly to cluster together, and thereby become steadily stronger as they travel down the familiar topography of the purity spiral. A consequence is that the scholarly enterprise itself is becoming unmoored from reality because what is produced tends to go almost completely unchallenged by countervailing views - and the results are scholarly works that, sadly, obscure more than they reveal. In summary, in case anybody were in doubt about it: political bias is real and it is A Problem in academia.

A useful case study is provided by a recent symposium organised under the auspices of the American Journal of International Law, probably the leading journal in the field of public international law, at least by reputation, in the world. The symposium, titled ‘Unsettling the Sovereign “Right to Exclude”’, aims to provide a ‘multidisciplinary approach’ that ‘seek[s] to problematize the unqualified nature of state authority over border control’. It brings together eight different authors who each cover a different aspect of that theme, but all of whom (with one partial exception, as we shall see) begin from exactly the same standpoint and come to exactly the same conclusion: in essence that it is important to ‘emancipate the universal human’ (Paz) by contesting the view that sovereign states should have the right to determine who gets to come in.

In short, the argument is for open borders and, ultimately therefore, the death of the nation state as such - with the implicit aim being to delegitimise sovereignty itself through destabilising one of its most central features: deciding who gets to be a citizen and who doesn’t.

It is important at the outset to be scrupulously fair. Immigration is at, or near, the top of the list of most salient issues for electorates across Europe and North America. And it is perfectly normal, then, that academics would have opinions and preconceptions about it. And it is also perfectly normal that this would motivate their research; why would anybody choose to research anything unless they had an interest in it, and since when did anybody lack opinions about the things that they are interested in?

It also goes without saying that there is nothing wrong per se with believing in open borders - or, for that matter, the death of the nation state. To ‘steelman’ the argument, as the saying goes these days, if one agrees that all human beings are of ‘equal moral worth’ (Schmid), as one presumably does, then the fact that people’s life chances are so strongly affected by the circumstances and location of their birth should be troubling. There is a problem with the ‘birth lottery of nationality represent[ing] the structural determinant of global inequality’, as one of the authors puts it (Chetail). And global free movement may, on its face, be a solution. I happen to think it would be a solution that would cause far more problems than it would solve. But I certainly would not suggest that people should not be allowed to voice opinions in favour of it or are behaving mendaciously in doing so.

It also needs to be added that the products of the symposium are not proper academic law journal articles - they are more in the way of glorified blog posts with footnotes. So they are necessarily superficial and a bit discursive - we are talking here about short and relatively breezy comments rather than fully-fledged scholarly works. And, on this point, it is worth pointing out that some authors are cagier than others; Schmid, for example (I earlier alluded to the presence of one slight outlier), grants that ‘self-determining political communities will sometimes have weighty interests in excluding outsiders’, although he goes on to make clear that this would not be consonant with ‘moral equality’ (Schmid).

So, for these reasons, we should be polite about the products of this symposium. But readers will nonetheless have sensed a ‘but’ coming, and now that the interests of fairness have been served, it is important to make clear that it is a big ‘but’: the authors have allowed themselves to get carried away. And this has happened for the simple reason that nobody at any stage in the process, and probably nobody in many years, appears to have subjected their arguments to a genuinely sceptical reading. If they had, they would have pointed out that the picture that the authors paint is not just partial, but almost entirely missing important aspects of the subject of sovereignty that cannot be ignored if one is to actually understand what is really going on.