We Need to Get Off The Defensive About Immigration

“My centre is yielding. My right is retreating. Situation excellent. I am attacking.”

-General Ferdinand Foch

History is replete with times when an army in fighting retreat draws a line, digs in, and then counterattacks. The Russians in WW2 took world-historic losses, before turning the tide with a massive counteroffensive around Stalingrad. The French and British forces in the early days of WW1 were pushed back across the frontier. The Germans were within sight of Paris. But they became stretched out over the course of the advance. When a gap opened in their lines, the exhausted, demoralised allied troops had to rally, get into an entirely different mindset, and go on the attack. 

Likewise with political debates, a side that has had the worst of it can decide to get off the defensive. 

Across the world, free societies are under assault from a resurgent fascism. Across the world, fears about immigration have been one of the main—arguably the main—weapon used. And across the world, there has been a timidity on the part of progressives about countering these arguments. There is a pervasive pessimism that this is a debate we can win. That the public at large will ever side with a pro-immigration position.

To some degree this is understandable, but it is not wise. We have no choice but to fight—the closed-border, mass-deportation agenda of the modern right will destroy nations if we let it. And fascists will never stop capitalizing on nativist narratives as long as they are allowed to stand.

We are locked into a battle we did not seek and our timidity is keeping us on the defensive. It isn’t working. Our pessimism is self-fullfiling. In any contact sport, you get hurt more by flinching from the tackle than you do from committing to it. No one ever won a fist fight they were convinced they’d lose. In politics, it is not enough to contest conclusions and debate details. You must attack premises—trash and tarnish the foundations of your opponent’s case. And you must put forward a positive, values-driven vision of your own. 

The right has any number of advantages on immigration. And majority public opinion is often with them. But this is by no means inevitable. They are also overextended—committed to increasingly deranged visions, with the horrific consequences of their worldview more and more visible every day. It’s time to shake off our timidity, take a deep breath, and go on the offensive. 

I have a hunch—no more, but no less—that most politically active progressives are ready for this. I think if a critical mass of us decided to take the fight to the enemy, many more would quickly join. And I think we would find the forces arrayed against us much weaker than we initially supposed. 

After all, ‘turning points’ in war are as much psychological as they are strategic. A matter of changing the attitude and orientation of the army. First and foremost, we must understand what we are fighting for, and believe that victory is possible. Tactics will follow the will to fight, not the other way around.

Are you sure we have to fight?

That’s the question center-left parties have been asking. Their response has generally been to try and avoid talking about it. And, where that fails, to give ground, to try and find a compromise with the right, and show nativist voters that their “reasonable concerns” are being “taken seriously”. Nowhere has this worked. Barack Obama sought a deal with Republicans in which increased border security and immigration enforcement would be traded for reforms and protection for some of the existing undocumented population. He ramped up deportations to show he was serious about his side, but the deal never happened. And his preformative cruelty did nothing to arrest the radicalisation of the Republican base. Kamala Harris attempted to flank Donald Trump on the issue in 2024, arguing that Democrats had attempted to pass an aggressive bill on border security that Trump had tanked. This was a plausible enough read of the negotiations, but it didn’t matter. Voters concerned about the border went to the more viscerally xenophobic candidate by large margins. 

The UK provides an even starker case. Following the 2016 Brexit referendum, the country has embarked on what can only be described as a program of national economic suicide to address the “legitimate concerns” of nativists. They are louder and angrier than ever. The current Labour government has pledged to reduce (legal) immigration, and numbers are in fact falling significantly. But, again, it doesn’t matter. Prime minister Keir Starmer has arguably gone further than any liberal leader in the world to appease the rising far right, and has been rewarded with historically low approval ratings. Even in Denmark, the poster child of centrist appeasers, their Social Democrats, after moving to the right on this issue, were mauled in local elections, losing Copenhagen for the first time in a century.

Progressive activists, and those of us in media and academia have done a little better. But only a little. The left will challenge anti-immigrant arguments as a ‘divide and rule’ tactic of capitalist elites. The billionaires, it is argued, keep us fighting a culture war so that we won’t fight a class war.

There are elements of truth here, but this assumes a rationality in the ruling class that just isn’t there. A world of closed borders does not benefit the billionaires. The Brexit project made virtually everyone in the UK worse off. Poor people are poorer, but businesses—small and large—have also felt the impact. Finally, in framing the debate as a distraction we risk implying that it’s not important. We keep trying to change the conversation back to topics we feel more secure on (economic inequality), rather than counterattacking directly. 

Often progressives will call out the motivations of the nativist project: it is not, contra reactionary centrist pleading, drawing on legitimate concerns, but racism. Men like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are bigots and must be opposed on that basis.

This has the virtue of being obviously true. It’s also a somewhat effective political attack line. But the liberal response can’t only be this. Voters have been told, over and over, that immigration is a problem. That it depresses wages, increases crime, stretches social services. That the country is full (whatever that means). What appears to have happened is a significant (and election determinative) block of people have accepted that, yes, the far right are racist, but they’re the only ones taking ‘the problem’ seriously. I’ve heard many people, on both sides of the Atlantic, say that while they find Trump or  Reform distasteful, they also think we need someone unpleasant since their country is being ‘taken advantage of’. 

The wealth and health of nations 

The reality is that, even if those proposing further anti-immigrant measures weren’t racist at all (and to be clear, they absolutely are), their policies would still be disastrous. Even current immigration regimes are far too restrictive and are massively harming us.  I think we can no longer be content to try and defend the status quo. We have to take new ground.

For some on the left, there is a fear that high levels of ‘unskilled’ migration will depress wages for lower income native workers. But this just isn’t what the data says. The past 30 years of empirical research have broadly shown virtually no effect across developed countries. ‘They took our jobs’ is a self-sustaining delusion that it’s embarrassing left leaders are still falling for. It’s even more galling when the charge is made by people who are actively and explicitly against raising wages for those at the bottom. When Biden ‘ran the economy hot’ during the covid recovery, this really did raise wages for the lowest income brackets. The response from the right was apoplectic rage. Centrists in the press screamed that this would be inflationary. When a ‘soft landing’ showed these fears to be incorrect, they resolved to deny the data and discredit the experiment such that it could never happen again. 

I want a progressive movement that is aggressively pro raising wages at the bottom and aggressively pro immigration. These are completely coherent goals. They don’t always have the same supporters, but they have the same enemies. It’s time to take the fight to them. 

To start with, we should firmly reject the framing that there is some ‘right’ level of immigration. “How many is too many?” is a favorite challenge of the nativists. It’s the wrong question. The measure of a country’s success is if its citizens are happy, healthy, and prosperous, not if an arbitrary number of people cross a border. 

In focusing so much on the former, we have abandoned the latter. Nativism across the world has made us more divided, poorer, and literally sicker. And that’s before we even get to its exploitation by fascists. 

Look at the phone in your pocket—it’s materials, parts, and assembly happened in at least a dozen countries. No individual nation can do all of that. Only a superpower like the United States could even attempt to internalize all those processes, and that would certainly be at an incredible cost. When politicians talk of ‘made in America’ they have steel beams, not cellphones, in mind.

Likewise, in a complex modern economy, it’s madness to think one country could exactly meet its labour needs in all sectors. Especially when you consider that these are always changing. It takes 10-15 years to train a doctor, but a country with staffing shortages of medical professionals needs that problem addressed now, not a decade from now. American liberals often reference farm jobs that ‘Americans don’t want to do’ when arguing for immigration. And it’s certainly true that agriculture needs non-native labour, but so do many sectors, across the income spectrum. There’s a reason Elon Musk broke (fascist) character to advocate for H-1B visas—he knows that the tech sector is structurally dependent on them. He just imagines, with the usual nativist naivety, that sectors he isn’t familiar with will work it out if confined to American workers. They won’t. The idea of pure national self-sufficiency is a preposterous myth, long past its sell by date. We live in a deeply interconnected world, and this has been true for at least 150 years.

What has changed is that as developed countries have aged (and birth rates dropped) we’ve needed immigration from developing countries at higher levels. Naturally, despite these often being the people who literally care for our parents, we’ve made them providing this service as difficult & demeaning as possible. 

The UK is a clear case study in how grotesquely self-destructive this tendency is. Our health and care sectors are in absolute crisis and that is impacting everything else, both consequence and cause of our national decline. A decade and a half of Tory austerity has left the National Health Service (NHS) underfunded as demand has continued to rise. Providing care for someone with advanced cancer or dementia is both expensive, and incredibly labour intensive—requiring both day to day supervision, and a system of specialised medical professionals. We hence need a wide variety of workers, not all of whom we’re capable of producing natively (32% of NHS doctors are foreign born). Immigration restrictions mean that these roles are simply not being filled. 

Starmer has repeatedly claimed that the country is “addicted” to foreign labour. A bizarre framing that acknowledges our interdependence, but casts it as a problem rather than a solution. Our government insists we can fill these massive staffing shortages by training more native healthcare workers. We can’t. For one thing, we need more doctors, nurses, and care workers now, not ten years from now. For another, the universities that train said professionals are also in absolute crisis as a result of our anti-immigration politics: foreign students were a key source of income, but this is drying up in the face of hostile visa rules and crackdowns.  Finally, the aforementioned project of national economic suicide means we cannot pay competitive rates—or anything close to it. Brits do not want to spend a decade qualifying to be a doctor for a starting salary of £32,000 ($40,000). 

And this failure is cascading. Families with older relatives with complex care needs can no longer find the support they need. Increasingly, NHS hospital beds are being used for them as there is simply nowhere else to go. This sucks up already stretched resources and staff time, which in turn means worse services for everyone else—longer waits to see a specialist, or for operations. A younger person, perhaps a parent with young children, with a cancer diagnosis they might otherwise have survived, now does not. 

You know the “is anyone on the plane a doctor?” trope? That’s our national situation. And when the person who stands up isn’t white British, we reply that we’d actually rather die.

This is no less absurd than the mainstream, bi-partisan view on immigration in most developed democracies right now. Most people don’t see it because they’re not thinking through the causal chain (from restrictions to staffing shortages to outcomes). Part of going on the offensive is getting them to. Part of shaking off our timidity is believing we can. 

Persuasion

Shortages of carers for our elderly, or specialist medical staff, are a particularly extreme case. But more mundane ones exist in all parts of advanced economies. As markets change, and nations specialise in different things, the norm is that some sectors will find themselves needing more workers, while in others too many workers compete for too few jobs (and hence benefit from the workers who are willing to travel for opportunities being allowed to do so). 

The US is larger and more prosperous, the EU has internal freedom of movement, but both are still harmed by overly restrictive systems. Both would benefit from, not exactly more migration, but from greater ease of it—from people who want to move easily being able to fill skill gaps where they arise. Yet liberal parties the world over are too scared to say this. 

It’s not just a temperamental timidity. There seems to be a tacit acceptance that electorates are simply not persuadable. Even as anti-immigrant measures cause economic harm that weakens support for incumbent parties, there’s a feeling that people would not tolerate being told the truth. 

And yet, for all that public opinion isn’t favourable, it’s also very changeable. In the US, Republican opinion generally follows fox news to an almost comedic degree. Support for mass deportations went from 32% of republicans in 2016 to 88% in 2024 as it became a mainstay of Trump’s rhetoric. There’s no reason to think that, if we offered a positive vision of our own, Democrats’ opinion wouldn’t coalesce around it in the same way. In the UK, support for ending all inward migration drops by 2/3rds (45% to 15%) if you tell people doing so would mean NHS shortages. Given that would absolutely be the consequence, can we not make that case?

We liberals can have such a lack of confidence in our ability to persuade. Especially on immigration. I often hear “I agree, but the public won’t go for that”. Or, we get scared of a retort in advance—“if we say X, they’ll just say Y”. 

The nativists will “just say Y’? OK, well, is “Y” true? Does it make sense? Or is it, in fact, society-destroying garbage? It is? Then say that. If their arguments are trash, then trash them. To quote, of all people, Tony Blair (who, whatever else he did, won elections), “the starting point of any campaign is to destroy the basis of [your opponents’] case.” If you allow their premises to stand, people will accept their conclusions. 

So why aren’t we? I think progressive timidity on this topic, in part, reflects the insecurities of our leaders. Not liking immigrants, you see, is what the “real” people think—the working class, the rural, the less affluent, the manual labourer, the straight, the white, the masculine, the male-coded elements of our society. Being pro-immigration automatically makes you less “real”—elite, effete, multicultural, overly cosmopolitan, queer, overly educated, email job, professional, female-coded—dismissive of, and ‘out of touch’ with, the “real” people of the country. 

Authenticity 

I’ve noticed when I really slam anti-immigration arguments, the reflexive response of many is to call me a snob. I get ‘class promoted’, becoming a “private school kid” who doesn’t know what life is like for “real people” out in the “real country”.

For whatever it’s worth, I’m definitely not a private school kid. And I grew up, and have lived for long periods in, the exact sort of “red wall”, northern parts of the UK nativists equate with maximal authenticity. And it’s fine to say things like this, to let people know where you’re coming from. But we shouldn’t stop with such a defensive move, we need to go on the offense—challenging the assumptions behind the charge. 

We should note, for a start, how selective this sensitivity is. Sneering at the working class is just fine if you’re cutting food stamps, or removing family benefits, or cutting social services. The right will quickly jump to deploying some very ugly class (and race) stereotypes when advocating these. The centrists’ handwringing about listening to the ‘voice of the forgotten man’ is dropped the instant we start advocating for material benefits. Again, consider the real fanaticism they found in the US when faced with a progressive, pro-worker economic recovery under Biden. 

And talking about “real” Americans, or “real” Brits, is just—at very best—a stupid framing. I’m not a more authentic Brit (who has more authority to define our national identity) because I was born in Grimsby, or grew up in the North East, or because I’m white and male. I’m not less of one because I’m socially liberal, or because I have a graduate degree and dual nationality. The vast majority of us are somewhere between the ‘real citizen’ and ‘out of touch elite’ caricatures.

Nor is it even true that nativist sentiment is some intrinsically working class thing. Just as often, it’s a luxury belief of affluent pensioners who can vote their distaste for a muti-cultural society without having to worry about the economic harm that causes the rest of us. 

The poorest Americans still marginally prefer Democrats. Both Trump’s strongest support and strongest opposition are cross-class coalitions. Likewise in the UK, how the bottom income bracket (under £20,000, or $26,000) voted in the last election is actually pretty close to the national average: Labour 33%, Lib Dem 11, Green 8, Reform 17, Tory 24, other 7. Reform is a couple of points higher, but so are the Greens. Also the combined left-wing vote share is larger than the right one, and more of the least affluent Brits voted Green or Lib Dem than did Reform. If you want to essentialise the forgotten, “left behind” workers of the country, the data supports a socially progressive caricature more than a socially conservative one. 

Of course, there is no such stereotype that captures the experience of all ‘working people’. And the one that our politicians and press impose on us is, frankly, insulting. I resent the assumption that I must dislike foreigners because of where I was born. Or that my high school friends who didn’t go to university must be bigots because of that, or because they work trade jobs. They absolutely aren’t! There are of course some working class people who are nativists. But there is also a long history of workers’ movements taking socially progressive positions. And there is a strong culture of aggressive social liberalism among many of the least affluent workers for those with eyes to see it. 

I think the reason the snobbery charge has been allowed to silence liberalism to the degree it has is because it exploits an insecurity. Not for most of us necessarily, but for our leaders. In the UK, our politicians (and press) are usually awkward, uncharismatic upper-middle-class sorts, who genuinely are a bit out of touch. They carry totems to try and affirm a connection to ordinary people. Starmer’s father was a toolmaker, did you know? Labour candidate Alan Strickland took it several generations further, boasting “my grandfather was the son of a miner” in a campaign video. These dullards are hence incredibly exploitable: They don’t have a good handle on what “ordinary people” think, but do read a lot of upper-class (in many cases literally aristocratic, or part of the UK’s de facto aristocracy) conservative writers in our press who claim to speak for them. 

In the US case, reactionary centrists in the press are usually from middle-class backgrounds, have a fancy education, and have spent most of their lives in big, blue coastal cities. I think they’re uncomfortable with how all these things have been feminised by conservatives. Ventriliquizing (what they imagine to be) the voice of the common man to attack (female and queer-coded) social liberalism, is a way for them to attempt to re-affirm their masculinity within the symbolically gendered framework the country’s politics operates within. The result is highly privileged New York Times writers lecturing queer barristers and bartenders about what working people think. 

I don’t know how to say this more basically, but this is all complete nonsense and we have to get over it. You can’t lead an army if your main preoccupation is if your enemy likes you. Liberalism can neither accept nor afford leaders with these psychological hangups. 

I don’t know about you, but in a fight for our lives, I want leaders who instinctively hate those trying to kill us. Conversely, I think troops wanting a general who does not openly sympathise with the enemy’s cause is a reasonable enough minimum standard. I also think that even the less craven of us are so used to a defeatist framing that we need reminding how pernicious a creed nativism is—and that there is nothing natural or inevitable about it. 

Freedom of movement 

I recently found myself in Barcelona for a few days—an amazing city I always instinctively vibe with. One thing I kept thinking was, when I was young, I could have lived and worked here for a year without restriction. Or Prague, or Berlin, or Lucca, or any European city. And now no one can. We tore all that up for no good reason. 

In my early twenties I traveled so much, working as I went. Pre-Brexit, we had freedom of movement in the EU and I—owing to my dad being American—had a US passport. It really made me who I am now, and I think I’m such a better, more grounded person for having been able to.

It wasn’t all positive, I was reckless, I made mistakes. You know that trope Americans like to tell of some distant ancestor arriving in a strange land with just their clothes and a few dollars? I’ve literally done that a half dozen times in my life. And it didn’t always go smoothly! I remember sleeping on a hard wood floor, in a freezing Boston apartment—a run down maze of small rooms owned by an elderly crack addict who’d make them available to passers through, in exchange for us coughing up some dollars towards his habit every now and then. 

I picked up what work I could, gravitating towards campaign work—knocking doors for a political candidate, or fundraising for a progressive cause. Those roles are always hiring. I saw so much of the world with them, and talked to thousands of people from all walks of life, often volunteering myself for the more exciting sounding assignments. Want to go work a ballot initiative camping in Maine? Sure. A road trip across upstate New York in mid winter? Sounds great. And in some of those organisations, I ended up taking on much more responsibility. In the chaos of the early Trump era, I found myself running big projects at a young age. Some of my more risky moves paid off magnificently. At one point, I left my job, ducked the last month’s rent I owed, and got a one-way train ticket to start a relationship with a woman in another city I’d known less than a week. She’s now my wife. 

And doesn’t all that speak to some fundamental human need just as much as the desire for comfort and familiarity does? I’m hardly the only person to throw myself at the world in this way. Go to any small town, in the US, UK, or EU, listen to young people there and you’ll hear talk of “getting out”. If that is what they want, they should be free to make a go of it. Free movement with other countries increases their choices in doing so. And for that matter, think of the affluent conservative retirees who vote for this anti-immigrant crap. What do they want to do with their time? Travel! 

Sorry nativism, but contrary to your claim to being universal, there is a deep seated human need for experience and adventure that your unseasoned dork ideology just can’t satisfy. Of course if someone finds deep fulfillment in living where their ancestors lived they should be able to do that—that’s the point of freedom! But the insistence that everyone else do the same is, I think, fundamentally inhuman. 

And that is the consequence of nativism. Anti-immigrant types never really seem to understand that these relationships are reciprocal. Americans often joke about moving to Europe if things get bad. Partisans of both sides seem to imagine there’s some ‘politically disaffected Yank’ visa route. Those who try run headlong into some of the most unpleasant, restrictive, and expensive bureaucratic processes ever devised. When the UK stopped EU citizens from being able to work here, we lost the right to work there. A particularly stupid example of this is older, Brexit voting Brits living abroad, who were shocked to find their own legal status in jeopardy. Leopards and faces, to use the vernacular. 

Reframing the debate

The great advantage of going on the attack, in both war and politics, is to fight the battle on your terms, not your opponents. One of the reasons the immigration debate feels so unwinnable, why we’re perpetually on the backfoot, is we fight it within the nativists’ framing devices. On their chosen ground, so to speak. 

For example, immigration rules are usually conceptualised as being a relationship between a nation (to which we belong) and outsiders (who do not) seeking entry. I think they’re better thought of as a relationship between nations. There is, for instance, an understanding between the US and UK that if the former provides a passport to one of its residents, the latter will allow them entry for a period of 6 months, but not to work or stay beyond that (and similar the other way round). The relationship between France and Italy in contrast, is that citizens of either can live in the other indefinitely and work (more or less) without restriction. 

The French and Italian relationship is a better one. Both with respect to human freedom, and the economic benefits to those who do not travel. The UK has catastrophically harmed itself by opting out of this open system. Recent estimates suggest Brexit has cost us 90 billion pounds in annual revenues (three times the size of the ‘budget black hole’ the government is trying to fill) and that the average Brit is £3,500 a year worse off (or 10% of the median income). 

EU freedom of movement worked. It’s a wonderful thing for people across the continent. One of the great success stories of the modern age. Something to be built upon, not apologized for. And yet this is virtually nowhere said. Occasionally, it will be pointed out that Brexit was a mistake, but for abstract ‘economic’ reasons. Part of going on the offensive will be progressives the world over using the sad story to show why anti-immigrant policies specifically make life worse for everyone. 

People will often say they don’t support open borders because the public won’t go for it. I dislike the phrasing because it reinforces the nativist model that immigration rules are about a nation to which we belong and aliens outside of that. I think freedom of movement provides a better model for the world we want. 

Britain should obviously never have left the EU, but nor should this be the end of our ambitions. I can think of no good reason why we also shouldn’t have a freedom of movement deal with the United States. We have historic links, the same language, and deeply interconnected cultures. This would provide astounding economic opportunities for Brits willing to travel to access much higher wages in the states. And trust me when I say there’s a lot of Americans who hold a special affection for, and fascination with, the old country. Who would take a pay cut to work here for a few years if we removed our intentionally exclusionary and expensive visa process. And both sides would bring with them skills, experience, and different perspectives. Everyone would benefit, this isn’t a zero sum game. 

Talking of the US, we should explore a North American freedom of movement deal. Say Canada, USA, Mexico. These countries are likewise deeply historically, culturally, and economically connected. Think of the hundreds of billions we’d save in border enforcement alone (and what socially productive purposes that money could be used for instead). The harms caused by this regime we could likewise simply do away with. Many Americans claim they have no problem with Mexican migrants, just those who came here illegally. Taking this at face value, we can elegantly solve that problem by making all movement legal. The tearing down of ugly and intrusive border fencing would become a glorious symbol of human freedom on the march. 

Nor should we limit our ambitions to the global north. Let’s start where we have the greatest connection and work out, aiming to find partners who will make mutually beneficial deals with us. Britain has a historic connection to any number of amazing countries through the Commonwealth. What would freedom of movement with, say, India look like? That’s basically unthinkable now, due to pervasive racist fears of being ‘swamped’ by ‘hordes’ of non-white aliens. But the few who’ve looked into it think it could work for both countries. A saner society would at least consider it. 

Attacking nativism

Anti-immigration politics’ claim to represent some natural human sentiment is a strange one, when you think about it. One we have been too timid in aggressively undermining. 

People will always have communities which they feel they belong to, but nativism requires quite a lot more than that: It says that people are not only part of communities, but the boundaries of those communities, their composition and internal norms, can never change. And that people will react with hostility to any attempt to do so.

But these things change all the time. At the time of the French revolution only 11% of the population spoke French. The remainder speaking regional languages and dialects. The modern nation—as a culturally, linguistically, and ethically homogeneous group—is an invention, and a surprisingly modern one. One that had to be imposed, often from the top down, often in the face of real opposition from those whose regional (or other) identities were stronger. This is not to say that we should become anarchists, it’s the structure that we have, but it can exist in better and worse forms.

And if distrust of those different to you is simply how people invariably feel, it’s odd that this sentiment must be stoked by endless lies and propaganda. There’s actually something very artificial about the views electorates hold on immigration—they can only be sustained in a one-sided information vacuum. People’s fears aren’t inevitable, they’re what you get when they’re force-fed demininising propaganda by the right and liberals are silent. 

Actually, when I talk to ordinary nativists, I invariably find they don’t feel the things it claims to represent—pride, cultural fit, a sense of belonging. Rather these are things they desperately want to feel, and have come to believe that excluding others will allow them to. “Everyone else has their own culture, why can’t we?” is a common lament. It’s particularly stupid in America which, for better or worse, is the undisputed cultural hegimon of the world. 

Even in the UK it’s, at best, pathetic and, at worst, ridiculously hypocritical. Britain genuinely does have cultural products worth celebrating and heritage worth preserving. But the minute that threatens nativist bigotry, they’ll turn on it. The right-wing press lobbied hard to get sports presenter (and former England captain, something of a national fixture) Garry Lineker fired because he called the government’s immigration policy “cruel”. Doctor Who actor (what could be more British than The Doctor?) David Tennant likewise drew their ire for being vocally pro trans rights. The National Trust (which preserves many of our historic buildings) was faced with attacks and boycotts for discussing the British role in the slave trade in some of it’s exhibits. Even the Church of England—a core, traditional part of our culture for hundreds of years—is regularly assailed for affirming the traditional Christian teaching of kindness to refugees. These people don’t love their country and culture, they often hate it!

And we haven’t even reached the most flagrant hypocrisy of nativism. It’s natural, they aver, to prefer one’s countrymen in the same way we have a special affection for our families. This latter part is true, and this really is a deep constant in human nature across cultures and time. Family takes different forms, and everyone is different, but for most people the bonds to our children, our parents and partners, and our best friends who are like family, are the most important part of our lives. 

And nothing—really nothing—is more hostile to these bonds than immigration systems. After marrying in America, my father became ill. We made the difficult decision to move back to the UK to help my family. The response of the British state (which, we should remind ourselves, is in an existential crisis due to lack of carers) was to make this incredibly difficult, expensive, and uncertain. We have spent tens of thousands on fees, additional taxes, and moving around. We have had to worry, again and again, that we would fall afoul of ever changing rules. We have had to live separately for periods. And, if the nativists have their way, this would not have been possible at all. I would have had to choose between being with my wife, or supporting a dying parent. I once asked a Labour MP how inflicting such choices on people (which their making the family visa routes more restrictive would absolutely do) increased social cohesion, or benefited the country in any way at all. They had no answer. 

And this is a fairly minor instance. Across the US, Trump deportations are tearing wives from husbands, parents from children. All cheered on by the party of ‘family values.’ In the UK, for a foreign spouse to have legal status you must meet a certain income threshold. Effectively removing the right to family life from the poorest half of the country. I was just able to avoid the above choice, many are not. If the Tory Lam/Philip plan were enacted, 4-7 million legal residents would be deported, leaving perhaps 10-15 million families devastated. 

Ultimately, nativism is not some universal and inevitable feeling. It does not reflect some core human need. Travel does—throughout history people have moved away from bad situations, and towards the hope of better ones. We have sought out new experiences and adventure. Family does—most of us need others, we want to give and receive love. Nativism is a perversion directly hostile to both. Indeed, in our world today it is arguably the greatest threat to them. Its exploitation by fascists is the greatest threat to free societies and free political systems.

And the anti-immigrant forces, in our current moment, are over extended. Brits listened to anti-immigrant campaigners and destroyed their economy. Most Americans are, at very best, uneasy about masked men abducting people from the streets. The world over, we are seeing the results of this ideology and they’re appalling. Nativism has always been a form of social suicide, but it packaged itself as serious, necessery, and respectable. Now it’s increasingly, and increasingly obviously, unhinged. Public opinion is already starting to drift our way, and that’s before people have heard a full-throated progressive case. If we hit back hard—and directly—I think we might find the enemy line much weaker than was imagined. 

Looking forward

Immigration is a good thing. It makes us wealthier, healthier, and more free. It is best understood as mutually beneficial deals between states. 

We should, as in the UKs case, re-enter such deals where we left them. We can reverse our national decline any time we choose. And then we should pursue other deals on top of that. I think that gets us away from the framing of ‘letting people in’—rather, countries come to an arrangement that allows greater freedom for both. 

In the US case, I know proposing a North American free movement block sounds unbelievably radical now. But, in an age of increasingly ‘two teams’ politics, I wonder if that became our side’s position the base would rally to it, in the same way the right’s has rallied to mass deportations. I also wonder—I don’t know, but I wonder—if the UK and US having, in different ways, really demonstrated the brutality and stupidity of nativism might have created an opening. If overflowing hospitals, or masked men on the streets, have been shocking enough that people are open to hearing an alternative who wouldn’t have been otherwise. Of course it would provoke real howls of outrage from reactionary centrists, but that dead-end worldview is what we have to move beyond.

It would also be coherent. What we are saying on immigration would match our values, match the positions we take on other issues. It could all fit within a coherent story of progress and pluralistic freedom. I’m not insensitive to the difficulties. The calculus for politicians is challenging. But that’s no excuse for the rest of us. Liberals shouldn’t tell liberals “that’ll never happen”. I don’t know that this is a debate we can win, but I also don’t know that we can’t. 

And just say we did—there’s no moral arc of the universe that bends towards greater freedom, but nor is there some natural nativism that rules it out. What if we won? What if 100 years from now the world was dominated by prosperous, egalitarian, liberal democracies, of different kinds, and with their own vibrant cultures, but joined together in an international order of large, overlapping free movement zones. 

I think people in that world would look back at ours with disbelief, much like we look back at slavery and witch burnings. Developed countries using state violence to tear families apart on a massive scale, to place innocent people in inhuman conditions, all so the remaining population can live poorer and die younger, will appear to them—correctly—as a sort of moral madness. It will be almost unfathomable to them why the majority of people thought such a thing was justifiable, much less necessary. Our current politics will be intelligible only as a mass psychosis into which entire nations fell. 

These future people will also finally be able to assess nativism for what it is. A disgusting morbidity. The claim that, for the nativist to be happy, the state must restrict the life choices of everyone else, will sound perverse and preposterous to them. One of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological desires one hands over with a shudder to specialists in personality disorders. 

The barriers between us and that future are those of beliefs. Much of what is holding us back on the liberal side is fear, and various insecurities. The fear at least I can understand. But we have seen the results of surrendering the field to the nativists. Of only offering cautious rebuttals, without a values-driven vision of our own. Of implicitly conceding that this is just how “real” people feel. It hasn’t worked, and it’s time to try something different. 

A much better world is possible. A more prosperous one in which states do not sabotage their own economies at the behest of bigots. Where people willing to travel for opportunity can do so, and benefit everyone in the process. Where an aging population does not mean those with terminal cancer, or in cognitive decline, must live out their final years in indignity, fear, or squalor. Where young people can seek experience and adventure, and older people can retire where they wish. Where we can find love, and form families, across borders without harassment. A world, in a word, that is free. 

Let us find the courage to fight for it.

Featured image is Networks of Major High Speed Rail Operators in Europe