At the heart of the case for Brexit was the idea of ‘taking back control’. The British people were no longer the directors of their own destiny and needed to reassert control over their own affairs. Which affairs, specifically? There were multiple targets, but immigration was central: ‘Vote Leave’, the British people were told, so that ‘[w]e’ll be in charge of own borders’.
In Britain, immigration has come to stand for something more than immigration itself. The British government’s inability to control (intra-European) migration is seen as emblematic of a wider loss of control. Many Britons feel that they are no longer in charge of their own destiny: ‘Take back our country’ is a slogan that resonates along the campaign trail.
Similar values have been appealed to in United States by people arguing for greater fortification of the southern border and generally providing increased funding for immigration enforcement. Conservatives insist that the ‘rule of law’ must be reestablished more firmly, meaning that the state must have stricter discretion over whom gains admission.
What these arguments have in common, at base, is an appeal to the importance of collective self-determination (or related notions of ‘national self-determination’, ‘sovereignty’, and so on): the right of the British people, or the American people, to be in charge of what takes place within their territory. The arguments use that appeal to support an increase in the state’s capacity to set and enforce rules about immigration, whether that capacity is being ‘taken back’ from transnational institutions or individual migrants.
What shall we make of these arguments? Some will be tempted to dismiss them out of hand as pretextual rationalizations for nakedly racist/xenophobic motivations, given how much racism and xenophobia has historically been entwined with movements for immigration restrictions. And I will argue later that the role of race (along with ethnicity and religion) is indeed crucially relevant in this context. But I want to begin by granting that these arguments are at least sometimes made in good faith. For the value of self-governance is shared by many people across the political spectrum. And restrictionist policies have at times been endorsed, or at least acquiesced to, by people who profess a generally antiracist outlook. For example, there were left-wing supporters of Brexit (‘Lexit’) who tried to distance themselves from any overt racist imagery associated with Vote Leave and Leave.EU. It is worth engaging in a serious analysis of whether there was (and is) any basis to the ‘taking back control’–type arguments for discretion over immigration.
In what follows, I will first show (
Before presenting the CSG argument itself, let me explain a little more carefully what exactly the conclusion of that argument is. Often when we talk about immigration, in our political lives or within philosophy, we are considering whether particular immigration policies should be adopted, such as a state admitting more unskilled workers or reducing the number of refugees admitted. The argument that I am interested in has a slightly different focus. Rather than asking the audience to endorse particular restrictions on immigration, it aims to persuade us that states need to maintain and expand their
The CSG argument made by political actors tries to mobilize concerns about CSG to justify shoring up state discretion over immigration. CSG has also played an important role in recent philosophical work by theorists seeking to defend a state’s right to control its border. I do
The CSG Argument
Political communities ought to protect their capacity for CSG.
CSG is diminished when political communities lack discretion over immigration.
Therefore,
C1. Political communities ought to protect their discretion over immigration. Therefore,
C2. Political communities ought to protect their states’ discretion over immigration.
Let me now clarify this argument in some more detail, including the meanings of its premises and why someone might adopt them.
The first premise states that collective government is a value that ought to be protected. Can this be defended? As Sarah Song points out, CSG is a
The second premise seeks to connect CSG with the ability to control immigration. What is the connection supposed to be? Song suggests that CSG requires that a state be able to make binding rules (in the form of laws) about what takes place within that territory.
The first conclusion, C1, that political communities ought to protect their ability to control immigration, can be straightforwardly inferred from the two premises. Those communities are generally only able to exercise such control by wielding the apparatus of the state. C2 can thus be inferred from C1, because there can be no collective discretion over immigration without state discretion over immigration.
I’d like to now explain some further strengths of the CSG argument. I’ll focus on its philosophical strengths but suggest that they might help to explain the political uses of the argument.
The easiest way to see these strengths is to contrast the CSG arguments with some other familiar arguments. These arguments focus primarily on the potential
There are some familiar difficulties with arguments of these kinds. They require a causal demonstration that immigration in fact has the effects that the theorist claims it has. And they also require a philosophical argument showing that those effects are in fact bad or, more precisely, are of a kind that the state ought to be preventing. Let me explain these empirical and normative problems in turn.
Consider again the economic impact of immigration. To argue for increased control on economic grounds one must show that immigration really does drive down wages. And that is often a complex matter, since although immigration can sometimes create competition for jobs it also typically expands the economy as a whole, which can ultimately create wage increases. Likewise in the case of cultural effects one must look at whether immigration really does change the culture of the receiving country in any of the ways claimed. For example, do higher levels of immigration really affect the major social mores of a country?
Those were empirical questions. Arguments for immigration control that rely on the effects of immigration also generate normative questions. For instance, it is not enough to say that immigration has some effect on the national culture—one must show that said effect is
Often these empirical and normative questions are somewhat intertwined. Suppose that immigration really does depress wages to a degree. We can still ask: Can workers who lose out be compensated? For it may well be that even if wage drops do occur, any losses to workers can ultimately be offset by redistributing economic gains that other members of society receive from immigration. Firms, for example, may gain in efficiency from the presence of immigrant labor, and they can be taxed to shift some of the benefits of that efficiency toward those who experience wage losses. To evaluate a proposal like this fully, we need to look both at empirical questions about whether tax-and-transfer schemes like this are economically viable and at moral questions about whether redistribution is acceptable or even required.
A major attraction of the CSG argument is that its proponent can seemingly avoid these empirical and normative questions, for, according to that argument, being able to control immigration necessarily enhances self-governance irrespective of what effects immigration may have. Why? Because being able to control immigration is in itself one of the elements of full CSG. Song emphasizes this point as part of why she believes her own CSG argument is superior to other arguments for border controls: ‘Political communities have a right to control immigration because it is a
She illustrates this point with an example involving a large number of people moving from the United States to Cuba with the intention of settling there (73). Suppose that these people migrate furtively, ‘without going through any process by which Cubans could reflect and decide on whether to allow their presence in the country’. One possible complaint about such migration would be its effects on Cuban society, and so on. But let’s stipulate that the Americans are fully committed to learning the local language and culture and taking other measures needed to ensure that they will not substantially change the course of Cuban society. All the same, Song suggests, the Americans have still done something wrong because they have still violated the right of the Cuban people to govern life within its territory. The sheer fact of the Americans being present in defiance of the collective will of the Cuban people is itself a violation of the latter’s right to CSG.
The philosophical advantage of the CSG argument, then, is that it allows a theorist to avoid taking on various empirical and normative commitments that can be hard to defend. I suggest that this has also translated at times into a political advantage. The Brexit debate did often touch on, for example, economic issues about how migrants contribute to productivity, draw on public finances, and so on. But when backed into a corner it was always possible for a defender of Brexit to say, ‘Yes, there are all of those questions about exactly which immigration rules are best for the economy, but set that aside: what matters most is simply that the rules be
Can CSG arguments be resisted? Let’s start with some existing considerations in the philosophical literature.
One possible response is to point out that there are considerations other than CSG at stake when it comes to border control.
For this response to succeed, one must not only point to alternative considerations but also claim that they
Of course, another option is simply to discount the moral importance of CSG, but this is a highly revisionary move, so it would be good to see if the CSG argument can be resisted without requiring such a major shift in many people’s moral views.
What I would like to explore in the remainder of this essay is whether there is a way to respond to the CSG argument on its own terms, granting that CSG is in fact an important value, but questioning whether it always tells in favor of policy outcomes like Brexit and increased border enforcement. More specifically, I will question the connection between state discretion over immigration and CSG. I will suggest that there are two promising strategies. First, I will show that we need a more fine-grained understanding of CSG. Only certain kinds of limitation on state discretion over immigration-making actually pose a significant threat to CSG. Once we see this, CSG arguments lose the advantages that I explained earlier. Second, I will argue that political movements that seek to increase state discretion over the border can sometimes actually
In this section I would like to explore more carefully what exactly is involved in self-governance and use my findings to demonstrate some limitations of CSG arguments. To see the points I wish to make about CSG, it helps to first consider individual self-governance (as we might call it): the ability of a particular person to determine the course of their own life. This form of self-governance is also generally thought to have considerable value, and indeed the value of CSG likely ultimately derives from the individual form, as mentioned earlier.
Here is a familiar liberal point about individual self-governance. Respecting individual capacities for self-governance involves respecting people’s
There is, of course, much to be said about what exactly makes one choice more central to individual self-government than another, and there is much existing debate about this topic. Very roughly, we can say that such choices affect the fundamental direction of a person’s life, something that plausibly includes their spiritual and emotional development, the major relationships they form, their creative projects, their political role in the society, and so on.
Apart from individual self-governance, I think we should acknowledge a parallel point about CSG. We need to recognize that some collective choices are more fundamental than others, more closely connected to CSG.
For example, compare decisions about
the precise width of the roads, and
which day of the week people should put out their trash (rubbish) bags, with decisions about
which language(s) students will be required to learn in public schools, and
whether to have publicly funded health insurance.
I hope the reader will agree that decisions c and d are much more fundamental than a and b. They concern, respectively, the central language (and thus culture) of the society and the conception of social justice enacted in that society. These decisions affect the fundamental direction of the country in a way that a and b do not. One way to see this is to notice that it seems much less objectionable to, out of a concern for efficiency, delegate the a and b decisions to agencies rather than have them made by bodies that are more directly accountable to the people. It is much more important that the people retain their ability to control the c and d decisions because to delegate those decisions would be to relinquish CSG to a much more significant degree.
Though I think it is clear that there are some such differences of degree, there is going to be disagreement about exactly which decisions are more essential to CSG. For example, people with different views about what political association is
Now, someone might object here that it should be
With these observations in mind, let us return to questions of immigration. Suppose that someone makes a CSG argument for increasing discretion over immigration. We saw earlier in the paper that CSG arguments are apparently attractive because they seemingly allow the proponent to sidestep difficult empirical and normative questions of the kind that arise when people make arguments based on the effects of immigration. Since (on their view) increasing discretion over immigration necessarily enhances CSG, a crucial value, the proponent of a CSG argument can play it as a kind of trump card, avoiding any further empirical or normative questions about the effects of immigration. The analysis I have just given of CSG suggests that in fact we should not allow it to be played as such a card. Even if CSG is an important value, that value is not necessarily threatened in any significant way simply because a state’s discretion over immigration is subject to some degree of restriction (any more than individual autonomy is necessarily threatened in any significant way simply because an individual’s choices are subject to some degree of restriction).
To make a strong case, the proponent of a CSG argument must show that limitations on discretion over immigration are genuinely limiting the people’s ability to determine the
What about immigration? Do decisions about whom (if anyone) to admit affect the fundamental direction of the society? To answer this, we again need to touch on empirical and normative questions, such as the following: When (if ever) does immigration in fact affect wage inequality? Can this inequality be offset through redistribution? When and how does immigration affect the cultural life of the nation? Which of those effects are properly concerns of the state? Can those effects be easily offset through integration policies? As with different kinds of trade regulation, the answer will likely vary for different kinds of immigration and immigration decisions. Foreign students, for example, are much less likely to alter the fundamental direction of the society than permanent residents, for example.
In sum, while, on the face of things, as we saw in
In the previous section I tried to show some significant limitations of CSG arguments and some ways in which CSG arguments can be resisted by showing that limitations on discretion over immigration do not necessarily entail any significant impact on CSG. In this section I would like to defend a stronger claim that, in fact, sometimes taking steps to enhance state discretion over immigration creates a threat to CSG. In particular, we need to consider the role of race in relation to immigration.
Let me first draw out some connections between race and immigration, especially in the context of Brexit and the southern border of the United States, and then I will explain its bearing on CSG.
CSG involves a familiar complexity that does not arise in the case of individual self-governance: the collective is composed of different people, with different viewpoints, interests, and so on. This makes it a matter for debate exactly when a decision can be said to represent a
In democratic societies, it is assumed that for the people’s will to be expressed there needs to be a process that respects each member of society as an equal (
Now, philosophers of immigration have recognized some ways in which immigration policies made out of negative racial attitudes can be in tension with ideals of equality. In particular, they have focused on cases where an immigration policy was openly made with the aim of excluding people of a disfavored race: the ‘White Australia’ policy, for example, whose aim was primarily to exclude people of Asian descent. The most familiar explanation in the literature for why such policies are unacceptable focuses on the message that that they send to people who are
The point I wish to make here is that in addition to being a general harm to equality, such policies can also damage CSG.
Let me now attempt to apply some of these lessons to the policies that are my central concern in this paper. There is no question that some of the motivations behind Brexit and movements for border controls in the United States involve open racial hatred and negative stereotyping. For example, Nigel Farage’s famous ‘Breaking Point’ poster was clearly intended to stoke fears of a brown-skinned other, while President Trump continually drew on racist stereotypes about Latinx persons in making his case for securing the southern border, people he described as rapists and criminals. The political success of these figures has likely helped to normalize racism in ways that make it harder for members of the targeted groups to participate as equals in the political process. British Muslims, for example, have faced increased hate crimes since Brexit, making it harder to for them to participate in the public sphere and in some cases have even felt compelled to leave the country due to credible fears of discrimination and violence.
But the situation is more complicated than in the case of White Australia, where racial hostility was the more or less universal motivation for the policy. In the case of Brexit especially, there was a sizeable contingent of left-wing ‘Lexit’ supporters who were at least willing to acquiesce in the end of freedom of movement but who would strongly reject any commitment to negative racial stereotypes about immigrants if asked. And many subsequent commentators have argued that Brexit should be seen in significant part as a revolt of the working majority over political elites who have ignored their voice and interests: a triumph of democratic inclusion rather than exclusion.
Many defenders of Brexit will say that they were not and are not motivated by racial considerations and that they strongly disavow the racial stereotypes that some right-wing Brexiters endorsed. They will say that their concerns and advocacy center instead around economic and political powerlessness. We saw earlier that the philosophy of immigration has been primarily concerned with ruling out immigration policies that are motivated solely and openly by racial animus, so on the face of it these left-wing Brexit supporters are morally in the clear. What I will argue now, drawing on recent sociological analyses, is that there has been an important role for race even in these apparently class-based movements for Brexit and that this role too undermines democratic CSG.
Brexit was often argued for, and ultimately seen as a victory for, a long-ignored populace, ‘the left-behinds’, understood to be members of the working class who had suffered from the effects of globalization, including immigration, without due attention from political elites. So far, no mention of race. Where race comes in is that the supposedly socioeconomic roots of Brexit are in fact often a stand-in for Whiteness. This is not an empirical paper, so I will be relying heavily on existing political sociology rather than making this case in full. Here are two important initial data points. First, if we look at the overall proportion of Leave voters, only twenty-four percent were in the lowest two social classes, while fifty-nine percent were middle class (using NRS social grades that define class by occupation).
These facts should give us immediate reason for skepticism when left-wing Brexiters claim to be putting their weight behind a purely class-based movement. In fact, they are putting their weight behind a movement that is at best heterogeneous with respect to class and is very disproportionately White. In addition to these sheer demographic facts, a historical perspective shows that this notion of the left-behinds has been substantially racialized. At times defenders of Brexit and apologists for the Trump vote have in fact openly drawn the link between class-based rhetoric and race in this context, openly taking themselves to be advocating on behalf of a specifically White disadvantaged population. Joan Williams’s book, for example, is called
The idea that class and race can be entwined in this way is a familiar one. In the United States, for instance, it has long been seen that when right-wing politicians claim to be defending ‘hardworking’, ‘lower-class’ Americans from ‘takers’ who seek to exploit the welfare state, they are in fact evoking a distinction between White and Black. For the stereotype of the ‘taker’ is Black while the hardworking masses are assumed to be White: the superficially economic category of the ‘welfare queen’, for example, is nearly always applied to Black women.
Subsequent left- and right-wing Euroscepticism, Shilliam shows, has also drawn on tropes of an Indigenous White, English national character at risk of foreign contamination. On the left, Labour’s Euroscepticism was ‘congenitally racialized’ (136). It was born in a political system where the interests of Black and Asian workers were undefended by the organized labor movement, and one-third of London dockers had participated in a strike in support of Powell (102). Left-wing Eurosceptic agitation in the 1970s, Shilliam argues, drew heavily on the idea of protecting the ‘common people’ in a context where ‘common’ and ‘ordinary’ were heavily racialized (as White). Even after the union movement began to address the issue of racial prejudice, union leaders and Labour politicians continued to endorse a narrative around immigration that represented immigrants primarily as scrounging users of public goods. As far as right-wing Euroscepticism goes, the Bruges Group, for example, carried forward a rhetoric of the need to protect the national character from undesirable foreign influence. And while UK Independence Party (UKIP) founder Alan Sked was eventually to express repugnance at Nigel Farage’s overt racism and say that the party had lost its way, it is all the same true that in the party’s earlier days, Sked directly sought out Powell to stand as a candidate.
In sum, just like the notion of the ‘welfare queen’, the seemingly race-neutral notion of the ‘left-behinds’ in fact evokes a strong set of associations with race, including the idea that especially deserving Whites are being sacrificed by a political class that pays too much attention to undeserving people of color. Thus, even when people defending Brexit have not been explicitly referring to the ‘White working class’, the common advocacy on the part of the ‘left-behinds’ has still been implicitly racial. And note that those associations hold whether or not a speaker intends to draw on them: someone using the phrase ‘welfare queen’, for example, would trigger its racial associations even if they believed strongly in racial equality.
Is it problematic if people are advocating, whether explicitly or implicitly, on behalf of the White working class? As we have seen, defenders of Brexit and the Trump vote sometimes openly accept a role for race and say that the ‘left-behinds’ they are concerned for are really members of ‘the White working class’. They might defend this as follows. In their view, the White working class is a legitimate interest group—just like interest groups defined by occupation or religion or minority racial status—and entitled to use the political process to protect itself from the vagaries of globalization, including immigration. Brexit apologist David Goodhart, for example, insinuates that it may be fine to agitate on behalf of a racial majority if its interests are not receiving due attention. He sympathizes with ‘feeling[s] of abandonment by political and economic elites who seem to be more concerned with minorities than the white working class’ (2017: 68).
Let me respond to this idea that agitation of behalf of ‘the White working’ class need not be problematic. It is again worth being clear that references to ‘the White working class’ are often deceptive, since typically people are actually referring to a group that is more heterogeneous with respect to class status. But even if we were to confine our attention to the White working class
Let me now tie these observations back to my broader questions about CSG. We saw earlier how immigration policies that are explicitly justified by a demand to keep out disfavored races can damage CSG, specifically by making it harder for racial minorities to participate as equals in the political process. What I have just been exploring is how even when race is not explicitly evoked it can still play an implicit role. And I would like to suggest that in these cases, too damage can be done to CSG. Appeals on behalf of the ‘left-behinds’, for instance, may not make any explicit mention of disfavored race. Yet, like advocacy for people exploited by ‘welfare queens’, they still ultimately invoke an outlook according to which there are especially deserving White members of society whose proper position in society is not being maintained. Thus, if political discourse is structured around addressing the grievances of the ‘left-behinds’ the voices and interests of non-Whites, understood to be less deserving, will not be given equal consideration. The political debates we have been looking at illustrate this dynamic, since they have allowed political focus to drift away from the policies that would benefit the actually least well-off—such as the health-care, education, and housing policies needed to support poorer Black people—toward policies advocated by Whites and intended to shore up their interests as a racial group, such as immigration restrictions. In such situations there is damage to CSG since non-Whites are not treated as equals within the political process.
Let me address some remaining questions before concluding. The immigration concerns connected to Brexit prominently featured concerns about Muslim immigrants clearly understood to be non-White. Another major concern was immigration from Eastern Europe and, it might be said, surely
Does this mean that immigration policies, and the broader package of policies associated with Brexit, can only be justified by reference to race privilege? It does not. What we have seen is that certain ways of advocating for those positions do either explicitly or implicitly appeal to a need to shore up racial privilege. Since that can happen even when the advocates of the policy do not themselves have racist attitudes, whether in the form of racial prejudice or beliefs in racial hierarchy, it is not enough for, say, Lexit defenders simply to assert that they have no racist attitudes. More care has to be taken to ensure that they are not, even unwittingly, contributing to a political process in which the interests and voices of White persons are given preeminence. As Shilliam points out, Labour politicians have continued to uncritically refer to the threat of immigrant labor without taking extensive steps to disassociate themselves fully from the long history of racialized antiimmigrant rhetoric in Britain, including in their own party.
In recent years, we have seen in the United States and United Kingdom strong political movements for increased state discretion over immigration, whether by increasing border enforcement capacity or exiting the free movement arrangements with the European Union. In this essay, I have explored one potent argument for such discretion—namely, that it is essential to protecting CSG. The arguments, we saw, appear to be especially strong since they seemingly allow the speaker to avoid various strong normative and empirical assumptions that other arguments must appeal to. On the face of it, they need not show, for instance, that immigration has a deleterious impact on a country—it’s just very important
What I hope to have demonstrated is, first, that these apparent advantages dry up substantially when we really examine what is involved in exercising CSG. What matters for CSG is not simply making collective
For comments on the paper, I’m very grateful to Alex Sager and two very generous anonymous reviewers. Many thanks also to Duncan Bell, Tiffany Joseph, and Meghan Tinsley for help locating the sociological literature.
From Vote Leave, ‘Why Vote Leave’,
See, for example,
The version presented here relies especially on the closely related CSG argument presented by
Article 1, for example, refers to the ‘self-determination of peoples’ as a core goal for the UN.
Quoted in
Song writes that ‘to exercise self-determination on behalf of the people it represents, the state requires territorial rights, the right to make and enforce laws throughout the territory’ (61).
See, for example, Jeff Sessions, 2018, ‘Attorney General Sessions Statement on President Trump’s Immigration Priorities Announcement’, US Department of Justice, 8 October,
The phrase is, of course, Boris Johnson’s. He did not use it during a discussion of immigration, but it was clearly a reference to importance of CSG in the context of Brexit. See Reuters, 2018, ‘Boris Johnson Says Brexit Deal Will Make Britain an EU Colony’, 13 November,
There are also more sophisticated attempts to undermine CSG that claim the ‘self’ in ‘collective self-governance’ either cannot be nonarbitrarily defined or must be extended to include people well beyond the boundaries of the state. Both moves are again highly revisionary and so I set them too aside in the text. For discussion, see, for instance,
More precisely, for reasons that I will explain later, limits on collective choice place limits on CSG
See, for example,
This example invites the following concern: What if Australia had genuinely been all White to begin with—would it then have been permissible to pursue racial exclusion in immigration policy? I discuss this issue and what to say about hypothetical racially homogenous societies in chapter 4 of my 2019 book,
Shayma Bakht, 2020, ‘An Exodus of British Muslims Is Happening Right Under Our Noses—and Still We’re Asking Whether Islamophobia Exists’,
Alex Gourevitch, ‘Leave the EU Already’,
Christopher Bickerton and Richard Tuck, 2017, “A Brexit Proposal”.
Jerry Kammer, 2020, ‘I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted’,
I have capitalized racial terms for racial groups to emphasize that they are historically contingent products of racialization. For a full explanation, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, 2020, ‘The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black’,
Michael Ashcroft, 2019, ‘A Reminder of How Britain Voted in the EU Referendum—and Why’,
See
Premilla Nadasen, ‘How a Democrat Killed Welfare’,
Pavan Amara, 2014, ‘UKIP Founder Alan Sked and Nigel Farage “Begged Enoch Powell to Stand as a Candidate” ‘,
See