Deep Thinking About Immigration

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/books/review/immigration-strangers-in-our-midst-david-miller.html

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From Hobbes and Hegel to John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, the seminal figures of Western political theory are united in their almost complete neglect of the topic of immigration. No doubt they have their reasons. Who among them witnessed anything like the global refugee crisis of 2015? Or the anxieties about national identity that it inflamed? Be that as it may, with hostility toward immigrants and refugees fueling the “Brexit” movement and the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, we could use some deep thinking right now about the relationship between the state and its citizens. This deep thinking would no longer start with the assumption that we already know who is included in that relationship (thanks for nothing, John Locke!), but rather would inquire how, in light of often conflicting values like local democracy and global justice, we should go about figuring that out.

On the case is the political philosopher David Miller. His timely book STRANGERS IN OUR MIDST: The Political Philosophy of Immigration (Harvard University, $35) may not be the first treatise of its kind, but it aims to be the first to combine such an abstract approach to the topic with such a strong dose of realism. Make no mistake: Miller is a humane, social democratic Oxford University professor — a softy. But he does not wish away such stubborn, unfortunate facts as social prejudice and failed states, and he wrestles with the issue of immigration from that hard-­bitten perspective. He comes down in favor of a state’s right — except when human rights are threatened — to close its borders to outsiders, and proposes four principles that should govern states’ selection policies when they do choose to admit immigrants.

Miller’s first principle is what he calls “weak cosmopolitanism.” A weak cosmopolitan believes in the equal worth of all human beings but sees this as morally compatible with giving special consideration to our compatriots. The argument is simple: The radical changes to our behavior required by a strong cosmopolitanism — which holds that we have an obligation to treat all people the same — would entail abandoning too much of what gives shape and meaning to our lives in the first place (our families, communities and so on).

In the context of immigration, strong cosmopolitanism mandates an international “open borders” policy, whereas weak cosmopolitanism dictates only that a country’s policy cannot violate anyone’s human rights and sometimes must actively protect them, as with people fleeing genocide. Apart from that, a weakly cosmopolitan state does not have an obligation to accept any would-be immigrants. What it does have to do, out of respect for them as human beings, is provide defensible reasons for declining them. As an extreme example, Miller cites the European Union’s controversial decision in 2014 to direct fewer resources to rescue missions for migrants on rickety boats in the Mediterranean. Even if you disagreed with the policy, its rationale — that the rescue missions were creating a perverse incentive for these dangerous journeys and thus ultimately imperiling more lives — was both reasoned and consistent with a belief in the value of all human life.

Miller’s second principle is national self-determination. Immigration can bring about considerable change to a country, and Miller argues that citizens of a democracy have the right to decide whether such changes would bolster or undermine their vision for their society. A nation’s goals may be economic or environmental or perhaps just athletic — suggesting a policy favoring, for instance, those who can compete for a spot on an Olympic team. There is wide latitude here.

Wide but not unlimited. Any such policies have to be consistent with weak cosmopolitanism — and also, Miller believes, with his third principle: fairness. The aim of a state’s immigration policy has to be one that would-be immigrants ought to accept as reasonable (even if in practice they disagree with it). For example, it is legitimate for a state to admit only high-skilled immigrants if this serves its economic goals, despite the fact that this policy may be unpopular with low-skilled migrants. By contrast, it is illegitimate for a state to admit only people of a certain skin color, or to have a “temporary” migrant policy (say, for guest workers) that in actuality creates a semi-permanent two-caste system. An unfortunate policy is O.K. An unfair one is not.

Does that distinction seem as if it might get blurry in practice? The early history of immigration policy in America, as told by the historian Douglas C. Baynton in DEFECTIVES IN THE LAND: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (University of Chicago, $35), suggests so. Traditionally, scholars have divided that history into two periods: a “selective” phase starting in 1882, which in large part (aside from the Chinese Exclusion Act) involved screening out individuals with any “defect” that would render them “likely to become a public charge”; and a “restrictive phase” starting with the passage of a ­literacy test in 1917, which marked the beginning of a series of proxy measures for keeping out whole nationalities or races. Using Miller’s principles, you might condone much of the first phase but condemn the second.

Yet Baynton, challenging the conventional historiography, argues that the selective phase of American immigration policy, despite its heavy reliance on the ­sensible-sounding “public charge” standard, was no less discriminatory. During those years, he demonstrates, immigration officials could and did customarily invoke this standard to rule out such “defectives” as women unaccompanied by male providers and members of races with supposed “predispositions” to criminality. Even those with “objective” physical impairments (as the Americans with Disabilities Act would underscore many years later) were incapable of work only if you made certain assumptions about how workplaces were to be structured. So beware “reasonable” justifications for immigration policies, Baynton warns.

The fourth and final of Miller’s principles is social integration. This is not to be confused with assimilation; Miller is not demanding that citizenship for immigrants be predicated on giving up the identities, values and practices of their previous lives. But he is calling for certain commitments, as well as a certain flexibility, on the part of everyone involved. He has no objection, for example, to the “integration contracts” that countries like France and the Netherlands have required of prospective permanent residents in recent years, which involve taking classes in (and tests of) language proficiency and civic values. The reasoning here is that as a matter of basic psychology, we are all inclined to help and sympathize with those whom we feel have something in common with us. But in the same spirit (and also in the spirit of fairness), Miller in turn expects the state to provide these immigrants with institutional support and legal protections befitting ­citizens-in-training.

Likewise, Miller argues for reciprocity with respect to cultural integration. A Muslim immigrant to Italy, he feels, should not object to the presence of a crucifix in his daughter’s classroom as a symbol of the nation’s Catholic heritage; but neither should her school object to her preference for modest dress and the wearing of a head scarf. Here, too, the American example is relevant. In his minutely detailed CITY OF GODS: Religious Freedom, Immigration, and Pluralism in Flushing, Queens (Empire State Editions/Fordham University, paper, $35), the historian R. Scott Hanson uses the story of Flushing — which calls itself the birthplace of religious freedom in America and is now the hub of the most religiously diverse large county in the United States — as a “case study” of the promises and drawbacks of pluralism. How religiously diverse can a society get?

Hanson, who has also done ethnographic work in the neighborhood, concludes there is virtually “no limit” to how much religious diversity a society can accommodate. But he also finds that when it comes to cooperation and unity — two goals that Miller, at least, places considerable emphasis on — there are limits (social, theological, sometimes just spatial) to how much of a sense of community you can achieve in such a pluralistic environment. It’s another consideration to bear in mind for those who seek to respect social cohesion as well as the rights and interests of prospective immigrants.