Myths about Immigration: Part 1

The following essay, published here in three parts, appeared whole in http://www.logosjournal.com/Winter-Spring 2007 Issue

I have neither the capability for nor even the intention of influencing the contemporary debate on immigration. The boundaries of that debate lie so far outside the realm of what I consider to be incontrovertible ethical principles that I wouldn’t no how to go about participating in it. Still, I can’t refrain from attempting to state those principles, for whomever might be listening.
Principles can’t dictate policies, but ought at least to inform them. So ought facts. The contemporary mass migration of peoples is an irreversible fact, and so it’s not only undesirable but impossible to discuss policy without both acknowledging the facts and entering the realm of principle.
Superficially the policy issues seem to be diverse, as varying concrete socioeconomic conditions push different needs and desires to the forefront of national discourse. In the United States, for example, the potential impact of increased immigration on the condition of domestic labor and an allegedly consequent worsening of an already gross state of economic inequality draws the most attention. In Sweden, it’s the potential impact of immigration on the maintenance of a generous welfare state that is the most salient issue; in France, the creation of a new, alienated, underclass; in Britain, fears of terror and crime; in Canada, pressure on an underpopulated society with a tight labor market; in The Netherlands, a threat to the ideal of multi-cultural balance.
These varying situations produce the roster of what men of affairs call “practical possibilities,” but discussion of them usually proceeds without approaching the underlying realities: ethical or material. Yet at the same time, one over-arching and inescapable rubric describes what is happening in all the nations that play host to or provide the new form of mass population movements. This is the world-wide existence of two kinds of societies: one, a thriving core of advanced capitalist economies and white-dominated social structures; the other, the less-productive economies and often weak or predatory states of the mostly non-white periphery. (The wealthy nations of Asia are neither givers nor receivers of mass migrations.)
Just as there is in the international economy a global market for capital, and commodities, and cultural products, in which the law of supply and demand is an underlying law of motion, so there is and has to be a global market for labor–for a new proletariat, though not perhaps as Marx envisioned it. Of course like capitalist employers everywhere, the political and economic elites of the wealthy states want to eliminate any potential bargaining power of this international proletariat, and totally to control the terms of exchange for its labor: to eliminate one side of the supply/demand equation. At the level of popular politics, though, elites have to proffer one or another variant of nationalism as a way to negotiate the enormous gap between their power and the demands of domestic classes. However, viewed from either perspective this longing for control is clearly chimerical in the long run. The idea that the centripetal and centrifugal forces at work can be contained by the arbitrary obstacle course of national boundaries–often nothing but lines drawn in the sand (as between the U.S. and Mexico)–is absurd on its face.
To sustain general ignorance of the obvious, it is always necessary to have recourse to the realm of generally accepted myths. Of course even when a useful belief has come to be generally accepted, the elites whose position it supports still need to spend millions or billions of dollars and control major institutions of communication to continue propagating it, or its hold on the electorate will weaken. We should never lose sight of this central feature of political life, in the midst of decrying the apparent power of myths. At any rate, in this context stating governing principles means not so much setting out a controlling ethic of discourse, but rather uncovering and exposing the conventional myths that prevent serious ethical discussion from ever taking place. Three myths in particular dominate the nationalistic discourse on immigration, and the beginning of serious discussion requires that their rhetorical sway be dispelled. That’s what I hope to accomplish here.