What We Talk About When We Talk About Immigration

On the philosophy of uprooting

Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?

-Carole King

Immigration is one of the chains which ties together the continuity of the electoral cycle in most of the developed world. Governments come and go; immigration retains its salience. There is never a resolution - only an endless deferral.

Despite our intimate familiarity with the contours of the problem, however, we appear to have a remarkably hard time mapping it philosophically. I am going to court controversy here and suggest that part of the reason for this is that the dispute is not really about ‘immigration’ as such at all. It is about a much more fundamental, structural change - a shift in the way government itself is carried out - and how we feel about it. The problem is not really the fact that some people are happening to go from one place to another to live (although we all recognise the practical difficulties that arise when they choose to do so in very large numbers). The problem is that we can see around us a kind of grasping towards a new way of governing, and that in such moments it is always the case that the physical relationship between the population and the land becomes destabilised and problematised. What people are rebelling against is not exactly immigration, then; it is rather the process of uprooting which accompanies epochal change.

In a previous post on the semiotic significance of the figure of Satan in political philosophy, I noted that it has always seemed important that the devil has no abode in a fixed place, but rather wanders hither and thither - going ‘to and fro’ across the Earth. This has an intriguing echo in the Edgar Allan Poe short story, ‘The Man of the Crowd’, in which the narrator pursues an old man as he travels unceasingly across a busy urban landscape, convinced that there is something demonic about him; in the end, the protagonist concludes that the man, in his unrelenting wandering, is ‘the type and genius of deep crime’. Again, here we see a suspicion of the quality of unrootedness in itself - of going about from one place to another while deliberately eschewing any sense of connection to the physical locality. What is discomforting is the idea of roaming, of having no ties to anywhere - of being literally ‘free’ in the most elementary sense. These stories have an interesting counterpoint in the legend of the Wandering Jew, in which indeed being condemned to wander until the Second Coming is treated as the just punishment for a man who taunted Jesus as he carried the cross to Calvary. Likewise, in some recountings of the legend of the Pied Piper (himself, notably, a wanderer), the mayor of Hamelin, who had angered the Piper in the first place by reneging on his promise to pay, is condemned by the townsfolk to roam the Earth in search of the disappeared children - a task which, it is said, he continues to perform to this day.

There seems within us, in other words, a feeling that there is some connection between wickedness and the lacking in a sense of loyalty to a physical place - that, indeed, evil in itself is a quality which emerges within the context of uprooting. This seems to tap into a deep human need for a sense of belonging, sociality, and ties to a landscape which even nomadic peoples historically tended to prize. The problem is not travelling from one place to another in itself, or even going from one place to another to settle. It is rather having no real home at all - and, especially, glorying in that status or treating it as desirable.

It follows that political evil is often associated with forced migration and ejection from a physical place. History is replete with examples of this, from the Trail of Tears of the Cherokee to the Assyrian exile of the Jews. Perhaps the most recent deliberate and extreme instance was the Khmer Rouge’s ‘evacuation’ of Phnom Penh in April 1975, when almost the entire population of the city was forced at gunpoint, and without notice, to march into the countryside (often, ironically, to their ancestral ‘home villages’) so as to start a new life on collective farms. Elizabeth Becker, in her account of the Cambodian genocide, When the War Was Over, recounts the experience of a banker, Komphot, who was among those forced onto the march:

They were on the outskrits of the city, a thick sea of people jammed on the narrow highway being marched to the countryside by the soldiers in black pajamas. Komphot was reminded of a crowd caught in a sports stadium with no exit for escape. It also seemed to him as if a giant had poured everyone out of the city and they were pretending not to notice. The rich still had money and were buying food from roadside merchants asking absurd sums….the poor had nothing and went without. The sick lay dying on the roadway. No one stopped to help a stranger…Every day at 4pm they were told to sleep, spilling on top of each other. Before dawn they were waked and told to march on….Like this Komphot marched for ten days…

Later, after arriving at a processing point, Komphot was sent with a few cousins to a small village where they were given a space to live in an animal pen: “‘We lived like pigs, taking whatever was available, the scraps of food offered us. I realised we were under the custody of the revolution, not a part of it.’” From there the group were ‘moved across the province, from one miserable stopover to another’ and eventually settled in a farming cooperative with nothing to live on but a small monthly ration of rice. Gradually, the people around him were killed off. ‘Komphot remembers one night when the sounds [of people being dragged away to be killed] were so close that “I thought they were coming to get us. I thought to myself: It is one thing to suffer to live, another thing to suffer only to die. I decided to give it two years. If nothing had changed I would commit suicide.”’

The example of the Khmer Rouge is instructive, because it makes clear to us that the innate suspicion that we have of forced uprooting is fully justified by the way in which those intoxicated by political power have always sought to operate. Those who seek to make societies anew - and to stamp newfound authority on those they rule - very often attempt to achieve this by physically severing the ties between people and place. This serves to demoralise the population, of course, but it also serves to make them pliant and needy. Having been ejected from their homes and their land, where they would (until very recently in human history) have been more or less self-sufficient, a society of wandering exiles is utterly reliant on the ruler for succour and much more easy to boss around. Hence, inevitably, we come to Machiavelli, who makes all of this abundantly clear (in I.26 of the Discourses on Livy):

Should anyone become the ruler either of a city or of a state, especially if he has no sure footing in it….the best thing he can do in order to retain [it]…is to organise everything in that state afresh; e.g. in its cities to appoint new governors, with new titles and a new authority, the governors themselves being new men; to make the rich poor and the poor rich…as well as to build new cities, to destroy those already built, and to move the inhabitants from one place to another far distant from it; in short, to leave nothing of that province intact, and nothing in it, neither rank, nor institution, nor form of government, nor wealth, except it be held by such as recognise that it comes from you…. His aim should be to emulate Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander [who] moved men from province to province as shepherds move their sheep.

It appears melodramatic to jump from the Khmer Rouge and Philip of Macedon to Tony Blair and Ursula von der Leyen, but the principle animating these more familiar figures is at root the same for all that it is much less cruel or coercive. For Blair, it will be recalled, the project of New Labour was nothing less than the creation of a ‘New Britain’ which would ‘liberate human potential’ and ‘sweep away [the] forces of conservatism’ for good. For the EU, the project is grander yet: the construction of a pan-European demos that transcends national and linguistic divisions and unites the peoples of Europe under a single set of institutions.

It is no accident then that Blair was so excited by the prospect of vastly increasing the number of university students in the UK; having half of the youth of the country migrating from their home towns to distant locations, clustered in specific urban centres where they would remain after graduating, was a cornerstone of his transformative vision for British society. Within the EU meanwhile the mechanism is enshrined in law in the concept of freedom of movement and EU citizenship, indelible principles of ‘European integration’, which permit anybody in any EU member state to up sticks and move elsewhere in the continent to live and work more or less at will. It is unlikely that policymakers quite have Machiavelli’s advice in mind (let alone Philip of Macedon or Pol Pot) when facilitating such processes of uprooting, but this hardly matters, because the effect is more or less as he suggested: a physical severing of the individual from home and family; a cultivated sense of destabilisation and flux; and a permanent dissolution of ties of trust and mutual support in dispersed local communities.

Uprooting, then, is associated for good reason in our psyche with moments of deep structural change in the way in which we are governed. And it should not be surprising at all, then, to find that insecurities about the subject of uprooting should be erupting at the present moment, when a rapid process of globalisation is afoot and the political arrangements that we have grown used to over a process of centuries are upended. Technological developments, particularly in the field of communications, have for the first time in human history allowed those who wish to govern to truly imagine global governance to be in their grasp (this is no conspiracy theory; it is something that academics and policymakers have been writing about enthusiastically for years). And the process of transformation in the very structure of government, from the national to the global, is - as ever with such changes - bringing with it a profound problematisation of the relationship between people and place.

As we move from the conceptual framework of raison d’Ètat to raison du monde, in other words, so it is that the very idea of feeling as though one belongs in a particular spot, and that one should hold loyalties to a certain place (particularly a certain nation, that outmoded and unfashionable notion of yesteryear) is itself being made subject to intense and relentless attack. And, conversely, everywhere we look, we are being positively encouraged to imagine ourselves as ‘citizens of the world’, as comfortable on the streets of Ascunsion or Cape Town as in Melbourne or Dubai - to be, in other words, the human predicate of globalisation itself. Being tied to a particular country, let alone a particular region, town or family home, means to fall short of that ideal, and is by consequence rendered in the imaginarium of the managerial classes to be undesirable, ‘problematic’, and even in some sense immoral.

People can sense all of this, and they can see it around them in particular in the way in which immigration happens, and is discussed. It is not that ordinary people generally have any particular animus towards immigrants personally. It is rather that they feel a deep unease about the context in which mass immigration is taking place, wherein ties to home and hearth, to family and tribe, to place and nation, are being continually traduced.

The problem in other words is not the Nigerian family who have moved in at the bottom of the road and whose children play with one’s own at the local park and sit next to them in the local primary school. The problem is the sense that the idea of staying in a particular place out of loyalty - the idea of being rooted cross-generationally - is being routinely cast as being low-status and deplorable, and is being replaced as a civilisational ideal by its exact opposite: i.e. that one should feel absolutely no loyalty whatsoever to the place where one was born and grew up - let alone where one’s parents were raised. And one should rather therefore feel liberated at a moment’s notice to pack up and move on, to almost literally anywhere on the globe, as economic incentives, or the whims of personal hedonism, dictate. (It follows that one should also have no objections whatsoever if a very large number of people from elsewhere in the world happen to choose to come and live in the place you consider to be home irrespective of how you feel about the matter. Because, the implication goes, it was never your home to begin with.)

Neither left nor right currently has anything like an answer to this problem, because it is not really answerable in conventional, policy-oriented means. For a long time, Tory politicians in the UK have talked about reducing annual net migration to the ‘tens of thousands’ (while supervising its stratospheric rise to 700,000) but even if they could be trusted to try to achieve this - let alone if it were in itself desirable - it would not alter the underlying structure of the phenomenon. Numbers matter, but they are a mere symptom of a wholesale shift in the very mindset of governance, from the national to the global, from the democratic to the technocratic, and from the republic to the principality. We cannot wish this away or solve it through binding legal caps on migration or other such wheezes; we need instead to think clearly and seriously about the very way in which we are governed. This, I am afraid, starts with facing up to and acknowledging the consequences of a great uprooting whose effects go far beyond immigration and extend to every aspect of our relationship to government itself.