The News: Entry Point

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

I find it tempting to think that immigration is only a political issue in this year’s American elections because some politicians have calculated that it works in their favor and have thus decided to hype it up, with the news media obligingly amplifying that decision.

After all, once you’re away from the southern border of the United States, it’s a much less visible issue unless you’re specifically involved in municipal administration in major cities that are trying to cope with the impact of arriving immigrants seeking asylum or who are otherwise seeking aid and services. In some of the biggest American cities, you also might physically see limited evidence of an increased number of incoming migrants in everyday life as you move about your community. But in many other parts of the country, unless you’re an owner or manager of a business that employs significant numbers of undocumented immigrants or people with temporary work permits, you might not really see tangible signs of immigration unless you went looking for them. You might believe that you are competing with recent immigrants in looking for jobs, but a robust range of evidence says otherwise. Most citizens and permanent residents won’t apply for or seek the jobs that undocumented immigrants will take.

So it might seem as if widespread concern over immigration isn’t based on anything experientially real in the lives of many American citizens and permanent residents, and thus is just the product of public manipulation. Only I don’t think that’s the case. Immigration is the most volatile and visible of a series of proxies for a genuine problem in liberal democratic states, namely whether people have a right to control change in the world around them. This isn’t just an issue in the United States, and it is a major driver of anti-immigration sentiment almost everywhere.

I’ve been working on a project concerned with what some theorists of liberalism call “the problem of exit”, namely, how or whether individuals and groups in a liberal society can or cannot leave political and social arrangements that they do not want to be a part of.¹ But equally there are questions to ask about the problem of entry, about whether individuals and groups have a right to control who can join their institutions, their neighborhoods, their communities.

“The problem of exit” seems to me to be under-examined, especially in terms of existing policy and public understanding. In contrast, the problem of entry is a massive zone of confusing policies and mainstream discourse, but it’s certainly something we all talk about, all of the time.

On one hand, we use property rights to answer questions about entry. It’s generally conceded on one hand that on property I own, I can control physical access and also can decide whether or how changes are made to the physical and cultural character of my property. We abrade that right some around the edges: local governments and homeowners associations can enforce codes that specify standards of maintenance or appearance for property, or require owners of properties to provide access through their property to areas held as commons, such as California’s guarantee of access to beaches. Regulations may require that I keep a property up to code, especially if I am making major repairs or additions to it. But liberal property rights in most countries and jurisdictions don’t require property owners to allow new people to reside on their property.

Except, on the other hand, most liberal states also insist that property owners may not discriminate against any class or group of people if they do rent property, against particular groups of customers if they allow people access to their property for commercial transactions or services, against particular groups if I am hiring people as employees and giving them access to a workplace or against potential buyers when an owner is selling property. Which is the main way that entry in this sense happens in the lives of specific communities. A house goes up for sale, and a new person enters the neighborhood. A large undeveloped plot of land that is zoned for commercial use goes up for sale and a new factory or shopping center gets built and changes the existing community.

We are deeply divided about whether communities ought to be allowed to say, “We like things just the way they are; we don’t want anything to change”. Critics of gentrification often invoke the rights of people living where they are to remain there and to retain their neighborhood ties, and yet they may also disparage other communities elsewhere for fighting against the addition of affordable housing or social services like supported living in group homes. Developers will complain bitterly about communities that restrict the scale or character of new residential buildings, while governments may have to wage punishingly long and expensive battles to build new infrastructure that local communities do not want. Almost no one holds to a consistent point of view at the level of rights to block or impede entry, to control the pace or character of change. Almost everybody’s a NIMBY if something fundamental about the place they live has been targeted for some major change and yet also many objections to change that are posed as foundational can evaporate in the space of mere months once change comes to pass and a community finds that it actually is quite happy with the transformation. Everybody will defend the rights of some group of people they see as victimized or disempowered to remain as they are on the land they presently inhabit and yet cheer on the dislodging of some property owners or controlling groups. One person’s valued open space is another person’s wasted resource. One person’s view is another person’s deprivation of the right to make their home taller.

Post-1945 rights-based frameworks strongly defend the rights of citizens and residents within a national territory to travel freely within that territory. At the same time, the international system built up in the wake of World War II specifically denies that there is a similar right to travel between nation-states. Free movement—and by implication, residence—within sovereignties, but not across sovereign borders. So a liberal state is supposed to embrace entry (and the change it brings) within its boundaries. People in Idaho or Wyoming may grouse about Californians fleeing their home state and then trying to remake their new homes into what they left behind, and they might even be able to come up with some mild ways to inhibit that kind of internal migration, but they’re not supposed to be able to block it altogether with legal or institutional controls. If it turns out that people raised in California love it in Bozeman or Missoula and lots of them move in over a decade, and that this in turn changes the retail landscape and the political balance of power, that’s the way it goes. The same goes in reverse: if people are leaving a place en masse and that sets off a doomloop of falling property values, commercial failures, and job losses—if exit becomes the entry of cultural and social change—we don’t ever talk about the possibility of refusing to allow people to leave. Though we do know that this kind of shift can effectively trap people where they are, because rights intersect with wealth in ways that often abrogate the exercise of those rights.

But we’re also uncomfortable when the scale and intensity of such movement rapidly changes the built and natural materiality of a place and seems to strand current residents in a place they never would have chosen to live in or be part of. We’re also concerned when there’s an intention to do so, as when Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers moved to a ranch in Oregon and effectively took over the neighboring town, or when the Free State Movement called for libertarians to all move to New Hampshire with the intention of becoming a political force there. Sometimes we expect “culture” to win out over migration, to remake new arrivals into people who belong in their new home; sometimes we expect migrants to add to an existing culture and create a new pluralism; sometimes we expect the existing culture to be more or less wiped out. And our public rhetoric is all over the place about which of those outcomes we welcome and how we explain change or the lack of change.

My father was born in California; almost none of his adult friends and associates were from there. He was bemused by that (mostly): it seemed very essentially Californian to accept constant change as new people arrived. (His own parents both came to California from elsewhere in the U.S., after all.) And yet I’m struck when I go back to visit that the retail and residential landscape of many of the Southern Californian places I grew up in have changed almost not at all in fifty years. There’s a few “hot zones” of major commercial redevelopment and expansion but also long stretches of very old businesses, old apartment buildings, old houses. The culture of everyday life also remains very similar in many ways, despite the constant in-flow of new people (and the outflow of people like me, who go somewhere else to study and then work and realize they could never afford to go back). There are places in the U.S. where I’ve lived and visited that I would be distressed to see change in fundamental ways; there are others that I think could profoundly benefit from a major overhaul. There are places where change seems fundamental to the material and cultural reality and places where it seems legitimately unwelcome.

I think some of these ambivalences inflect into debates about immigration and explain, partly, why it is relatively easy to convince many people that it is a crisis even if they’re not witnessing anything directly that warrants that labelling. Immigration is a proxy for feelings about change generally, about the entry of new people, new businesses, new social formations, new kinds of public culture. Those feelings can include racial, ethnic or religious bigotry but they’re not limited to those kinds of negative, defensive perspectives on change.

My father’s parents, once new arrivals themselves to Southern California, ended up owning a small house in a city within Los Angeles County that had a lot of smaller and relatively affordable housing stock way back then. As a result, they had a diversity of lower-middle-class neighbors, including a fair number of Chicanos who moved into the neighborhoods around them during the 1960s. By the time they died, the town had shifted again to being majority Asian by a thin margin, most predominantly Chinese, most of them newly arrived legal immigrants. It’s the kind of change that upper middle-class cosmopolitans in many cities welcome (though they often welcome it most when it happens a neighborhood or two away from their own residence). But for my grandparents, it meant that the local shopping centers were suddenly full of businesses that didn’t cater to them, that churches fundamentally changed their congregations, and so on. Despite some racist grousing from my grandfather, I don’t think that even they thought any of that was a big deal—nothing fundamental changed in their daily lives—but they did find it disorienting. Most importantly, they were witnesses to how entry works in a liberal society. You get to move to a new place and start over, bringing your favorite foods and your religion and your political views and your culture? Well, so do other people. The wheel turns round and round. In this sense, we are all replaced by our futures—not just by others, but even by ourselves.

As in so many other cases, the more conservative you are in your reaction to that, the more you tend to think “the law for thee, not for me”. I should be allowed to go where I want, but not you. But this is why ethnonationalist feeling keeps renewing itself, because all of us also have special places that we think of as home, whose transformation dismays us—as well as special places we’ve especially hated (sometimes also home) where we are delighted to see them become different than they were. Ethnonationalists relocate the highly personal and idiosyncratic terrain of those kinds of feelings to large, amorphous agglomerations of people and ‘culture’ and then try to transfer the intimate feelings we have about a street, a neighborhood, a place that we’ve known well to those vague and shifting groupings of people we hardly know at all, to maliciously pump up a fear of being “replaced”. When reactionary ethnonationalists succeed, the practical problems genuinely posed by a sudden influx of many new people to an established place quickly become emotionally volatile feelings about the generality of change—and when that happens, a reactionary narrative often seems like the right way to manage what is happening. It might be that the only way to undercut that is to recognize that all of us at times are disconcerted by our inability to decide on the changes we welcome and the changes we detest.

Image credit: Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

1. See for example Kukathas, Chandran. The Liberal Archipelago : A Theory of Diversity and Freedom. Oxford University Press, 2003.