musings on immigration

[alyaza]

i read this post from liberal pundit Noah Smith the other day—How will you save small midwestern towns without mass immigration?; i find it interesting now that i've finished Future of Denial. here are some miscellaneous thoughts on the two.

for the most part, a combination of social and economic liberalism seems to actually get people reasonably close to what i'd consider a correct take on immigration. but, as with many political differences that distinguish liberalism from leftism it's the remainder that presents a gigantic issue. this article is useful for illustrating some of that.

it's not all good

you might say the political distinction is best illustrated by the framing of the article in the first place: that revitalizing and maintaining the economic prospects of a desiccating region through immigrant labor is more-or-less always a good thing (for both the immigrant and to a lesser degree the place they're immigrating to). take for instance the glowing verbiage here:

If you’re a poor immigrant from a low-income country like Honduras, or Somalia, or Haiti, or Laos, or even the poorer parts of Mexico, the chance to live in a first-world country like America and work in a relatively clean, relatively safe factory for $14 an hour is the chance of a lifetime. You’ve really made it, if you can do that. So when a small-town factory owner who needs labor starts hiring workers from an immigrant group, they quickly tell all their friends and family, and the factory fills up with immigrant workers.

is this sentiment true in many cases? i'm sure, especially if your frame of reference is Somalia or Haiti or any other number of deeply fucked up countries in the world. it isn't for nothing that over a million people per year immigrate to the United States—in terms of political stability, wealth, opportunity, and cultural and economic hegemony this country has quite a lot to offer virtually any immigrant. but living a better, safer life obviously does not make you immune to exploitation (even in a liberal framework; certainly in a leftist one). the treatment of immigrant labor is often quite appalling in the United States (especially undocumented labor, which de facto allows for slave-like conditions) and deeply exploitative or unsafe relative to non-immigrant labor. and—while this can't inherently be solved by wage increases, benefits, and unionization—is it not an obviously troubling dynamic that vital industries like meatpacking and fruit production are heavily reliant on a flow of immigration to function?

mass immigration, freedom of movement, carceral policy

there's a section in Noah Smith's article which is as follows:

Opinion about immigration in America depends very strongly on the type of immigrants being considered. For example, people really love high-skilled immigration. But at the same time, people really don’t like illegal immigration. But in between, there’s a whole category of immigration that doesn’t quite fit into either of those buckets: mass low-skilled legal immigration. This is when a large number of people come to an American town who aren’t entrepreneurs or engineers or doctors, but who came through perfectly legal channels.

and in the conclusion, he notes:

[...]if you’re upset about “floods” of low-skilled immigrants getting “dumped” on small towns in the American heartland, you should ask yourself: How else do you propose to revive those declining regions? Would you starve them of the only resource that they could possibly use to revitalize themselves?

i think these make for good jumping off points to exploring far more interesting aspects of mass immigration that deserve consideration and aren't just dumb right-wing canards or fearmongering. for example: immigration is for most intents and purposes a finite resource under the immigration law of most countries. there are a finite number of people, and the subset with the ability and desire to move elsewhere are even more finite. most immigration processes are also exceedingly laborious; and some are virtually impossible, especially for the "low-skill immigrant" category Smith identifies.

needless to say: i think that's bad! if we're serious about facilitating mass immigration and freedom of movement then i think it obviously follows in the short term that we must demilitarize existing borders; reform immigration systems to be much more permissive of who is allowed in and how quickly; and create analogues to the Schengen Area around the world. i'm sure Smith agrees with most of that, and that it'd make everything much easier for those considered "low-skill immigrants". we could revitalize a lot of economically deprived areas that way.

but i suspect where i'd lose him is full abolition of borders—i am opposed to them in principle and practice. in this specific context, that's because if we want to make the finite nature of immigration as unimpactful as possible, that will require minimal restrictions on global freedom of movement. borders are obviously and by far the largest impediment to this. but there are other reasons borders suck and shouldn't exist, and some of these are perhaps even ones that you've considered in passing before.

borders are necessarily carceral, even when in "kind" forms like the Schengen Area; they must define an in-group and an out-group, a "legal" and an "illegal", a "right" and a "wrong" way to move about. the construct of "illegal immigration" is in large part a product of borders (and the states which make them tangible). borders serve to define the in-group and the out-group, and they make it possible to describe someone as "illegal" through the application of a state's law. as Catherine Dauvergne puts it: “Illegal migration is a product of migration law. Without legal prohibition, there is no illegality.”

a byproduct of this is that a state's power to police its borders can extend far beyond its actual borders. Tad Delay and Harsha Walia combine to note, for instance, that:

Borders do not keep people out. What borders do is confer and revoke status. We tax goods at the border. Humans turn “illegal” at a border. [...] Concentration camps and border patrol raids draw attention, but power acts on migrants or refugees long before they reach a host nation. In her marvelously documented book Border and Rule, the immigrant rights activist Harsha Walia defined border externalization as webs of “interdiction, offshore detention, safe third country agreements, and outsourcing of border control to third countries.”

many of the people impacted worst by this—the ones who resort to being trafficked, or who brave journeys of thousands of miles over land just to attempt to declare asylum—are, of course, in the "low-skill immigrant" category. reforming the immigration system will only change so much for these people, especially as they become more frequent due to climate change, political instability, and worsening economic prospects in their home countries.

neocolonialism

of course there's an additional, interesting matter of complication: at least currently, the dynamics of immigration in the world seem quite neocolonial. the financial power—or prospective financial power—of developing nations is, in a sense, extracted through emigration. facilitated by the lack of opportunity in such countries, developing nations lose their highly-educated talent to other countries like the United States (and often these emigrants do not return). a brain drain follows, from which such countries often struggle to recover. economic prospects are worsened; political instability is made more likely; the country is perhaps obliged to take on foreign specialists (who may have their own agendas) to replace lost domestic talent, or perhaps forced to be subservient to outside financial interests to make up for this.

the root of this issue is the state these developing countries were left in by the colonial process. this is almost universal, actually. even comparatively well off developing countries like Nigeria—poised to be a major economy in the future due to its population growth and oil wealth—struggle with the historical plunder of colonialism¹ and the lack of colonial statebuilding. the Congos of the world have even less to look forward to in this respect. emigration is a very understandable impulse from countries like this; but simultaneously, and especially if it becomes easy even to the non-skilled worker, virtually guarantees Nkrumah's words become reality for these countries: "the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside." even the benefits of such emigration (remittances, for example) are easy to see as liabilities in the long term.

overall, this is an unfortunate dynamic that there don't seem to be easy answers for—in the short term, even good and humane immigration policy on the part of developed nations seems likely to make the dynamic worse.

¹ and ongoing economic neocolonialism too! that oil wealth has many strings attached by foreign corporations—check out how many joint-companies there are in the Nigerian petroleum industry.