Main points
These are the main points that you should know or have an opinion about from today’s class.
- Self-determination and immigration.
- Democracy and immigration.
Miller gives three reasons why societies should be allowed to regulate immigration:
Doing so is necessary for their members to exercise their right of self-determination.
Democracy as a political system is undermined by too much diversity.
Allowing immigration from poor countries to wealthy ones would make climate change worse.
The idea behind self-determination is related to the idea behind democracy: the people should rule. Which people? Usually a nation, hence the phrase “national self-determination.” The break-up of multinational empires, such as the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Soviet Union was thought to be a victory for national self-determination and democracy at the same time as the different nations within these empires could rule themselves and self-rule is what democracy consists in. (The democracy part hasn’t always worked out, so the most you can probably say is that national self-determination is a necessary but not sufficient condition of democratic politics.)
OK, so what do the people get to determine? Can they take a vote on torture and decide that it’s OK? Miller is not that radical a democrat. He thinks there are some things that are not subject to democratic self-determination. But he also thinks that many of the topics that legitimately fall under the heading of national self-determination require the ability to control immigration.
He makes his case on pages 62-63 of his book (Miller 2016, 62–63). It seemed to me that there were two different arguments there. The first is about public expenditures.
The idea is that some expenditures are mandatory. You can’t admit people into your society and refuse to pay for the education of their children. (Even if you could, it would be a dumb thing to do.) So in order to control the budget, you have to be able to control immigration.
The second argument that I find in Miller’s text goes like this.
Speaking for myself, I think that this is what is really behind the desire to control immigration. Budgets are important, but the budgetary problems immigration causes are not large and many things affect public budgets. Culture is what people are really concerned with.
Miller is working with an implicit distinction between insiders and outsiders. The state can’t exile or disenfranchise insiders who might change the culture: kids with weird ideas, religious communities with growing memberships, women who want the vote, racial minorities who want to end favoritism for the dominant class, and so on. These are steps that cannot be taken to control the culture in the future. Insiders have rights. Outsiders do not: they can be excluded in the name of controlling the culture in the future.
Everyone thinks that diversity makes democracy more difficult. Egalitarians think the gap between the rich and poor threatens democracy. Many political scientists worry that ethnic, racial, or religious diversity does so as well.
For example, Danielle Allen (our commencement speaker a few years ago) says this: “The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality and economies that empower all have been achieved” (quoted in Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018, 227).
In particular, according to Miller, it’s hard to get a constituency for public services and redistribution. David Frum has a good line about this: “In a multiethnic society, economic redistribution inescapably implies ethnic redistribution” (Frum 2018). The suggestion is that it’s easier to mobilize against redistribution if you can use racial divisions to do so.
People in rich countries produce more greenhouse gases than people in poor countries do. So if you move people from a poor country to a rich country, they will produce more greenhouse gases as their standard of living rises.
I find this argument odd, partly on moral grounds and partly on logical ones.
The logical point is that I don’t see how it supports Miller’s position. Miller thinks that societies should have discretion in how they manage their immigration policy. This argument dictates what societies should do regardless of what they want to do. If it is true, then wealthy countries should not increase immigration even if they want to do so and countries with low greenhouse gas emissions should admit immigrants from high emission societies even if they do not want to do so.
These are the main points that you should know or have an opinion about from today’s class.