The discourse of immigration politics
Immigration has long been a dominant topic in electoral politics in the United Kingdom and other ‘Western’ nation states, if not the dominant topic. Politicians sense, again and again, that this topic must be mobilized if they are to have any chance of electoral success.
The mobilization of the topic of immigration that occurs at every election observes a peculiar logic. At each election, politicians tell the electorate that the issue of immigration has not been previously discussed (or not ‘seriously’ or ‘honestly’ anyway), but that it will now for the first time be properly tackled. In other words, it is an essential feature of the discourse of immigration politics that the vehement insistence on the importance of the topic is accompanied by an equally vehement denial of previous such acts of insistence. This discourse, contrary to appearances, constrains the entire mainstream political spectrum. So, for instance, in the United Kingdom the Labour Party operates within it just as much as the Conservative Party. This is important because the need to escape from this discourse is more pressing than ever, and the illusion that this can be done from within existing political structures highly dangerous.
The strikingly self-replicating character of the discourse of immigration politics in Western nations is brought out by studying the phenomenon in some historical detail. If we focus on the United Kingdom, a clear picture emerges of a self-sustaining discourse, feeding on its own self-deletion, in practice undergirding a series of ever more restrictive Acts of immigration legislation passed by successive governments. The discourse is effective because it relies on a tacit pact between politicians and their audience. It is, in reality, perfectly well understood that the topic has been much aired before; the supposed new seriousness can only mean that certain unspoken but well-understood sentiments are being acknowledged and given their due.
According to the philosopher Michael Dummett, ‘A prominent politician recently said that “we” … meaning prominent politicians … had long been afraid to discuss the issue of immigration, and ought to put this fear aside and bring the matter out into the open.’ Dummett wrote these words in 1978, in a pamphlet called ‘Immigration: Where the Debate Goes Wrong’. As he then pointed out, nothing could be further from the truth: ‘for nearly two decades it has been our major preoccupation.’
Since the 1960s, British politicians, of all parties, have again and again exhibited to the electorate their willingness to discuss the never-before discussed topic of immigration—and their willingness to tackle this ‘tough’ issue once and for all. What they say is the same from iteration to iteration, often word for word. What is needed is ‘firm but fair’ immigration control (see, for example, the Tory Party manifesto 1987; Labour Party manifesto 1987; Labour Party manifesto 1997; Labour Government policy paper 1998; Michael Howard (Tory) in 2005; Phil Woolas (Labour) in 2009; Wes Streeting (Labour) in 2018; Priti Patel (Tory) in 2020). (Donald Trump used the same language in his 2016 presidential campaign.) The Labour leader Ed Miliband in 2015 rested content with marketing a Labour Party mug bearing the slogan ‘Controls on Immigration’. Such immigration controls, in another endlessly repeated mantra, are ‘the key to good race relations’. (See, for example, the Labour Party manifesto 1970; Tory Party manifesto 1974; Tory Party manifesto 1979; Tory Party manifesto 1983; Tory Party manifesto 1992; Tory Party manifesto 1997.) In more recent decades, what has been needed, politicians have assured us again and again, is a ‘points-based system’ (with the meaningless phrase ‘Australian-style’ added to taste). (That such a system has been in operation for a long time in the UK seems to constitute no objection to calling for its implementation in order to ‘transform’ the ‘failing’ immigration system.)
It is not difficult to discern why politicians present themselves at each election as finally having come to their senses and seeing that immigration must, after all, be controlled—and that something about ‘race relations’ must be mentioned. As Tory leader and soon to be prime minister Margaret Thatcher put it succinctly in a TV interview in 1978, ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people of a different culture’. The reason that ‘immigration control is the key to good race relations’, as Thatcher was keen to emphasize, was basically that you have to appease bigotry if you don’t want race riots.
If we go back far enough, we find that the issue is still referred to in explicit terms—those of ‘raising the colour bar’ (i.e. putting special obstacles in the way of ‘coloured’ people not faced by white people). By the 1950s it had become customary in the UK among the enlightened classes to which politicians belong to deny that a colour bar was in operation; but nonetheless the availability of the vocabulary meant that the issue could still be stated in these terms. Alec Douglas-Home, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, laid his cards on the table in 1955:
On the one hand it would presumably be politically impossible to legislate for a colour bar and any legislation would have to be non-discriminatory in form. On the other hand we do not wish to keep out immigrants of good type from the old Dominions. I understand that, in the view of the Home Office, immigration officers could, without giving rise to trouble or publicity, exercise such a measure of discrimination as we think desirable.
While the language drops out, effectively the intent behind immigration control legislation since the 1950s has been the maintenance of the ‘colour bar’.
Immigration restriction legislation in the UK began with the Aliens Act 1905, designed to restrict Jewish immigration from eastern Europe. It is in the post-World War II period, however, that immigration restriction became a dominant priority. The British Nationality Act 1948 had created the category of ‘Citizen of the UK and Colonies’ (CUKC), covering citizens of the UK and Commonwealth and replacing that of ‘British subject’. No CUKC—whether born and/or resident in Huddersfield or Harare—was subject to immigration control. The (Tory) Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 changed all that. From now on, only CUKCs born in the UK, or holding a passport issued by the UK passport authority (as opposed to authorities situated elsewhere invested with the power to issue UK passports), were free from immigration control. The further (Labour) Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 specified that a CUKC could live and work in the UK only if they, or at least one parent or grandparent, had been born, registered or naturalized in the UK—effectively creating a two-tier system of citizenship based on parentage. The principle of jus soli (the entitlement to citizenship of someone born on the territory) was thereby effectively abolished. (The UK continues to think of itself as adhering to jus soli in modified form; but this is a bit like saying that you believe in a modified right to universal healthcare—healthcare for all so long as you satisfy a certain standard of national purity. Of course this is the direction the current Tory government, in fact, wants to push the National Health Service in.) The Act also introduced the power of deportation outside wartime for the first time. Since then the UK has constructed and continually extended a grotesque detention and deportation regime designed to terrorize, confuse and demoralize immigrants.
A Tory government would further intensify the restrictions with the Immigration Act 1971, which codified the restrictions introduced in 1968 in terms of the flagrantly racist concept of ‘patriality’, shifting further from jus soli in the direction of jus sanguinis (citizenship based on descent, as favoured by states such as Germany and Israel). Patriality was equated with ‘right of abode’, so that only those born, registered or naturalized in the UK, or having a parent born, registered or naturalized in the UK, had the automatic right to live and work there. The (Tory) British Nationality Act 1981 would finally abolish the category of CUKC altogether, creating three tiers of Britishness instead. There was ‘British Citizen’—the real deal—plus two inferior categories, ‘British Dependent Territories Citizenship’ and ‘British Overseas Citizenship’. Patriality (and so automatic right of abode) was scrapped for everyone not themselves a ‘British Citizen’. (If you are British, take a look at what it says in your passport under ‘Nationality’. If you are a ‘proper’ British person, it will tell you that your nationality—per absurdum, grammatically and semantically—is ‘British Citizen’. Note that other European passports, such as French and German passports, just tell their holders that their nationality is ‘French’ or ‘German’.)
Since 1981 various further restrictions have been introduced, through an almost frenetic series of further Acts (1993, 1996, 1999, 2002, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2014, 2016). Each of these has served to tighten restrictions on entry further, and/or to imbue the state with greater powers of imprisonment or deportation on ever flimsier grounds. On the whole no one, the Labour Party included, has sought to repeal any of this legislation. A notable exception is The Labour Party manifesto 1983, formulated under the leadership of Michael Foot:
Through their immigration and nationality laws, the Tories have divided families and caused immense suffering in the immigrant communities. We accept the need for immigration controls. But we will repeal the 1971 Immigration Act and the 1981 British Nationality Act and replace them with a citizenship law that does not discriminate against either women or black and Asian Britons.
It is important to understand that these individual Acts of legislation that have sought to dismantle the concept of British nationality as outlined in the British Nationality Act 1948 directly produced the conditions that made possible the Windrush scandal, which has torn through families, deporting, or threatening to deport, from Britain people who were born on British soil the children of those who had entered the country completely legally as British citizens. (A proposal to repeal these elements of the legislation was contained in Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 Labour manifesto.) To the climate of suspicion and persecution around well-established inhabitants of the UK, politicians aptly gave the name ‘the hostile environment’.
The successive waves of immigration restriction legislation that I have outlined were driven both by a generalized racist hysteria and by specific issues, incidents and ‘crises’ that brought this hysteria into focus at determinate moments. Prominent among these was the crazed reaction to British citizens of Asian descent seeking to enter the UK having been expelled from Kenya (where their nineteenth-century ancestors had been brought by their colonial masters to work on the railways) in 1968. This prompted the hasty passing of the 1968 Act, which redescribed these citizens’ status in such a way that their entry to a country, the UK, to which they held passports could be blocked. The shameful result of this was ‘shuttlecocking’: being placed on a flight back having been refused entry to the UK, only to be sent back to the UK on the next flight, and so on. The hysteria would swell up again in 1972 when Idi Amin expelled British Asians from Uganda. (To its credit, the Tory government of Edward Heath did not cave in to racist pressure this time, and admitted this group to the UK.) It did not require incidents beyond Britain’s shores to whip up the hysteria, however. Race riots such as those seen in Southall in 1979 were ‘homegrown’ disturbances that could serve politicians as motivation for their mantras about ‘firm and fair’ immigration control being the key to good ‘race relations’. As far as they were concerned, appeasement of racist bigots seemed to work in terms of electoral success.
At every turn, there have been ridiculously exaggerated imaginings about ‘floods’ and ‘tidal waves’ of immigrants. Sadly, Western governments are still caught up in their rhetoric of ‘firm but fair’ ‘points-based’ systems designed to play into these fantasies. The notion of a ‘grown-up debate’ about immigration is still a dogwhistle for racism and bigotry, with its concomitant, absurd insistence that we are broaching an entirely new topic. Meanwhile a genuine catastrophe on an unprecedented scale now faces migrants, exacerbated by the most serious pandemic since 1918.
The seriousness of the current situation is difficult to overemphasize, and it should need no arguing that states have a duty to refugees. The greatest burden in terms of absorbing refugees is currently shouldered not by prosperous Western nations, but by neighbouring countries that are often themselves poor. Refugee camps are enormous and squalid, with Covid-19 now adding to the enormous dangers to human life that tear through them. It ought to be utterly clear to nations such as the UK that they must facilitate the entry of refugees, not put them at further risk of death.
We must not, however, in insisting on the plight of refugees, fetishize the distinction between refugees and others (mere ‘economic migrants’) that is a staple of received immigration discourse. ‘Economic’ migrants are supposed to be suspect, nefarious, even ‘illegal’ (although it should not needing pointing out that no human being is illegal). But such migrants have no less claim on a decent, fulfilled life than anyone else. A white person seeking to better themselves by working somewhere other than their home country is, of course, no economic migrant but an ‘expat’.
Discussions of immigration tend to start out from the question: ‘How many of those people should we let in?’ This frames not just the discourse engaged in by politicians: it is also the question from which monographs in the ‘philosophy of immigration’ standardly begin. This reveals a skewed perspective. The movement of people—migration—can be viewed either as immigration or emigration, depending on where you are standing. (Furthermore, a vast bulk of migration, contrary to many people’s assumptions, is temporary, not permanent.) The question ‘How many of them should we let in?’ conceives of the Western nation state as a fortress, under siege from outsiders called ‘immigrants’. But the Western nation state is itself built upon not only massive migration (to North America in particular) but the massive exploitation of the territories migrated to—and of people already living there plus people forcibly imported there. The power and wealth of these nations would not exist had it not been for precisely these forms of exploitation. It is highly telling that the philosopher Alison M. Jaggar should feel the need to write in 2020 that ‘the terms in which many Anglo-American philosophers currently debate migration justice neglect and even obscure consideration of the ways in which current migration flows may be shaped by Euro-American colonialism and neo-colonialism’. But such is the state of much of the academic discourse as well as standard electoral political discourse, a discourse that can do nothing with the point Jaggar raises since its framework expels the possibility of accommodating it. Sadly even Michael Dummett, although an energetic anti-racism campaigner and a real activist who got in the car to Dover or Heathrow on a regular basis to plead on behalf of immigrants being harassed by immigration officers, falls into the usual liberal platitudes about a nation’s ‘right not to be submerged’ (p. 17) in his book On Immigration and Refugees (2001) and shows no awareness of the constitutive role of racism in Empire, speaking as if the British began to be racist in the 1950s. (For more on Dummett see here.)
A different framework is needed for thinking about migration from the one shared by electoral politics and much ‘philosophy of immigration’. Only in this way will the notion be shaken that ‘the immigrant’ represents a distinct class of human being, preferably inherently ‘illegal’ until proven otherwise, who is, ipso facto, seeking admittance to the fortress to which the great white masters of the Earth hold the keys. Along the way it has to be understood that it is the history of colonial migrations that has itself produced the nation states whose power is productive of the skewed perspective. Without the concept of nationality, no discourse of immigration politics.
Crucially, the fantasy that racist immigration restriction is the exclusive preserve of right-wing politics must be overcome. All politicians, with precious few exceptions, in Western nations engage in its pernicious discourse. It is customary in the UK to single out Enoch Powell, a particularly nasty Tory politician famous for his ridiculous and horrifying ‘Rivers of Blood Speech’ of 1968, as if he represented a unique exception to the regular discourse of immigration politics. While his rhetoric was eccentric and extreme, however, his views were not. For those who don’t believe this, let’s wait and see whether Joe Biden does anything to reverse the punitive and cruel immigration measures in force under Barack Obama’s administration. Yes, Donald Trump’s approach to immigration was even more wanton and cruel than that of his predecessor, but it represented only an intensification of what was in place under Obama. Similarly, it would be astonishing if Sir Keir Starmer felt able to move beyond the ‘fair but firm’ mantras of the standard immigration restriction narrative. Starmer has certainly been clear in the past that he thinks immigration numbers to the UK need to be reduced, so he has manifested a clear interest in being ‘firm’.
Recognition that talk of immigration in Western nations has, on all sides, been restricted within this invidious self-replicating discourse might be a first step in the direction of coming to see the real issue. Many, many human lives and livelihoods depend on it. Without radical transformation, the reality is that families will continued to be ripped apart, more people will drown in the Mediterranean thanks to Western nation states forcing them to resort to unsafe modes of transport to reach safety, and there will be more crushing detention and deportation—all of it senseless misery.
