Like Illegal Immigration, Arguing About Illegal Immigration Never Ends

I missed Daniel's Feb. 11 elaboration on my exchange with universalism's most eloquent exponent Will Wilkinson. It's a good one:

Fundamentally, the disagreement between James and Will Wilkinson (and between myself and Wilkinson in the past) centers on a few basic things: we think citizenship entails certain rights and privileges non-citizens do not receive, and we think national sovereignty is a legitimate element of political organisation and the enforcement of it is a proper function of national governments.  Further, we think that such a government can both legally and morally deny to non-citizens the rights and privileges that citizens possess, because non-citizens have no necessary or inborn claim on the goods of another polity, just as American citizens have no such just claim on other polities.  While I can’t speak for James, I would say that this is because people have rights only as citizens of a particular polity, and that the actual polity to which Americans belong at present is a nation-state (albeit one that maintains certain forms and fictions of being a confederation of several states), while “human rights to movement and free association” as such do not exist.

My qualifier: one absolutely does not have to write off all rights that do not derive from polities as fantasies in order to argue persuasively that 'mobility rights' are imaginary. To say nothing of what kind of political doom one consigns oneself to by arguing that one does have to do so. Indeed the main point about immigration is that it is, unlike other questions that bear on rights claims, is under the sole province of the political determination of domestic citizens and their representatives.

So I get to enjoy being just one momentous step out of sync with Daniel and being just one galaxy away from Will, whose latest runs thus:

No doubt the browning of California has become unpleasant for some white natives. But according to the 2007 United Van Lines internal migration study, California just had another year of decline in out-bound intra-U.S. migration rates, leaving net migration about a wash. [...] So what gives my xenophobic friends? If the idea is that the U.S. will inevitably slide toward second-world status if the whole place comes to look a lot more like California and Arizona demographically, wouldn’t you expect California and Arizona to be much poorer and much less popular? I mean, given the claims I’m getting from some of you, these places ought to be nightmares. But instead they are … really nice places to live!

Setting aside the notion that the peril of illegal immigration is mitigated to the extent that the foreigners in question are just passing through, I don't know about Will's xenophobic friends but here's my beef: it's not the browning of California that's unpleasant but the 'de-territorialization' and 'de-citizening' of California. It's possible that a lot of white Californians would be megastoked if a few million illegal Swedish immigrants showed up, but my bet is actually no. Imagine how the California state GOP would feel if besieged by a sudden influx of Canadians. Whack-job Republicans hate Canadians, remember? Those superlatively white bastards!

Er, once again, the issue is not the color of your skin but the content of your citizenship status. The principle on which Will (and ilk) relies is that a polity -- whatever that now would mean -- with large numbers of noncitizens in it is not by definition a nightmarish situation. My principle is that it is. Because just like the purity of the white race (whatever that is) matters little to me, the economic performance of areas full of noncitizens matters little to me. Will argues that because California has a big, productive economy, it is therefore a 'nice' and 'desirable' place to live. What a woeful demonstration of everything wrong and misleading about the economic frame of mind! Planet Earth has a big, productive economy -- it must be a really great place to live. Well yes, but don't you get the feeling you have to look through the wrong end of the telescope to stop, rather than start, with that proposition? Daniel's point about the virtue of small polities is borne out in sextuplets here. California is too big and too diverse to pass judgment upon given statewide economic data, period.

It's the political health of polities that matters to me a great deal. 'Niceness' is not the only criteria I employ in thinking about where to live -- certainly not niceness on a state level. I doubt I'm alone. And I urge east coasters to believe me when I say portions of California and Arizona are absolute hellmouths. And I insist in good Tocquevillean style that, to the extent that residents of those hellmouths became responsible citizens, and not just responsible 'individuals', they would greatly improve the condition of their environs. But a polity teeming with noncitizens and defaulted citizens is organized such that the management of all administrative affairs tends to come down from on bureaucratic high, sealing fates everywhere in one of the more vicious circles ever to contribute to the fatalistic attitude about the destruction of American citizenship that libertarians only wish were transformed into positive excitement.

Comments

[Kyle]

I would say this pretty much puts Will's argument to bed, but there seem to be no limits to the liberatarian enthusiasm for completely reducing "human flourishing" to "household income" (and no, Will, I'm NOT saying there is no correlation between material wealth and general happiness).

I've been following this argument and have been much more troubled by Will's assertion that these non-citizens have a legitimate moral claim on us to grant them access to the resources and opportunities we enjoy. I say troubled because in a certain sense I think he is right, and there's something almost beautiful about turning Christian charity into humanistic duty.

And Will must know (as he's expressed an interest in this kind of research), how unreflectively biased human beings naturally are to those in their immediate communities. One of Joshua Greene's papers (I don't have the time right now to find which one, it's on his website here: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/) describes a thought experiment which lays bare how much more inclined we are to go to great expense to help someone in need who we happen upon in person than we are to send aid across an ocean to a stranger. Greene's point, and I imagine Will would agree, is that behavioral tendencies may have been selected for in the Pleistocene that incline us toward this kind of "chauvinism," and we find it difficult to become because these same mechanisms are still operative (we have not evolved biologically to keep pace with globalization), but just because we are this way doesn't mean we ought to be this way.

This is what I think Will is getting at when he talks about stunted moral development or what have you. But if we're to render citizenship irrelevant when it comes to distributing resources and opportunities, what other group affiliations will have to go by the wayside? After the polis, then the household, right? Maybe when I die my estate shouldn't pass to my wife, who after all is just my wife, but to whoever squats on it first.

[Will Wilkinson]

James, Can you please say something about why citizenship as you construe it is so valuable for people according to some broadly shared notion of value, and not just according to your personal pet theory of what makes life meangingful? That way, it would be possible to have a productive debate. And I'd like to believe that citizenship (and the word "polity") is not just a personal fetish of yours, but I don't.

Wealth is good for people in terms of health, longevity, life-satisfaction, education, etc. I can prove it. And I suspect that the places in Arizona and California that you so shamelessly denigrate represent an improvement in quality of life for most of the people who live there, which would help explain why many of them do.

Your disdain for those communities and the people who live in them reflects very poorly on you, my friend, and very much illustrates what concerns me about citizenship fetishism: it practically encourages you to dehumanize people with other passports.

[Sameer]

Yeah, it seems your argument hinges upon answering Will's question. Please do!