Myths about Immigration: Part 2

The myth of culture is closely allied with a second myth, the myth of the democratic people. Who exactly are these “people” for whom a given set of appropriately realized laws etc. is supposedly authoritative? The standard answer to that question makes “democracy” into an off-shoot of the modern nation-state, but other than as reference to an historical past that may already be outmoded, there’s no obvious reason why that answer is appropriate. Most readers of this blog, for example, are probably American citizens. According to the standard version, therefore, we should all feel at one with all the other persons who meet that description, both juridically and--to some ill-defined extent--emotionally. All together and equally, we make up “the American democracy.” But many of us (myself included) do not in fact feel that way. There are legitimately authorized laws, policies, and decisions that we accede to only out of fear of the costs we might incur if we did not accede; or because our connection to the polity and its economic base is so attenuated that we have no meaningful way of registering our opposition, so why bother? (Our dissent is easy and usually meaningless to register, but not our profound opposition). At the same time, there are millions of our fellow citizens whom we think of much more as enemies than as fellows, and there are residents of other polities with whom we have (or feel we have) much more in common. And of course there are many Americans who feel that way about us: that we are traitors, “socialists,” doers of Satanic works, etc. What, other than sheer force makes this collection of persons a “people” let alone a “democratic people,” is opaque.
Conversely, those of us who belong to the professional class and live in a large, “first-world” city, sometimes directly employ and regularly (as when eating out) make indirect use of, the labor of persons who are legal outcasts in our society, or are treated as juridical inferiors. These differentiations are essentially arbitrary by any standard of judgment or value we can imagine. Furthermore, these persons, such as the Latina nannies who are a constant presence in my New York City neighborhood, often serve our interests considerably better, and with infinitely less harm to the common weal, than do, say, some CEO’s of global or national corporations. Yet the received version of democracy moves on with its grand narrative of human agency, all the while unable to give a coherent account of who the agents of this narrative are or ought to be; of why they can only be one class of persons rather than another.
Mass immigration, in other words, is not primarily a story of “peoples,” though it can be read that way for purposes of sociological analysis and the writing of discriminatory laws. Primarily–the mobility of trained professionals aside--it is a story of poor persons from poor countries looking for work in rich countries: persons who are marked fundamentally by their diversity (as are those who are willing to employ them as well). In the end, the only truthful, non-ideological, generalization that can be uttered about immigrants in this or any other context is that they will bring change to their host nation: always have, and always will. But fear of change is not an ethic. It’s more properly described as a neurosis, and in the case of the verbal bomb-throwers of today’s Right, a pathology: the same pathology that disfigured so much of the 20th Century. The words of hate uttered by John Kyl, Ann Coulter, and the rest of the Right-wing enrages, have more in common with the vocabulary of Adolph Hitler than with that of Franklin D. Roosevelt; just as for a great many white Americans of European descent, the inspiriting Latin- and Asian-inflected demonstrations of April 10 were certainly more in their “national” tradition than the loathsome manifestations of the K.K.K. Who in these pairs best represents the “American culture?”
The question is unanswerable, because it implies an objective factual account of a concept that is wholly and controversially normative. When the demagogues of the United States, or even the somewhat more ethnically homogeneous France or The Netherlands, start conjuring up the terrors of linguistic or religious or ethnic diversity, we have to take note that they are in every case obliterating large quantities of the “national” past. In all these cases, that national past includes the obliteration of actual peoples, and thousands or millions of persons, as well: including especially the forebears of the people they are now perceiving as a “cultural” problem.

The third great myth of the immigration debate is the master myth, to which the myths of national culture and the democratic people are subsidiary. This is the uninterrogated notion of the sovereign national state as an ethical entity, legitimately constituted by “rights” of exclusion as well as by sovereign powers over those whom it includes.
That it can be conceived of as a criminal offense, that a law-abiding, hard-working, person can be the object of authorized violence for wanting to work or live in one place rather than another, is actually an astonishing proposition. Nothing in the realm of ethics or right or duty can possibly uphold it. Hidden from view, but apparent on close inspection, the awareness of that truth will be evident to any dispassionate observe. Consider, for example, the following statements from the decision in the case of Edwards v. California (314 U.S. 160) enshrined in American constitutional law since 1941:

...[T]his does not mean to imply that there are no boundaries to the permissible area of State legislative activity. There are. And none is more certain than the prohibition against attempts on the part of any single State to isolate itself from difficulties common to all of them by restraining the transportation of person and property across its borders.” (From the opinion of the Court by Justice Byrnes, perhaps the most conservative member of the “Roosevelt Court”).

“...I am of the opinion that the right of persons to move freely from State to State occupies a more protected position in our constitutional system than does the movement of cattle, fruit, steel and coal across state lines.” (Justice Douglas, concurring).

“Thus it is plain that the right of free ingress and egress rises to a higher constitutional dignity than that afforded by state citizenship.” (Ibid.)

These statements all rest, as they had to, on the peculiarly American Constitutional distinction between states and nation. The State is sovereign; the states are not. Yet none of those statements would have to be changed by so much as a word if the distinction were instead being made between one nation-state and a world of nation-states. It would still be the case that as Chief Justice Fuller held in the earlier case of Williams v. Fears (179 U.S. 270, 274; quoted by Justice Jackson in his concurring opinion in Edwards): “Undoubtedly the right of locomotion, the right to remove from one place to another according to inclination, is an attribute of personal liberty...” To this he of course added that “...the right, ordinarily, of free transit from or through the territory of any State is a right secured by the Fourteenth Amendment and other provisions of the Constitution.” However, it is crystal clear from Fuller’s wording that the right, the attribute, is “secured” by the Constitution–not created by it. It is surely, if there be any such at all, a natural right–as much so as any could be, with the exception of the right of self-defense. Or if we prefer to avoid the anachronistic language of natural rights, we can simply make use of the latter part of Fuller’s holding: we are speaking of a basic attribute of being a free human being.
The Edwards case held, in fact, that Americans were free to travel from any state in the Union to any other without being prevented entry, or deported, on the grounds that they were “indigent,” one of the hobgoblins that used to be periodically trotted out to keep Okies, or Arkies, or African–Americans, or Puerto Ricans, from being treated as equal citizens wherever in the U.S. they might wind up. This freedom was to be upheld regardless of whatever “drain” a person or group of persons might be alleged to constitute on available resources or public funds; or however “inferior” their “culture” might be. For the U.S., it rested on the relatively generous Constitutional notion of American citizenship. We have to remember however that citizenship is strictly a legal and not at all an ethical condition. Constitutionally or legislatively, it is granted on arbitrary grounds by sovereign states, and that is all. Moreover, the unitary conception of citizenship implicit in the American Constitutional system (and most others) is fast disappearing from the international social order. Viewed in this light the principle of Williams and Edwards is quite clearly not merely a constitutional principle, but is also a general principle about human society.
How then did this basic right of free movement come to be so constrained? How did the laisser passer, the original passport that promised citizens protection while abroad, come to be reconstituted as a weapon against unofficial border crossing in either direction? That is a recent innovation, and it came about not as part of the flowering of individual rights attendant on the rise of the democratic state, but as part of the assertion of powers attendant on its aggressive development. In historical fact, all the rhetoric about the right of states “to control their own borders” obscures the truth that finally this is yet another instance of the strong exercising a “right” against the weak; it is not a right in any sense of the word but is instead a privilege of the ones who have the power to do it. Mexico can’t prevent the entrance of Americans and their capital to own portions of its economy--this would be known as autarchy, or worse yet socialism, and condemned to history’s graveyard.
States do not have rights, they just have powers; only persons have rights. Particular states may protect those rights–sometimes. The US has the power to keep troops in various nations which do not have troops stationed in the US. In this respect the whole discourse about immigration has implicitly assumed the coincidence of law and justice, but they could only conceivably be coincident if the entire world were covered by one universally agreed-on law. As it is, the arrest and imprisonment or deportation of harmless persons for being in one place rather than another is slightly more lawful and sometimes less harmful, but no more just, than torturing them. Guantanamo and one of the horrendous Corrections Corporation “detention centers” are the same kind of facility–a facility in which naked state power, unsupported by anything but its own public opinion (if that), is exercised.
As for the demagogic cry that there should be “no amnesty for lawbreakers,” its reasoning is as tortured as the treatment of persons that it so often justifies. The only “law” broken by illegal immigrants is the law that they shouldn’t be illegal immigrants! There is no moral rule or reasonable behavioral constraint that they have violated. To the contrary, the only thing most of them have ever done is work hard. That’s what immigrants, legal or illegal, male or female, come to other countries to do. (The status of refugees from persecution and violence raises different issues.) If they commit crimes, here or there, they can be treated as criminals–but that is true of all persons wherever they live or come from. Geography conveys positive legal rights, but not rights of exclusion–or if it does, they can’t be defended morally.
In this respect, one last word about the contemporary American debate is in order. Given elites’ constant resort to the “work ethic” to criticize the behavior of lesser breeds among the domestic population, one of the most ironic spectacles of the early 21st Century is the sight of white politicians and journalists, not to mention the gun-loving, Armageddon-welcoming white residents of states such as Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, stepping forward to defend the job security of low-wage black workers in the underbelly of the American economy. As it stands, about the only “help” offered to low-wage workers of any kind by the governing elites and majority population of those states is building more prisons, thus keeping those wages up by getting a few hundred thousand more black men, many “guilty” of nothing worse than drug abuse or drug peddling, out of the job market.
Of course it can be argued in defense of restrictions on immigration that the free market for labor is the most anti-human of all free markets. That, however, would be an inversion of Marx, from whom such a notion derives. His critique of the free market for labor is that it prevents people from protecting themselves against exploitation, hazard, insecurity, obsolescence, etc., as well as against organized strikebreaking. And as he argued and history has borne out, only the collective action of workers themselves can establish those protections. As for immigrants, if welcomed into existing workers’ movements anywhere, and possessing both the power to organize and the right to vote, they would provide more impetus to that action, and more bodies for its manifestations.
Using the critique of the free market to protect jobs against other people who want them at lower wages (i.e, who are willing to endure a higher rate of exploitation) is thus a mis-use. If this is a genuine concern, then the obvious course of action is to raise minimum wages, preserve the right to strike, and increase the scope and depth of public welfare services via the solidarity of workers, and thus to reduce the general rate of exploitation; not to set workers against each other. The myths of nation, culture, and “the people,” however, have always been and still are intended to do exactly that.
Fin.