Michael Dummett on immigration: a critique
Michael Dummett (1925–2011), as well as making a significant contribution to philosophy, was a committed and energetic campaigner against racism in Britain. It was reading his On Immigration and Refugees that first opened my eyes to the true nature of the United Kingdom’s immigration regime and its horrifying history. Above all, the book builds an incontestable case that this immigration regime is deeply connected to racism. Nevertheless, I want to highlight some important shortcomings in Dummett’s views on immigration as articulated in his book.
Before getting into Dummett’s views on the politics of immigration, it may be worth emphasizing that his philosophical work and his activism were, for him, separate spheres. In philosophy, he devoted himself to profound investigations of the work of the German mathematician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and to the pursuit of the programme of ‘analytic philosophy’ which he took Frege to have initiated. Dummett’s activism against racism was entirely separate from this, and for a period he gave up his research work in order to devote all his time outside his teaching commitments at Oxford University to the cause of anti-racism. He and his wife Ann Dummett were among the founders of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants in 1967. Dummett was certainly not the sort of person to pontificate about matters of racism from his philosophical armchair. His activism was hands-on: he would regularly get in his car to drive to a British seaport or airport to plead in person on behalf of immigrants who were having a hard time at the hands of immigration officials.
Dummett was, by all accounts, a man of principle, compassion and flair. It is difficult to watch his address to members of the Ahmadiyya strand of Islam in 2007 without being touched by his ebullient humanity, gentleness and sincerity. I hope that the criticisms of Dummett that follow will be understood in the spirit of homage to a person of great calibre.
Dummett’s On Immigration and Refugees (2001) is divided into two parts. Although Dummett was not a political philosopher, and did not regard himself as making a contribution to the ‘philosophy of immigration’, the first part of the book (titled ‘Principles’) nonetheless engages with fundamental philosophical questions concerning immigration and asylum. The second part of the book (titled ‘History’) gives a powerful account of the succession of Acts of legislation passed by British governments, both Tory and Labour, that have served to restrict immigration ever further and chip away at the concept of British nationality in the service of a racist immigration policy. This account has a powerful cumulative effect. (For more on this see here.) Here I want to focus on the first part of the book outlining ‘principles’.
One of these principles concerns what Dummett calls ‘submersion’. Dummett takes issue with Margaret Thatcher’s statement in a TV interview in 1978 that ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people of a different culture’, which he calls ‘utterly ridiculous’ (p. 14). He maintains, however, substituting for ‘swamped’ the, as Dummett sees it, less emotive term ‘submerged’, that ‘there nevertheless is such a thing as a country’s being submerged by immigration’ (p. 15) and that ‘a nation [has] a right not to be submerged’ (p. 17). It is ‘an injustice’, Dummett tells us, ‘that immigration should ever be allowed to swell to a size that threatens the indigenous population with being submerged’ (p. 20). Note the shift from speaking of a ‘country’ (p. 15) or a ‘nation’ (p. 17) being submerged, to an ‘indigenous population’ (p. 20) being submerged. This reflects that, of course, the only way to make sense of the concept of being ‘submerged’ requires there to be some special group (here marked as ‘indigenous’) at risk of submersion.
Dummett has a way of downplaying this supposed right that consists in assuring us that the ‘right not to be submerged’ is ‘of extremely limited application’ (p. 14). He suggests that, as a matter of fact, the ‘indigenous population’ of Britain was, at the time he was writing and before, in no danger of being ‘submerged’. He also seems to suggest that, even if it were in danger of being so submerged, the British would ‘be in no position to complain’ (p. 15). This is supposedly because the British, when in charge of the colonies of Malaya and Fiji, were responsible for the ‘swamping’ of the indigenous populations there by the importation of Chinese and of Indians, respectively. But this a curious direction to take the argument in: whether or not ‘the British’ (considered as custodians of the territory of the United Kingdom) should be sheepish about complaining about something that ‘the British’ had themselves orchestrated as colonial masters, this does not touch the matter of principle.
Considered on its own merits, the whole notion that the ‘indigenous’ population of Britain or any other such population has any right not to be ‘swamped’ or ‘submerged’ is itself preposterous. ‘Indigenous’ Brits, whoever they are supposed to be, have no claim to territorial or cultural dominance over anyone else.
That Dummett fails to see the preposterousness of his ‘right not to be submerged’ (however limited he wants to insist its application will be in practice) hinges on his general tendency to frame the issues of ‘principle’ in his book in terms of the question that is the starting point of much writing on immigration: How many of those people should we (this Western nation state, or the ruling class that gets to speak on its behalf) let in? But this is a skewed perspective. Each act of migration is, at one and the same time, an immigration and an emigration: exclusively adopting the vantage point of the ‘recipient’ nation is a choice reflecting ideological priorities. Like so many others, Dummett just takes the nation state from whose vantage point the question is posed for granted. Note that those who frame the issue in terms of this question never consider whether it was legitimate for Europeans not just to swamp or submerge, but come close to wiping out, the indigenous peoples of North and South America from the point of view of those indigenous peoples.
There is a related shortcoming in Dummett’s understanding of racism. Aside from the curious passage about Malaya and Fiji just cited, Empire does not figure at all in Dummett’s book. This is all the more striking given Dummett’s own direct experience of the British Empire. In an ‘Autobiographical Sketch’ published in 2007 Dummett wrote, looking back on his time in Malaya (now Malaysia) as part of Field Security following World War II:
I think it must have been in Malaya that a passionate hatred of racism was first born in me. I learned of the means by which the British masters of pre-war colonial Malaya had maintained and acted out the myth of white racial superiority: how no white person would lower his dignity by riding on a bus; how no white person earning less than a certain minimum was allowed to live in the country; how the clubs guarded their racial purity; how Europeans were paid far more highly than ‘natives’.
Dummett’s awareness of the racism that structured colonial Malaya before World War II does not, however, make it into the book. It is with apparent surprise that he notes that ‘racist attitudes were expressed by the British ruling class as early as 1953’ (p. 92). A thesis of the book is that racism swelled in Britain in the 1960s. There were then, according to Dummett, various waves of ‘racial hysteria’ (p. 109), but by 1983, ‘a fair section of the white British public, perhaps a quarter, possibly even more, has altogether lost its feelings of racial superiority, of contempt or hatred for people of other races’ (p. 121). Dummett then speculates that, while 25% were ‘quite weaned from racial prejudice’, 15% were ‘still virulent racists’ (p. 122). (Dummett gives no source for these figures.)
I’m sorry to say that Dummett’s understanding of racism emerges from these remarks as seriously naïve, failing to grasp the systemic nature of British racism and its roots in Empire. It ought not to be difficult to see that racism is constitutive of the entire colonial project. Dummett’s tendency to speak as if British racism emerged in the 1950s fits his account of the ratcheting up of immigration restriction legislation in the United Kingdom from this period on. But while he is undoubtedly right that ever-increasing immigration restriction imposed by politicians played into racism, it is highly misleading to suppose that this racism was a new phenomenon—and could be supposed to simply subside, as Dummett claimed it had begun to in the 1980s.
One of the virtues of Dummett’s book is its appreciation of the importance of historical understanding when it comes to developing a grasp of how the British immigration regime functions. A deeper historical understanding of racism than that offered by Dummett is required, however, if the framework offered in the book is not to risk replicating an insidious tendency to think of immigrants as, after all, supplicants whose claims must be judged by a power (the Western nation state) whose own authority is not questioned. Far from being assumed as an unquestionable given, the Western conception of the nation state can then start to be examined in terms of the way it has produced, and continues to produce, the landscape of the politics of migration in the first place. The racism which Dummett so passionately opposed can then be understood more deeply, through the roots of nation state thinking that help to nourish it.
