More Immigration, More Freedom

0:00:00.7 Chandran Kukathas: One thing that people have tended to assume is that we can simply take a kind of commonsensical understanding of what is an immigrant, but it is no more straightforward to say, “What is an immigrant?” Than it is to say, “What is a native?”

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0:00:21.0 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:24.4 Aaron Ross Powell: And I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:25.2 Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is Chandran Kukathas, Professor and Dean of the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University. His new book is Immigration and Freedom. Welcome to Free Thoughts.

0:00:36.7 Chandran Kukathas: Thank you. Glad to be here.

0:00:39.2 Trevor Burrus: So your book could be said to be both, in some sense sort of complexify the questions of immigration and nationalisation, in the sense that it challenges the definitions of things that many people might think are kind of obvious, and in some sense maybe even simplify in that it focuses the questions on freedom, as the title of your book says. So in that vein, for the first question, what is an immigrant?

0:01:07.3 Chandran Kukathas: So this turns out to be a surprisingly complicated question. Both governments and researchers, for example, who are people interested in that question tend to offer similar, but equally misleading definitions. For most governments, they take an immigrant to be someone who is outside of his or her country of nationality for a year or longer. That’s the UN definition of an immigrant. Most researchers also use this, but the difficulty comes firstly in trying to figure out why a year? What’s so special about one year? Well, it turns out that this is simply a definition of convenience because there’s no reason why you couldn’t make it six months other than you’d have a lot more immigrants. We can make it a day and everyone who is a tourist would be an immigrant, or you can make it 10 years in which case, only those who really come in to settle are immigrants.

0:02:14.3 Chandran Kukathas: It’s also complicated because it assumes that we can neatly divide people into people who are, let’s say natives, and people who are immigrants. But that turns out to be not so obvious because as a matter of simple historical fact, immigrants have become natives and natives have become immigrants. People move from one place to another, and they’re regarded by some people as immigrants. There are disputes over who’s to count as a native or a national, because all of this is simply a matter of what the law says. It’s not as if the law picks out some particular characteristic that makes you an immigrant, or for that matter, picks out a particular set of characteristics that makes you a native or a national. All of these things have constantly changed, and the definition has changed mostly as a result of political imperatives. People want to keep people in or keep people out. People want to remove people from classifications in the country as a particular member or as a national. So the whole thing is kind of fraught with difficulty, and essentially the definition of an immigrant could be almost anything you want it to be.

0:03:39.8 Aaron Ross Powell: Why isn’t intent part of this definition? Because it seems like just… Our kind of common sense definition is, say a tourist is someone who comes to a country and plans to go back. And you could be a tourist for a few months, it can be… You can be a tourist for quite a long time. An immigrant is someone who comes with the intent to stay, but nothing you just discussed, what you discussed was about time and other things, but not about intent.

0:04:05.9 Chandran Kukathas: Essentially, it’s a very good question. So one of the problems with trying to determine who is always not an immigrant on the basis of intent is simply that people don’t always do what they intend to do. For example, many people might arrive in a country for a purpose of a short-​term visit and end up staying for a lot longer for a great variety of reasons from being offered a job, to falling in love, to finding that they’re not able to leave for some particular reason like during a pandemic, for example. But that’s a relatively minor reason because not a lot of people end up staying or acting contrary to their original intentions. Most people come as tourists, remain tourists and leave, but there is a kind of category of people for whom… This is a slightly more tricky case, that’s to take the example of students. And there are literally hundreds of thousands of students from all over the US who’ve traveled overseas to study whether it’s high school students doing years abroad or American students who are going off to take other degrees in other countries. How do you count a student who’s going to be in a country for more than a year?

0:05:33.4 Chandran Kukathas: Now, in the UK, they found this to be a problem because by the government’s statistical calculations, anyone who’s in the country for more than 12 months has got to be counted as an immigrant. They may be intending to be there only temporarily, but the rules that they’ve got for counting people says, well, they’ve got to count as immigrants. The UK government has gone back and forth on this debating whether students should be counted as immigrants or students should be counted as visitors. And depending on what you decide you’ll get different figures. From the point of view of government, it all depends on what is the aim of your policy. If your aim is to reduce immigration, then to show you’re successful, you want to try to prove that immigration numbers are low. If you want to try to encourage more immigration, you might want to say, “Look, all these people count as immigrants so this is our success.” So there’s no straightforward way of simply saying, “Well, we’ll just count people by their intentions.” Because we can’t say that their intentions explain what they’re going to do, and we don’t even know how to, ourselves, determine which sort of intentions are relevant.

0:06:54.0 Trevor Burrus: How new is all this stuff? And by all this stuff, I mean, well, borders to some extent, passports, travel restrictions, citizenship. You cited a bunch of interesting historical examples such as the British Empire, say until I think 1922, where it seemed like you could pretty much live anywhere if you were a member of the British Empire. But even then, the nation state itself is not terribly old, if you look at World History and all this idea of borders and stuff, so when did this really become sort of salient political issues?

0:07:28.1 Chandran Kukathas: That’s also quite a complicated question because there have been travel restrictions of one sort or another for centuries, if not millennia. Communities have always imposed some sort of restrictions on people’s movement, although I think historically, it’s more likely that communities were worried about people leaving rather than they’re coming in because labour was a scarce commodity, and so you were reluctant to let people go, particularly if they were able-​bodied. But in the 20th century, I think, is when you start really seeing much more systematic controls on movement, it’s when the passport becomes a much more important document. Much of this was as a result of European governments wanting to control the movement of refugee flows, particularly after the First World War, and it was at that point that they started wanting to keep people out in Europe.

0:08:29.2 Chandran Kukathas: But you mentioned the British Empire, that was another case, because the way in which the British understood their empire was that it was essentially a realm within which everybody was a subject of the Crown, and as subjects, they were all equal, and so therefore they had the equal opportunity and right to travel, not only within the empire beyond Britain, but also to travel into Britain. Now, as a practical matter, the British did allow countries like Australia and South Africa to control their own immigration policies, but otherwise, everyone who is a member of the British Empire, who is a subject of the Crown, could travel across anywhere and to Britain itself. There were still some restrictions but these were not of a general kind. There were things that they had in place to, for example, prevent people moving if they were disabled, or when they were at one point worried about too many people of colour coming in, they introduced the Coloured Seamen’s Act to stop sailors who came to Britain, basically stopping and staying. But in principle, everyone can move everywhere. It’s not until really the 1960s that Britain really starts to tighten up on its immigration controls within the empire, and that it had to do by essentially defining people who are up until then, British nationals and recognised as such, had to start defining these people as no longer British.

0:10:19.4 Trevor Burrus: So due to these complexities that we’ve been discussing, and you also… You go through what an immigrant can be, and you also list at least 20 definitions of what a native might be, how does this all end up why we should… Essentially, your book sort of reframing the questions of immigration around the getting away from these simple concepts and thinking that this is obvious, ’cause I think that’s an interesting part of your book. I think people think they intuitively know what a native is or they intuitively know what an immigrant is, but they really don’t. And so that means that we have to reframe the basic question about immigration, correct?

0:11:01.2 Chandran Kukathas: Yes, I think so. I think one thing that people have tended to assume is that we can simply take a kind of commonsensical understanding of what is an immigrant, but it is no more straightforward to say, “What is an immigrant?” Than it is to say, “What is a native?” And one good way of understanding this is to think of the example that I’ve given of the British Empire, where everyone was in fact, until the 1960s, anyone who was a part of that empire was regarded as essentially a British national. But if you took the American case, you’ll see going across the span of American history, that the definition of an American native or national changes constantly all the way up until the middle of the 20th century. To give you just one example from my book, a woman who was a native-​born American white woman, could lose her American nationality for marrying a foreigner as recently as about 100 years ago.

0:12:19.4 Chandran Kukathas: This law was changed just around about that time, but it still meant that if she married a foreigner who was not white, she would lose her American nationality, even if her she could trace her ancestors back to the Mayflower she would lose her American nationality. So all kinds of things have affected the definition of an American national. Native Americans weren’t counted as natives until the 1930s or ’40s. So if you think about it in this way, you suddenly realize that immigration control for a long time has been not just about keeping some people out, but it’s really been about deciding who belonged in the first place, and that is something that continues to be contested.

0:13:16.1 Aaron Ross Powell: What’s the role of the state in this? Because if we take a step back and we’re not talking about immigrants, but we’re talking about communities and belongings to different groups, we all are members of a lot of different groups, and we all recognize how fuzzy those borders are. So you’re a member of a church and there are some people who are devoted attendees, but there are other people who drift in just occasionally on major holidays, and we recognize that there’s a fuzziness about membership in that church based on those criteria. We’re all members of many different organizations and communities. We see… You go to a place like New York City and each neighborhood has its own often very strong character, but we don’t have borders between them, and we recognize that people can be members of that community without being in it, and it seems like the thing that distinguishes the immigrant issue is the state needs to put a stamp on people for various purposes, but then we have a tendency to then import a lot of meaning into who the state decides to put a stamp on. So is this a uniquely conceptual issue with immigration, or is this that when the state enters the picture, it creates all of these conceptual problems on top of something that was complicated, but relatively easy to deal with prior?

0:14:46.4 Chandran Kukathas: I wouldn’t want to go so far as to say it was easy to deal with before then, but it certainly has added a layer of complexity. If you take, for example, the United States, and here again, I’m generalizing over a very diverse history of several hundred years, let’s take say the 19th century. For many communities, whether or not someone who was at one point an outsider is regarded as a citizen or a member of the community will be determined by those people who lived in the community who would make a judgment about whether that person was someone of good standing, whether they were someone who was now eligible for social services, who was eligible for membership of the churches and so on, because for those communities, the way that person was judged was based on that person’s membership or interaction with people in the community. But of course, in the 19th century, at the same time, there were national forces at work where there were people who were already concerned about immigration.

0:16:09.5 Chandran Kukathas: At that point it was primarily immigration from Ireland or other parts of southern Europe, and they had a strong argument to push to say that people should be excluded. And political pressures led to federal governments at various times trying to clamp down on immigration, but also then to try to deport people who were already here in the United States. But what they found was that many of the communities simply resisted or didn’t take any notice of federal regulations or demands, because they already have these people who were active members of their communities. So what you got was something like the conflict you find now between the federal government under one administration and so-​called sanctuary cities. The cities say, “No, no. We want these people.” Federal government is trying to say, “Well, we decide whether or not these people are justifiably to be allowed into the country or recognized in this way.” Many of the cities are saying, “Well, we simply don’t buy that. This is an old story.” It’s not something that’s peculiar to the present. It was going on, just like the American case, all the time. And of course, there were people who were smuggled in and who had to go into hiding and so on as they do now. But there’s always been a tension between federal regulation and the regulations of states and of cities and of communities.

0:17:50.5 Trevor Burrus: So when people think about immigration control, usually the first thing they think about is the border, and you hear this in America all the time, and of course, we just had a president who spent a lot of time talking about controlling the border. But a big point of your book is that this is a… Well, it’s even defining a border, but this is not the most important form of immigration control, even though it’s the one that many states focus on heavily in, especially in America in recent years. So if it’s not the border, then where is immigration enforcement? Where does that occur?

0:18:28.0 Chandran Kukathas: Well, I think this is a really very, very important point because if you think about the number of people who cross the border each year, it’s about in the United States somewhere between 360 and 380 million border crossings. Of course many of these are the same people. But even if you just think about the number of people from outside of the United States, non-​Americans entering the US every year, it’s more than 70 million people every year who cross the border. Now these people aren’t all immigrants, which was the earlier point that I was trying to make. Many of them come in because they’re itinerant workers, some of them come in because they’re tourists, some of them are just flight attendants. But what border control or rather what immigration control is mostly about, is not controlling people crossing the borders, but controlling what they do once they have crossed the border.

0:19:30.3 Chandran Kukathas: Most countries want lots of tourists because they’re people who come in and spend money. It’s good for the local economy, and many parts of the country depend upon these people. Businesses want people coming in to trade and exchange. What immigration control is primarily about is controlling what people do when they have entered a country, and for the most part it’s about controlling the labor market. They don’t want people coming in and working in a country. But they also don’t want them to come in and, say, go to college unauthorized, they don’t want them to come in and set up a business, they don’t want them to come in and buy up property. There are all kinds of things they want to stop outsiders from doing, but the only way of managing this then is to make sure you regulate people inside, ’cause otherwise, your colleges will admit students, your businesses will trade with people, employers will employ people. So most immigration control ends up being the regulation of people within a society to stop them from engaging with immigrants or would-​be immigrants or just outsiders.

0:20:42.0 Trevor Burrus: Well, that’s the interesting fact on this, when people think about immigration controls being imposed upon immigrants, people who are not of your country. But if you think about it, if no one wanted to go to a place because no one would hire you, no one would date you, you would not be able to rent an apartment just because people did not want to interact with you, maybe something like North Korea, although I think North Koreans probably want to…

0:21:13.0 Chandran Kukathas: Yes. They probably are not allowed.

0:21:15.0 Trevor Burrus: Interact with outsiders more than the government lets them. Yeah. But if no one wanted to, then you would just… That would “Solve an immigration problem” because no one will go there.

0:21:26.8 Chandran Kukathas: Exactly. So the conflict over immigration is actually, in a way, kind of obviously not a conflict between natives and immigrants or would-​be immigrants. It’s among natives, it’s among nationals because some people really want the immigrants for one reason or another, and other people don’t. So immigration control is really about some people within a country telling their fellow citizens what they can and cannot do. And in this case, immigration control is about… If you took the case of the United States, some Americans saying to other Americans, we don’t think you should have the freedom to employ who you choose, to admit who you choose, to trade with who you choose, to let a property to who you choose. We’re telling you what you can and cannot do, and you cannot do these things if it’s with somebody from outside the United States. That’s what immigration control is for the most part, because as you’ve already noticed, there are always people who are willing and interested, in some cases, even desperate to engage with people from other parts of the world.

0:22:42.5 Aaron Ross Powell: But couldn’t we make that same claim about basically any law. Any law is there are people who want to do something, so that might be smoke marijuana, or it might be steal someone’s money, or it might be stab someone, or it might be used the wrong kind of light bulbs in their house. And other people have said, We don’t think that you should get to do that, and so we’re gonna use the state to stop you, and then enforcing that is going to require some sort of monitoring or interference in the lives of even the people who don’t wanna do it, means because you’ve got to check people’s houses for the right kind of light bulbs, you’ve got to patrol the streets against stabbings and so on. So is there… This doesn’t seem necessarily like this is unique to immigration. You’ve just kind of described the way that laws work in a pluralistic society were not everyone’s taste and desires align perfectly.

0:23:41.6 Chandran Kukathas: I think it’s a very good point. It doesn’t hold equally for all the examples you’ve mentioned, for example, the case of someone not being permitted to stab somebody else. I think there’s probably not much disagreement among the population about whether this should be something that is prohibited. If you took the case of light bulbs, there may be a bit more push-​back because there are many people who think, “No, no, I should be able to make that decision for myself.” But maybe many people will accept that there’s a good public policy justification for some kind of regulation. When it comes to other things like who I should be free to marry, who I should be free to associate with, what I should be able to do with my own body, there I think you’ve got a much more substantial disagreement. And I think there many people want to say particularly in countries like the United States, “Well, I think you should leave me to make up my mind for myself on this question.” So at this point, the debate then becomes one of, “Well, what are the third-​party effects of my engaging in some sort of behavior like this, whether it’s deciding on light bulbs or engaging with others in terms of employment practice and so on. That’s where the issue really gets going.

0:25:22.3 Chandran Kukathas: And immigration is something that falls into this kind of band of issues. On the principal side, I think someone could quite reasonably say, “Well, why should anyone tell me who I can and cannot employ? They can’t tell me that with respect to American citizens, because I should be able to employ whoever I think is most suited for the job. Why is it different with respect to someone from outside? If that’s the person that I want to hire because he’s cheaper or because he’s smarter, or he’s quicker, why shouldn’t I be able to as a matter of principle? Some people will concede, “No, well, it depends on the impact on the rest of the economy.” Well, there is a couple of things to be said here. One is, well, why am I responsible for making the economy better for everybody else if my aim is to do better for myself? That’s something that’s… No, part of my concern. I could, for example, just close up business and that would be bad for the economy, but no one’s going to say I’m obliged to run a business. Why is it I’m obliged to run a business and make less of a profit because you think that I should not be able to hire certain sorts of people?

0:26:58.7 Chandran Kukathas: So there is that kind of principled argument that you can make. But if someone would have come around and say, “No, well, the problem is that we want you to run a business, but we don’t want you to hire non-​Americans, say, because we think you should hire Americans ’cause this would be better for other Americans.” Then we can have an argument about, A, whether this is okay in principle to force Americans to run their business in this way, and then secondly, we can ask, Is it really beneficial to other Americans to force some Americans to adopt particular hiring practices? And that’s the more like the economic side of the question. We can independently assess it, but I’m kind of interested in that first question. Why is it that you want to say that I, as an employer, have to look out for the rest of the economy, if I’m gonna operate in this particular way, but at the same time, if I chose not to operate at all, I don’t need to worry about the economy? It seems like a very strange imposition.

0:28:18.7 Trevor Burrus: It’s interesting ’cause on this view which would strike, because nationalism is pretty popular now around the world, and it’s always had its big moments in human history. And here we could say, Well, we just don’t really need this concept of nations and citizens and nationalism. And on one view of your argument, it could be that there is no real argument against immigration that would not also apply to newborn children of natives within a country, because a baby boom can… Let’s say there’s a baby boom and it can displace older workers eventually when those workers become old enough to work, those babies become old enough to work. Babies could have different cultures, they could have different cultural attitudes. So it seems that… But some people will be very uncomfortable with saying this with believing that, no, babies of natives are categorically different than immigrants and would really resist that analogy.

0:29:23.0 Chandran Kukathas: Yeah. That’s a very good point. Because historically, governments all around the world—the US, Singapore, China, Germany—have all over the centuries tried to control their populations, and they’ve tried to control them both by controlling movement, that is to say immigration and by controlling birth. They’ve tried to… When they’ve tried to control it by birth, they’ve tried either to encourage people to have more children because they’ve wanted to increase the size of the population, or they’ve tried to discourage people from having more children. Think of China’s one child policy, for example, in order to reduce the number of people in the country. So immigration control and birth control, if I can use that term, are two equally prevalent methods used by governments in history to try to control the population.

0:30:32.5 Chandran Kukathas: The interesting thing about it is that it’s actually never worked. It’s very, very difficult to control people moving. It’s also very, very difficult to control the decisions that people make about whether or not to have children or how many children to have. Whether you give them incentives to have six or seven children as Germany tried for a long time, or whether you try to discourage them from having more than one or two children as again many countries, including China, have tried to do. So these things are all of a piece when it comes to government attempts to control the population. It’s not really much different. In different periods of history, you see different methods adopted, and it’s all because governments want to make some judgement as to whether there are too many or too few people.

0:31:36.1 Aaron Ross Powell: We have a lot of obviously arguments about immigration and we take a lot of approaches to them that are… So we, as you’re doing, we try to frame the issue conceptually and tease out distinction. Sometimes we make strictly… We’ve had Brian Caplan on to talk about open borders, and he takes a almost entirely just economic growth approach. We shoot down counter arguments, like Trevor just did, with the babies counterexample. But sometimes I wonder how much these are all just effectively window dressing on, people have gut instincts about others and the part of the growth of civilization, part of the process of becoming civilized is expanding the circle of those we’re willing to consider not other.

0:32:36.9 Aaron Ross Powell: So we started in very small tribes and then we branched out and we branch out and we branch out and we bring more people into our sense of community, and that now it feels like for a lot of people, due to the existence of states that draw borders they’ve kind of expanded their sense of other to these lines drawn on a map and then stopped. But that ultimately, that’s what the argument is about, is just this kind of gut sense of like, I don’t like people who I feel like are different from me, and difference begins on the other side of this imaginary line. And so do you think that is at least a large part what’s motivating a lot of this, and if so, how do we address that from within the tool-​set that, say, you’re using or the economists use, who are kind of arguing in a different way.

0:33:34.3 Chandran Kukathas: Well, firstly, I think you’re alright about this aspect of our nature, our inclination to classify some people as outsiders and others as insiders, to say certain people make up the other, and I think this is something that’s quite well established in the literature on social psychology which tells us how easily we form bonds with other people and regard them as a part of our in-​group and then exclude others. Social psychologists have done some very simple experiments where they just say, tell people you are on the blue team and the other people are on the green team. And within a matter of hours, people on the blue team bond, even though they had nothing in common before then and now start to disparage and genuinely feel that there is something wrong with or bad about the green team. Now we can say that this is almost irrational, but we can’t deny the existence of this element in our psychology. We just have this. But what I think the experiment reveals is how easily this sentiment is created by just defining a certain group or entity or collection of people as having this characteristic of being a part of a group with the capacity to exclude or disparage others.

0:35:14.9 Chandran Kukathas: And I think an awful lot of the debate about immigration becomes a debate of this kind about why we need to keep others out depends upon taking advantage of this element of our nature, our tendency to want to bond with some people and exclude others to the point maybe, of finding others to be not just unattractive but maybe even maybe even wicked, because part of this psychological process just involves this. And I think people in politics, when they’re trying to find an advantage, what they need to do is to find people and tell them something about themselves that makes them feel good, and then find them some kind of source of opposition or anxiety. And this is a tactic that further strengthens the very, very in a sense, artificial bonds that people have, but for political actors, this becomes a great asset because you can really then start to manipulate people by appealing to this particular sentiment.

0:36:38.7 Chandran Kukathas: Now, in some ways, this is something that’s also gone on, not just in these little experiments or even in something small like a neighborhood or a village community, but it can extend to the extent of encompassing nations. And over the course of their history, nations have been built by political leaders telling people that they belong together in some way, they have an identity and they have a sensibility that makes them different and then make others, outsiders who should be either kept out or only allowed in on a very, very limited basis.

0:37:22.6 Chandran Kukathas: And in our nature we’re inclined to buy the story, and I think this will always be the case. I don’t see this stopping. What I want to do in this argument that I’m putting is not so much to say to people, Don’t be like that. It’s rather to say to them, “Okay, try to understand that this is what it is. It’s not something that has some kind of deeper reality. These attachments that we formed are not irrelevant or unimportant, but they’re not somehow as fundamental and as foundational as you think, and a lot of it is the result of your having been manipulated in various ways by peoples, by states, by organizations that want you to see the world in a particular way.” I think that’s as much as one can really do.

0:38:20.6 Trevor Burrus: And this is the most… There’s a lot of arguments against immigration and you address them in the book, the economic argument… Do they lower wages? Seemingly not much. But the other argument that really resonates with people is, even without the nation state, the people around me, due to shared history, culture, we have some things that we share some mores, some values, the things of freedom that really matter, for example, in America, and that if you let a bunch of people in who don’t believe that, then those things would go away. And that would be true for any country. And you could see that in different places where sometimes really mass migration happens very quickly and everything changes quite a bit there. Is that a valid concern, or should we just say you’re being irrational about your team and let people in because people wanna interact with them, and it’s good for freedom and it will be good for your country?

0:39:22.0 Chandran Kukathas: I don’t think it’s an irrational thought, but it’s also an idea that actually doesn’t have much evidence to back it. We just don’t have any examples where a mass influx of people has radically changed a society to the extent that the values that were dominant have somehow been squashed or eliminated. There’s one example that I consider in the book of a massive influx of immigrants with radically different cultural values and understanding, and this is the case of Germany in the 1990s and 2000s. You’ll recall that after 50 years of communist rule, Germany was reunified in 1991, and at that point, about 17 million Germans suddenly… East Germans suddenly became Germans, or many of them literally moved to West Germany, physically moved in the millions. At this time, Germany not only saw the virtual migration of essentially about, a number that was about a third of its original population, it also took in a massive number of refugees because it suddenly decided to define itself as a migrant-​welcoming nation.

0:41:08.2 Chandran Kukathas: So there was a massive influx of people from Turkey as well as from East Germany. In the East German case, they were all essentially people who had been brought up under half a century of communism, had no capitalist sensibilities, no attitudes that were favorable to capitalism. Germany is doing okay. No one would claim that Germany has collapsed, that its cultural values have been transformed. No one’s gonna say that there have been no problems, but there’s really just no evidence to suggest that somehow this massive influx has dramatically changed German culture, German society, German thinking. If you took a country like the United States on the other hand, the change as a result of immigration has been slower, but the numbers have been even greater over the course of more than, essentially when you’ve had people move in the millions from southern Europe at a time when Americans were substantially against immigration from that part of Europe.

0:42:26.3 Chandran Kukathas: There was migration from the Mexico and Latin America, there was migration from many parts of Asia, all of which has transformed America in terms of its physical appearance, if you look at the people who are there. But if you look at what you might call American values or the American ethos, it doesn’t look like it’s changed all that much. Maybe there’s a greater appreciation or tolerance of diversity, but other than that, it’s hard to see that the America of the founding, the values that were embodied in the constitution have somehow been drastically undermined by a massive influx of cultures from all over the world. So I think the concern is not something that expresses an incoherent thought, but there’s just no evidence that it’s just a, that it’s actually a genuine worry.

0:43:40.0 Chandran Kukathas: We don’t know of a case where this has been a problem. On the whole, people move because they want to unless they’re refugees, and they assimilate because that’s the most rational thing to do. If you wanna make your way in a new place, the best way to do it is to adapt to the place that you find yourself in. Of course, there will be some people who want to keep to themselves. There are Jewish communities in New York, there are the Amish in Pennsylvania. But on the whole, these are the exceptions.

0:44:19.4 Aaron Ross Powell: As you’re saying this, it reminds me of… At one point in the book, you talk about how it’s question begging, you say, to defend the definition of distinguishing a national from an immigrant on the ground that it serves to protect the interest of nationals. And there seems to be something, I’ve always found this argument about, “We need to protect our values from waves of incoming immigrants who don’t share them,” really interesting, because it seems to go wrong in two ways. The first is this question-​begging nature, which is that in any sufficiently large and diverse country, there’s going to be lots of values. And so I can argue sitting here in my home in Northern Virginia, that someone in rural Mississippi perhaps has a value system more different from mine than someone in another nation might, but we don’t seem to worry about that. Again, it seems like we conceptually stop at borders. But the other one is, this always struck me as a really, an argument made from kind of provincialism, in the sense that one of the things you find when you get to know people in other parts of the world or travel to other parts of the world, is that they’re far less foreign than you might imagine, and that we’re much more similar and that the values are quite similar. And so it seems like an argument made by people who haven’t, I guess, gotten out much.

0:45:46.3 Chandran Kukathas: Yeah. I think that’s true. But even to the extent that people are different in different parts of the world, In, certainly in countries like the United States or Britain or Australia, there’s already sufficient diversity within these countries that welcoming people from any part of the world will not mean having them come into a place where there’s no one who shares their values or let’s say, or particular religious convictions or particular cultural practices. There’s already so much diversity there. And a country like America was in a sense, founded on this because it was founded on a conviction that the most important form of diversity then, religious diversity, should be tolerated. And in a sense, if you took a country like the United States, I would say that its most fundamental value is an appreciation of individual freedom to follow their own paths, to live by the values that they themselves think are important. What most American citizens I think would resent is someone else telling them what kinds of church they should go to, what kinds of ethical views they should hold, what kind of cultural norms they should accept.

0:47:21.7 Chandran Kukathas: Now, if that’s the case, if you’re going to exclude people on the grounds that they don’t fit the cultural values of your country well, you’re in a sense betraying the actual ethos of your own country to the extent that it is a country like the UK or the United States or Australia that says, “Look, people are free to live their own lives, live by their own convictions. And we appreciate that this is a society that has East Coast liberals and Mormons in Utah and the Amish in Pennsylvania, and people with a whole range of different attitudes to how one should live one’s life.”

0:48:13.2 Trevor Burrus: Many listeners at this point would be saying, the elephant in the room is being ignored, and discussing the advent of higher immigration controls throughout the 20th century, and that the reason, one of the big reasons for that and the concern that we should have is the welfare state, and the increased provision of services from the government which are finite and can be used by and maybe, and abused by immigrants who maybe want to come to a country for the purpose of getting healthcare, when they hadn’t paid taxes on it for decades or their whole life. Is that something that changes the equation now from looking at the nation-​state in some sort of Lockean sense and saying, “Okay, freedom of association is presumed,” to looking at the modern nation state and saying, “Things are different now.”

0:49:06.1 Chandran Kukathas: I don’t think it really does make a big difference for the simple reason that there’s absolutely no reason why you need to supply anyone who comes into our country with welfare rights. You don’t do it with tourists, for example. You expect them to have their own medical insurance or make provision for themselves. You don’t do this with the hundreds of thousands of people who come in as students unless they make some provision through their tuition and so on for their own healthcare. And I can say for myself, as an example, when I moved to London in 2007 as a professor at the London School of Economics, I had a working visa for five years, which simply said, “Not eligible for welfare.” I was paying taxes, mind you, by this stage, so I had access to many public facilities, including the National Health Service, but I had no right to, for example, go on unemployment benefits. If I lost my job, I would not be entitled to public provision. And this is quite common all over the world, and I don’t see any reason why this should be an obstacle to allowing people to move. Now, I would understand if people wanted to make an exception, say for those who’d arrived in the country as refugees and were in such bad shape that you felt a kind of need to take care of them.

0:50:56.0 Chandran Kukathas: Though even then, the simplest thing to do would be simply to give them an entitlement to work, and for the most part, they would simply take care of themselves by finding gainful employment. It would be a very, very small proportion of any population then that would be in need of welfare benefits. But I don’t see that as a problem for those who want to move.

0:51:22.6 Trevor Burrus: In your final chapter before the epilogue on, which is on freedom, you start by talking, in the beginning you talk about control, and you, to take the famous passage from Proudhon about being governed, which the first part is, “To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied-​upon, directed, law-​driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, and commanded.” And in a book about immigration control, people might regard this as a little hyperbolic, to put this famous anarchist’s statement upfront when we’re talking about controlling the border. So why did you go with that passage. How does that frame the general argument of your book?

0:52:08.3 Chandran Kukathas: The reason is basically that one of the arguments that was often put to me when I made the point that immigration controls mean controls on us, not on outsiders but controls on us. Many people have said to me, “Well, that’s true. But what’s the big deal? Because after all, we are already controlled in so many ways.” And we’re subject to regulations, whether it’s in the labor market or in our medical insurance choices, or it’s whenever we go through an airport. And one of the things I wanted to do and say in the book is, yes, well, maybe this is the time for us to start looking a little bit more critically at all the ways in which we are controlled. One of the reasons I think we so readily accept the implications of immigration control is that we’ve already decided to allow ourselves to be controlled in so many other ways, to the extent that we’ve simply internalized all these norms. We don’t realize that we were being controlled. We don’t even ask the question, “Is this defensible?” In any terms, whether in principle or for the consequences. So this was a dramatic way of beginning my response to that particular challenge. But there is a further part of my point that I’d like to draw to your attention, and that is that one of the things about getting used to being controlled is getting used to seeing other people being controlled.

0:54:06.5 Chandran Kukathas: Because you’ve not only got to have to accept that happening with you, but if you see it happening all around you to other people, you’re going to have to rationalize this away. And I think we can see this with immigration very clearly, because when we see particularly traumatic pictures of the victims of immigration control, whether it’s people who have been deported, many of them wrongfully. Or people who have been imprisoned, and one of the things I point out in my book is that at any given time, there are about 4000 Americans who have been wrongly imprisoned for what were mistakenly thought to be immigration violations, but as a result of the system of control, this is what happens. But to the extent that we become used to this for ourselves, we also get used to justifying these sorts of controls on other people. And sometimes these controls on other people can be even harsher. If you think about all of the violations of human rights of both Americans and immigrants, that the immigration control and enforcement, ICE, have been responsible for, you’ll suddenly see that we are excusing an awful lot of control. So I really wanted to bring this to the fore, and that’s essentially how I end my book, to say, “What kind of people do you have to become to be okay with being controlled?”

0:56:00.4 Chandran Kukathas: And I want to say, “Well, you have to be the kind of people who in the end don’t really care about freedom that much, even if you think you do, you’ll actually lose that capacity to appreciate that you’ve lost some freedom.” So you’re right, the Proudhon passage is very dramatic, and he was an anarchist, but I think he has a point to make. And you can only make that point in that way, if you really want to get at something important that’s happening, and has happened.

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0:56:49.4 Aaron Ross Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.