OPEN BORDERS AND THE SURVIVAL OF NATIONAL CULTURES

George Vasilev*

The concern to ensure the survival of national cultures is an important source of opposition to

relaxed border controls (Sassen 1999, xvii). Immigrants might strive to culturally adapt rather

than to displace existing cultural norms. But they bring with them new habits, customs,

values and cuisines that unsettle established traditions and transform national self-

understandings in unintended and unanticipated ways. This functions as an abiding source of

angst in receiving states. Concerned that too much immigration – or the presence of specific

types of immigrants – undermines the integrity of national cultures, receiving states maintain

tightly regulated borders and exclusivity in naturalisation criteria, regarding this as essential

for staving off the perceived cultural threat posed by new residents.

In this chapter, I consider the guiding assumptions behind such policies. The aim is two-fold:

to assess the extent to which immigration undermines national culture; and to determine how

the objectives of an open border system might be accommodated alongside the objectives of

national cultural survival.

I argue that conditions of migration do indeed exist that can lead to the extinction of national

cultures and that this particular experience of cultural loss exposes people to various harms

that cannot be justified by any benefits that free mobility might bring. Nevertheless, the very

possibility of such conditions is not a plausible ground for the continuation of strict

* I would like to thank Nancy Wonders for the incisive feedback she offered in the writing of this chapter. I am

also grateful for constructive feedback from Rainer Bauböck, Leanne Weber and the other participants at the

‘Peace at the Border’ workshop at Monash University, Prato, Italy in 2013.

restrictions on human mobility, as national cultures can be protected under an open borders

system. In a world of free international movement, the survival of national cultures could be

ensured through the ongoing maintenance of bounded citizenship regimes and the

enforcement of jurisdictional boundaries. These support national cultures by sustaining the

conditions of national self-determination and the public status of languages associated with a

particular territory’s nations. While it is possible to envisage levels of immigration so intense

that they lead to the collapse of these culture-sustaining institutions, this extreme case

scenario does not presuppose a complete abandonment of open borders policies, only their

temporary suspension in those societies where culture-disrupting immigration poses a

plausible threat.

To make these points, the chapter is organised as follows. It begins by defining national

culture in non-essentialist terms and considering the role played in its reproduction by

international borders, citizenship regimes and globalisation. It then goes on to consider the

moral questions raised by the protection of national culture and the extent to which the

diversification brought on by immigration functions to erode national culture. The final part

puts forward a set of ideal proposals for the simultaneous realisation of free human mobility

across international borders and the continuity of national cultures.

National culture

National culture encompasses the languages, values and traditions considered definitive of a

national community. All modern democracies seek to promote and protect their national

cultures, taking it to be a sovereign right to do so and a means of securing the cohesion and

integrity of the state. Central to this process is the spread of one or more languages over a

territory as the official idioms, along with the standardisation of values, historical narratives

and symbols seen as emblematic of the nation.

It should be noted that national cultures are not settled essences, much less consensually

attainable end-goals, despite some prominent attempts to characterise them in this manner.

Some philosophers believe that citizens can plausibly arrive at a normative agreement on the

character of their nation, which would then function as the common ground upon which

diverse citizens could deliberate over collective decisions (Miller 2000). Others, such as

politicians and media commentators, frequently tout particular idealisations of the nation as

though they were self-evident facts, invoking the apparent timelessness of traditions, values

and histories to signal what it means to authentically belong. However, in reality, no cultural

essence exists, or has ever existed, that accounts for all the diversity present within a national

community. Nations are vast and unwieldy constituencies, encompassing a pluralism of

actors who maintain mutually irreconcilable visions of the good life based on religious,

ethnic, linguistic and ethical differences. In light of this, national cultures are more accurately

understood as hegemonic, rather than inclusive or consensual, social phenomena. Their pre-

eminence over a territory is won at the expense of competing idealisations of state and

society, but rarely, if ever, through a consensus that incorporates the preferences of all of the

nation’s members.

This insight does not imply that a national culture can only ever be an oppressive imposition

on people who identify differently. Competing idealisations of national culture acquire

greater or lesser degrees of popular legitimacy, depending on the extent to which they

alienate individuals who hold alternative self-conceptions. Furthermore, the non-reducibility

of national culture to a set of essences does not mean it is socially or ethically irrelevant. On

the contrary, the ability to reproduce practices, customs and languages considered integral to

a community’s sense of self is definitive of what it means to be collectively free, even though

the social markers at the centre of such reproduction are forever shifting and internally

contested (see below).

An understanding of national cultures as unstable and as sites of continuous contestation

offers normative and sociological guidance on how to think about the relationship between

cultural survival, on the one hand, and the free movement across territorial borders, on the

other. If national cultures can and do exist as plural and fluid phenomena, and if disagreement

over the character of the nation is an empirical reality, then it stands to reason that the

relaxation of border controls does not have to disrupt the continuity of national cultures. After

all, the diversification brought about by migration is compatible with the ability of nations to

contest and reproduce practices they consider central to their identity, given that such

collective self-definition has always ensued against the background of a constantly altering

cultural terrain.

Migration invariably shifts the terms of such reproduction through the new forms of life it

injects into a receiving society. But this is not equivalent to cultural extinction. If it were, we

would be at a loss to explain the historical continuity of today’s nations, all of which have

undergone dramatic transformations over time through the modification of languages, values,

beliefs and customs as a result of migration and external influences.

International borders and cultural survival

While it is true that open borders are not an automatic threat to the continuity and distinctness

of national cultures, it would be an oversight to conclude that they are no threat at all.

Territorial borders have been intimately linked to processes of state-sponsored cultural

reproduction, and are one reason why governments remain so vigilant in maintaining

sovereignty over the movement of people across borders despite being relatively relaxed

about control over the movement of information, capital and goods. To give up control of

territorial borders is to relinquish one powerful instrument in the production of national

cultures, as borders mitigate social pluralisation and therefore a potential challenge to the

hegemony of state-sanctioned modes of national existence. In a world in which people are

free to take up residence wherever they wish, pre-existing cultures face dilution, even

extinction, when the intermixing of new traditions, languages, customs, habits, cuisines,

histories, ideologies and moral codes displaces those historically linked to a territory and

considered an integral part of the identity of the national community located in that territory.

On the face of it, this assertion runs counter to the non-essentialist insights just offered, which

conceive of cultures as constantly changing and indeterminate. However, while cultures are

not static, there is a point when cultural change is experienced as cultural loss. As Alan Patten

notes, that point is reached when people unwillingly lose control over the institutions of

socialisation that permit them to transmit their culture to the next generation and therefore

ensure its survival (Patten 2011, 739). These institutions include schools, the workplace,

institutions of government and public administration, the media, popular culture, along with

language and forms of discourse, which expose people to a common formative experience,

and therefore bring them to consider themselves as bearers of a particular national culture.

From this perspective, open borders would become an instrument of cultural loss insofar as

they would cause demographic shifts that impinge on host members’ sense of ownership and

dominance over such institutions of socialisation. The determining factor is not simply that

the change in demographics radically transforms the cultural characteristics of a society, but,

more fundamentally, that there is a crowding out of existing members from the positions of

power and responsibility that enable them to maintain a distinct formative environment and

therefore a sense that their culture is in existence.

It is not possible to draw on a contemporary example illustrating an open borders pathway of

cultural extinction, given the tight regulation of international population flows that currently

exists. It can nevertheless be illustrated by way of analogy within the domestic context, where

culture encroaching migration has been a commonplace practice throughout history, and

where national minorities have historically had little or no say over the movement of people

into their traditional homelands. Indeed, one of the greatest migrations in history, namely, the

arrival of immigrants from Europe to the United States (US) from 1850 to 1914, devastated

Native American societies, as did large-scale human movements to other classical countries

of immigration, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina (Castles and Miller

2009, 8, 248). Similarly, expansionist states consolidating their grip over newly gained

territories often encourage migration to these places with a view to diluting or obliterating

local cultures (Dummett 2001, 50–1). Such policies were an ostensible feature of the Soviet

Union in the Baltic States, Indonesia in East Timor and the Yugoslav state in Kosovo, and

continue to be an ostensible feature of Israel in the Occupied Territories and China in Tibet

and the Xinjiang Province, to name but a few examples.

Open borders but bounded polities

These examples show that a nation’s inability to restrict settlement in its historical territories

can imperil its distinctiveness whenever population inflows disrupt the mechanisms by which

pre-existing languages and practices are transmitted from generation to generation. However,

such institutional displacement need not be a necessary outcome of an open borders policy.

After all, governments can take an indifferent attitude towards the movement of people into

their territories, but maintain sovereignty over citizenship so that access to decision-making

power in key public institutions is a discretionary rather than universal entitlement, and

therefore a power firmly situated in the hands of the host population.

Furthermore, governments could continue to enact and enforce particularistic laws over a

territory while allowing that territory to be accessible to all who wish to take up residence

there. Under such arrangements, cultural continuity would be ensured in spite of the presence

of large populations of newly settled residents, as these residents would have little or no say

in how law-making, government and, ultimately, socialisation are carried out in the first

instance. Instead, they would gain these privileges only once they were deemed to pose no

challenge to the process of intergenerational cultural transmission. Access to positions of

influence and full citizenship would be granted only to an extent that would allow for the

absorption of newcomers into the nation to keep pace with the rate of their arrival. At the

same time, the maintenance of jurisdictional authority would ensure laws enforced over the

territory continue to function as vital instruments for the propagation of the national culture

into the future.

There is nothing radically novel about such an arrangement. Freedom of movement in a

world of political and jurisdictional boundaries has been a feature of the European context for

some time now, and has been entirely consistent with the cultural continuity of national

communities. The Schengen area of the European Union (EU), the Nordic Passport Union

and the free movement agreement between Ireland and the United Kingdom all provide

examples of free mobility coexisting with the reproduction of national identities through law-

making and law enforcement by self-determining political communities (Bauböck 2009, 10).

In these zones of free movement, the enjoyment of rights of exit, entry and stay does not

impinge on national cultures, as their reproduction is protected through the regulation of

political membership and subjection to territorial jurisdiction. The regulation of political

membership guarantees that each signatory state remains a distinct community of character,

as admission controls nurture the collective stability and historical continuity necessary for

people to share commitments towards each other and a sense of common life (Walzer 1983,

62). Similarly, territorial jurisdiction protects the cultural heritage of each national

community by underpinning what Philippe van Parijs terms ‘territorially differentiated

coercive linguistic regimes’ (Van Parijs 2011, 142). In such regimes, the language of the

national community remains the medium by which ‘laws are published, courts operate, public

media broadcast, official information is disseminated, elections are organised and

proceedings are conducted in local, regional and national assemblies, sometimes also the

language of commercial messages in public spaces and formal business in large private firms’

(Van Parijs 2011, 134).

By the same token, the independent relationship between freedom of movement and cultural

continuity should not be overstated, as liberal democracies encounter normative obstacles in

how far down the path of membership exclusivity they can go. A society committed to

principles of inclusion and equality cannot justify relegating long-term residents from

political power, as the very essence of democracy is the freedom to contest and shape laws to

which one is expected to conform. To extend this freedom to some residents but not others is

to deprive a class of individuals of the capacity to consent to or reject policies that have a

significant impact on their lives. It is also to leave them vulnerable to exploitation and

oppression owing to their disenfranchisement and inability to organise effectively for self-

defence (Walzer 1983, 58–9). Germany’s so-called guest workers are a well-documented

case in point. As Michael Walzer points out, guest workers were ruled like ‘Athenian metics’,

having their every move regulated, but lacking the ability to bring such regulation to account

(Walzer 1983, 58). Migrant workers in Gulf States endure similar mistreatment as a result of

their alien resident status, being forced to accept segregation in barracks, the imposition of

very long work hours and the threat of deportation for misconduct (Castles and Miller 2009,

132).

Living up to a commitment of inclusive citizenship does not pose problems when

socialisation processes keep up with immigration rates. However, challenges arise when the

inflow of people is so large that it overwhelms local formative environments and processes.

The simultaneous enactment of policies of open borders and open membership under such

circumstances will spell the demise of the national culture, as newcomers and their

descendants fail to develop a sense of belonging with the receiving population sufficient to

maintain the unity of the political community. Through sheer force of numbers, unintegrated

newcomers will gain the ability to assume pre-eminence in key public institutions, and

administer them in a way that aligns with their sense of self at the expense of the historically

existing one.1

When confronted with these circumstances, the receiving population is left with no

alternative but to restrict immigration if it wishes to continue reproducing its culture and

following through on a commitment of inclusive citizenship. By curtailing the inflow of

people, the receiving population nurtures a demographic under which it can extend

opportunities for citizenship without forsaking its majority status in democratically governed

institutions. In this way, it remains in control of public institutions, and thereby ensures the

continuity of the socialisation processes that sustain the society’s national distinctness, even

as the society continues to be populated and culturally altered by new immigrants and

subsequent generations.

In sum, open borders need not challenge the ability of host nations to be cultural gatekeepers.

Nevertheless, conditions of migration do exist under which freedom of movement

unavoidably engenders tension with national cultural continuity. Where a destination is

subject to intense immigration over a prolonged period, a choice must be made between the

prioritisation of liberties of geographical mobility and the maintenance of national

distinctiveness.

Before proceeding to consider the normative implications of this trade-off and its likelihood

in a world of open borders, a word is required on globalisation, as it has significant bearing

on the interrelationship between migration and national culture.

The impact of globalisation

Globalisation introduces an additional layer of complexity into the relationship between

migration and national culture. The intensification of cultural flows set off by globalised

capitalism, migration and communication has had a standardising effect on national diversity,

subjecting different national populations to the same homogenising and hybridising

influences. This is evident through the appearance of a global lingua franca based on the

English language (Van Parijs 2011, 11). English has become ‘the world’s primary

transnational language in culture, the arts as well as in science, technology, commerce,

transportation and banking’ (Barber 1995, 84). It is also evident through the convergence of

mass consumption patterns based on globally produced and distributed popular music, film,

television and fast food. Coupled with these homogenising tendencies have been hybridising

tendencies. People now have identities that are less fixed or unified, and more likely to be

hyphenated owing to their enhanced exposure to diverse lifestyles, ethnicities and

consumption patterns (Held and McGrew 1999, 39).

For some, this trend is evidence that we have arrived at a historical juncture where national

distinctiveness is no longer socially relevant. From this perspective, immersion in national

cultures is self-deluding, as it involves, in the view of Jeremy Waldron (1995, 100), ‘an

artificial dislocation from what is going on in the world’. One may live in San Francisco and

be of Irish ancestry, and yet not feel that one’s identity is compromised when ‘he [sic] learns

Spanish, eats Chinese, wears clothes made in Korea, listens to arias by Verdi sung by a Maori

princess on Japanese equipment, follows Ukrainian politics, and practices Buddhist

meditation techniques’ (Waldron 1995, 95). In this cosmopolitan world, the only authentic

self is the ‘mongrelised self’; that is, one that is constituted by a limitless diversity of

character and not by discrete and homogenous cultural communities (Waldron 1995, 100–

12).

However, such conclusions wildly exaggerate the corrosive impact globalisation has had on

national distinctions. We have already noted that the measure of a nation’s existence is not

some illusory homogeneity, much less any impermeability from the outside. Rather, it is the

extent to which national members are intergenerationally reproducing cultural forms they

take to be definitive of their identity, but which are constantly changing and publicly

contested. This non-essentialist and process-oriented ontology of nations is perfectly at ease

with the ontology of hybridised individuals noted by Waldron. What gives rise to national

distinctiveness in a situation of hybridity is the common frame of reference under which

individuals are taking up foreign influences and reconstituting them with domestic ones (Held

and McGrew 1999, 374). This common frame emerges as a result of people’s ongoing

socialisation in domestically rooted formative environments, which leaves them retaining a

sense of national identity despite the cocktail of foreign cultural forms they may be

internalising. Put differently, insofar as the starting point of hybridisation is nationally

situated selves, rather than blank cultural slates, national distinctiveness will continue to

remain socially relevant. The interplay between the foreign and the domestic produces

combinations of culture that are variegated and complex, but by no means detached from a

specific national inheritance.

It is also apparent that although globalisation has created opportunities for the formation of

transnational identities, it has also led to the reaffirmation of national ones. This is because

advances in communications technologies generate awareness of the value orientations and

lifestyles that distinguish people from distant others, rather than simply unite them. Indeed,

present-day communications technologies have made possible denser and more intense

interaction between members of particularistic linguistic communities. This has served to

rekindle, and not simply erode, traditional forms and sources of national life (Held and

McGrew 1999, 31). For this reason, globalisation is more accurately conceived as an ongoing

dialectic between the standardising push of ‘McWorld’ and the fragmentary pull of ‘Jihad’ –

to paraphrase Benjamin Barber (1995) – and not merely one or the other. Far from being

rendered defunct, national identification has acquired new qualities under these paradoxical

forces. It has become more plural, hyphenated and overlapping, but no less relevant as a

social ground from which people make sense of the world.

The morality of cultural survival

A fundamental normative question left looming in the analysis is why the survival of cultures

should be valued and supported in the first place. The disappearance and genesis of cultures

are constant features of human life. Given this, one might reason that the quest to preserve

culture is a quest to artificially arrest an unavoidable process of social change and renewal.

As Waldron puts it, the death of a culture is ‘like the death of a fashion or hobby, not the

demise of anything that people really need’ (Waldron 1995, 100).

More fundamentally, even if there were some value in ensuring the survival of national

cultures, how can this objective legitimately trump the right to free movement whenever the

two clash? There seems little, if any, moral justification for denying people the option to lead

prosperous and secure lives elsewhere simply in the name of maintaining a national culture. It

implies the violation of a fundamental human freedom in the service of a parochial sentiment.

In a world where massive disparities in wealth and opportunities are territorially delineated, it

seems morally dubious for high-income nation-states to use the protection of their culture as

grounds for the imposition of constraints on human mobility.

It is true that, on its own, the mere threat of cultural disappearance is not a compelling moral

ground for enacting state-sponsored projects of cultural preservation in response. After all,

not all instances of cultural disappearance are the result of coercion imposed from the

outside. Some cultures disappear through the choices of existing members, who may no

longer see the maintenance of practices associated with their traditional identity as vitally

important. Where a culture is on the way out as a result of internal indifference, there is little

moral purchase in keeping it afloat.

Matters change, however, when the elimination of a culture is a non-voluntary process. The

argument for cultural survival under these circumstances appeals not to the preservation of

culture for its own sake, but for the sake of protecting the interests, integrity and

opportunities of individuals constituted by that culture. Non-voluntary cultural loss is tied to

practices of forced conformity and subordination, whereby members of a nation are coerced

into seeing themselves as belonging to another, more powerful nation. This relation of

domination is unjust for the reason that it undermines the ability of subordinated individuals

to lead meaningful and autonomous lives. The determination of their identity by an outside

agent deprives them of the means to maintain a dignified collective existence, while the

reconstruction of their society in the image of their assimilator exposes them to new barriers,

burdens and biases in public life that hamper their ability to flourish (Kymlicka 2001, 32).

When these insights are applied to a context of immigration, we gain a clearer picture of why

freedom of movement is not an inviolable right, but must be subject to certain constraints in

order to avoid the generation of injustices tied to cultural loss. Were immigration to occur at a

level that contributes to the displacement of members of the receiving society from key

public institutions, it would be implicated in the integrity- and opportunity-depriving

outcomes noted above, insofar as it paves the way for immigrants to become the new rulers

and therefore new disseminators of nationally oriented cultural forms in the receiving society.

As Rainer Bauböck observes, a situation of this kind is morally dubious because it is akin to

colonisation (Bauböck 2008, 27). Immigrants are not joining the pre-existing national

community and contributing to its evolution, but are capturing the institutions that formerly

permitted that community to self-govern and evolve.

In view of the inherent unjustness of such a scenario, a national community can indeed make

a morally defensible claim to exercise immigration controls over its territory. However, such

a claim would have merit only where the community could demonstrate that open borders

would imperil its survival by robbing it of the power to self-govern and therefore to

understand itself as free and respected (Bauböck 2009, 14).

The likely consequences of open borders

The assertion that national culture has moral relevance can very easily be construed as a

defence for more and not less vigilance over international flows of people. Indeed, the

protection of national culture already figures prominently in contemporary justifications for

restrictions on immigration (Sassen 1999, xvii). It is not uncommon to hear politicians and

media commentators referring to a supposed crisis in the state’s authority to control borders

and therefore the urgency for more rigorous policing of borders in order to alleviate a

perceived cultural threat posed by immigration.

However, such populist appeals to restrictions on immigration cannot be validly supported by

invoking the moral status of national cultures. Allegations in popular debates that

immigration is a menace on national culture are rhetorical ploys designed to appeal to

people’s base emotions in order to advance political and ideological ends. They are not

statements deriving from a reasoned assessment of empirical facts. In reality, current

international human flows do not even remotely approach any threshold of cultural loss, as

receiving society members remain firmly in control of the formative environments that enable

them to perceive themselves as self-determining and nationally distinct.

But would matters be otherwise in a world of free mobility? A question of this kind invites

endless speculation and conjecture, as it is premised on a counterfactual that cannot be

definitively proven. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to believe that culture-endangering

migration will only ever be an exception rather than the rule in a world of unconstrained

international mobility.

First, it is unlikely that the elimination of border controls would herald mass migrations that

lead nations to flood each other out of existence for the simple reason that people are

generally reluctant to leave their villages and towns to take up residence abroad (Sassen

1999, 141). Indeed, the vast majority of the world’s population does not consider migration.

The few who do are typically fleeing their homes in search of refuge elsewhere as a result of

ethnic violence, persecution, development programs such as large dams, and natural disasters

(Castles and Miller 2009, 7). This reluctance to leave one’s country of birth explains why

dramatic upward shifts in migration rates have not eventuated in contexts where border

controls are eased or have been historically absent. For example, inside the EU, where

citizens can reside and work freely in another Member State, cross-border migration remains

minimal. This is despite the presence of disparities in earning levels between Member States,

which provides strong economic incentives for citizens to seek work and residence elsewhere

in the union. A similar unwillingness to migrate was observed in the 19th century, when

states lacked the technical and bureaucratic capacities to regulate borders. In that period, too,

migration was confined to a minority of people (Sassen 1999, 141).

Second, empirical experience tells us that people who immigrate are more likely to do so with

a mindset to adapt and integrate, rather than to impose their beliefs and practices onto host

populations (Kymlicka 2001, 29–32). The readiness of immigrants to submit to the cultural

hegemony of receiving societies suggests that immigration will continue to be a nation-

sustaining phenomenon as it has been historically, even if a rise in the flow of newcomers

were to result from the removal of border controls. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to recall a

case of immigration that has led to the emergence of separatist nations down the track.

Overwhelmingly, immigrants seek to conform to existing languages and practices considered

the norm, as their economic and social success will depend on doing so.

Third, immigration changes the identity of immigrants more so than it does the identity of

members of host societies, as the former are subject to powerful homogenising influences

through their immersion in new hegemonic social structures. This is especially true for

second-generation immigrants, who are exposed to even greater socialising influences than

their parents through education in public schools (Carens 2000, 123). Such structures are

invariably transformed as immigration alters the cultural composition of a society. But they

are not rendered inoperative.

Finally, although the removal of border controls creates opportunities for international

migration, it does not follow that these opportunities will merely stimulate permanent

settlement, and therefore a rising tide of claims for full membership in the receiving polity.

There is also the likelihood that a further intensification of circular migration will result, as

those seeking temporary employment abroad gain the ability to freely circulate between their

country of origin and their country of labour (Sassen 1999, 143–4). Indeed, current closed

border policies discourage circular migration in favour of permanent settlement, as those not

permitted to reside and work in a country face significant costs and risks when travelling

internationally. Individuals who would prefer to circulate back and forth to supplement their

household income in their countries of origin are compelled to make the high-wage country

their place of residence in order to avoid capture by border authorities and exploitation by

people smugglers.

The effects of this incentive structure were witnessed after fences and surveillance systems

were built along the US–Mexico border in the 1990s. The most salient impact of this

fortification was not any reduction in migration, but the transformation of temporary labour

movement into permanent settlement. Heightened border controls allowed smugglers to

increase their fees sharply as the journey across the border became more dangerous. This

encouraged many illegal Mexican workers to stay in the US and eventually bring their

families with them (Castles and Miller 2009, 249).

In sum, any shifts in migration flows that follow the removal of border controls are unlikely

to be of a magnitude and character that immediately endanger national cultures. Important

exceptions would be small nations, which could rapidly be outnumbered were their states to

become a popular destination for settlement. So too would stateless nations, which lack the

sovereign power necessary to socialise newcomers into co-nationals. In such contexts,

legitimate claims for restrictions on free movement would apply. Elsewhere, however,

migration flows will likely remain consistent with the survival of nations.2

Immigrant diversity and social cohesion

But perhaps we have set the bar too low in our assessment of what constitutes culture-

endangering immigration. What about the claim that immigration, even at the more modest

levels currently witnessed, already threatens the viability of national cultures by undermining

social cohesion? Some analysts have drawn a causal link between immigration and social

fragmentation, regarding the diversification set in place by immigration as corrosive of civic

bonds (Putnam 2007), and contending that this justifies the maintenance of restrictive

immigration and citizenship policies (Pevnick 2009, 147–8). Looked at from this vantage

point, immigration may not necessarily equate with cultural loss in the first instance. But it is

certainly a step in that direction, as the divisions it is said to create undermine the internal

authority of the state, and thereby thwart the state’s capacity to perform the socialising

imperatives necessary to sustain a viable public culture. In light of this, and the numerous

conflicts over integration currently raging in western democracies, one might conclude that,

far from relaxing restrictions on freedom of movement and naturalisation, we should be

keeping them where they are, even tightening them, in order to maintain the conditions of

unity supposedly undermined by a diverse citizenry.

This line of reasoning is problematic for numerous reasons, two of which are presented here.

First, it erroneously assumes that a link exists between the promotion of cultural

homogeneity, on the one hand, and the emergence of societal cohesion, on the other. One

could in fact credibly argue that the opposite is just as likely. There is no shortage of

examples demonstrating how the attempt to turn a culturally diverse population into

homogenous citizens backfires, igniting antagonisms that were previously non-existent. The

Islamic scarf affair in France is one such example. Here it was the very effort to purge

difference from the public sphere through a ban on veiling that functioned as a source of

division, as women who were previously not partial to the practice began to defiantly take it

up as a form of resistance towards the state’s intrusion into their lives. The outcome was to

reify group distinctions, rather than nurture the cohesion desired by officials, as the exposure

to assimilatory pressures increasingly oriented women towards their communities of birth and

away from the republican identity espoused by the French state (Benhabib 2002, 94–100).

The point can be made in the reverse by noting how heterogeneity has been consistent with

the cultivation of reciprocal bonds characteristic of solidarity. For example, drawing on the

findings of an Anglo-Canadian study on the effects of multicultural programs, Tariq Modood

(Modood 1998, 388) highlights how South Asian adolescents in Vancouver felt much more

hyphenated and mixed, and more readily identified with the values and lifestyles of their

white peers, than South Asian adolescents in Birmingham – a decidedly less (official)

multicultural setting. Such individuals tended to identify more strongly with the

particularistic norms and mores of their immigrant communities than did those in Vancouver

where multicultural policies are actively pursued.

More broadly, if social convergence is what keeps societies together, this does not explain

why the most violent conflicts have been fought between culturally alike individuals –

consider, for example, the virtual absence of objective differences between non-religious

Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks in Bosnia; Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; and

Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda. It also does not explain why the deepest manifestations of

mutual commitment can be found among culturally dissimilar members – consider, for

example, the deep linguistic, religious, historical and ideological cleavages dividing Israel’s

Jewish population.

The promotion of cohesion is a complex matter that cannot be resolved in the scope of this

chapter. However, suffice it to say that cultural homogeneity is not a determining factor of

cohesion. Given this, any attempt to restrict immigration on the grounds that it necessarily

corrodes solidarity through the introduction of diversity is premised on an empirically suspect

assumption.

The second reason why it is problematic to restrict immigration on the grounds of avoiding

disunity is that doing so penalises immigrants for a social problem that may not be of their

making. Indeed, if we study closely so-called failures of integration in western democracies,

we find that their root causes are not any cultural incompatibilities between protagonists, but

unwise policy choices and disparaging public attitudes that leave immigrants feeling

alienated and socially marginalised. This is exemplified by the treatment of Muslim

immigrants in recent times. While much social commentary and political rhetoric have

demonised Muslims for their supposed unwillingness, even inability, to adapt to the national

identities of host societies, such adaptability has been impeded by the rising tides of

intolerance that have swept across western democracies (Bauböck 2008, 7–8). In such

settings, it has been commonplace for Muslims to be portrayed as a culture apart, having an

identity said to be backward and an implacable threat to democracy (Vasta 2010, 516). The

climate of suspicion generated by this civilisational discourse has functioned to diminish

opportunities for Muslims to flourish as full members of these societies through their

subjection to government surveillance (Humphrey 2009) and discrimination in the labour and

housing markets (Yilmaz 2011, 10–11).

Coupled with such prejudice has been a lack of government initiatives to assist Muslim

immigrants to acquire the language skills that would enable them to participate in the

institutions of their receiving states. In many European states today, language skills remain a

key condition for naturalisation. Yet support or easy access to language courses is not made

available. The result is that many first-generation immigrants fail to adequately pick up the

dominant language, as the imperative to meet subsistence needs through paid work leaves

them lacking the time and money to invest in language classes. The effect of such

government neglect is the amplification of the perception that immigrants are to blame for

their failure to integrate (Bauböck 2001, 5).

In these situations, the breakdown of social cohesion is falsely attributed to cultural factors

when it is more accurately socioeconomic by nature and a direct result of the ill treatment of

immigrants. Accordingly, to seek to cultivate cohesion by restricting the presence of

immigrants would be a perverse reaction, as it is tantamount to rewarding unjust behaviour at

the expense of those forced to bear its consequences.

The preferred future of open borders

It has been argued so far that open borders can plausibly function as the default position from

which claims for cultural survival can be staked. But what would such a world ideally look

like? In the remainder of this chapter, I will provide several proposals in response to this

question. Each offers practical guidance on how the joint objectives of free mobility and

cultural continuity can be pursued without losing sight of the fundamental commitment to

ensure the respect and integrity of individuals.

Eased criteria of naturalisation

A relaxation of international borders would ideally be accompanied by a relaxation of

naturalisation criteria (see also Torresi in this volume). This would involve granting long-

term residents eligibility for full rights of citizenship. It would also involve rejecting the trend

prevalent in many countries today of conditioning the extension of these rights on tests that

demonstrate linguistic proficiency and knowledge of national values.

The reasons for easing the conditions of naturalisation are various, but all point to gains that

could be made from the perspective of national cohesion. Extending full membership rights

to immigrants protects them against the exploitation that arises from democratic exclusion.

By acquiring the right to vote, immigrants have the capacity to inflict political costs on

elected representatives who act against their interests. They also attain the reach into the

policy-making process necessary for its outcomes to be responsive to their concerns. When

immigrants become democratically consequential in this manner, they have an incentive to

see public institutions as their own, as they are now participating in a common political

enterprise as equals.

Language and national values tests are favoured by many countries on the assumption that

they foster cohesion. However, such policies are based on a rather naïve view of what

generates unity. In fact, there are good grounds to believe that such policies actually do more

harm than good to the social fabric, and therefore are best avoided. First, when societies are

governed on the assumption that cultural sameness is a determining factor of solidarity,

diversity is recast as a cultural blight that must be overcome. This breeds antagonism where it

might not have previously existed.

Second, language and national values tests risk creating a class of permanently alienated

residents by making the attainment of citizenship too burdensome (Laegaard 2010, 458).

Where the path to full membership is exceedingly difficult, there is little incentive to take it,

further undermining cohesion.

Third, the requirement that immigrants demonstrate that they have internalised officially

sanctioned values in order to be admitted as full members is inconsistent with respect, as a

demand of this kind is not made on natives, many of whom hold values that run counter to

nationally sanctioned ones. In fact, racist and xenophobic individuals make up a significant

proportion of the native population in some of the liberal democracies that are most

enthusiastic about citizenship tests.3 And yet these individuals are not summoned to prove

their national credentials in order to enjoy full membership rights (Bauböck 2002, 7).

To oppose language and national values tests is not to oppose all membership criteria. On the

contrary, the ability to decide who can and cannot belong is a foundational feature of

community. Without the option of exclusion, there would be no basis for collective self-

determination and therefore no basis for communal belonging (Walzer 1983, 50). Rather, the

appeal for eased naturalisation criteria is an appeal for membership boundaries that are more

compatible with the liberal and democratic aspects of coexistence than is currently permitted

under arbitrarily drawn boundaries. Where migratory flows do not interrupt the ability of

receiving nation-states to be self-determining, full citizenship must be open to all long-term

residents if states are to maintain fundamental human rights commitments centred on the

promotion of basic liberties, human integrity and social justice. Any membership criteria that

are consistent with human rights would be attentive to the degree to which the wellbeing and

prosperity of claimants were harmed by their exclusion from a particular polity. The ideal

nature of such selection criteria remains a matter of philosophical debate among those who

favour ‘affectedness’, ‘stakeholdership’ or other principles for the determination of

appropriate admission guidelines.4 It is not my intention to defend one of these principles

over another, only to emphasise that they must be the starting point of any assessment of how

to enact citizenship if open borders are to avoid introducing new injustices for those injustices

they succeed in eliminating.

Overlapping political membership

In a world of open borders, citizenship regimes based on exclusive membership in one

nation-state become increasingly untenable, and should therefore be replaced by transnational

regimes permitting multiple and overlapping memberships (Bauböck 2003). Membership in

such a system would still be determined through the guiding principle noted above,

prioritised according to the degree to which one’s flourishing and protection from harms are

dependent on inclusion in a specific polity. However, the multiple rather than exclusive

character of membership in this system recognises that internationally mobile individuals are

likely to have dependencies stretching beyond the nation-state they have chosen to make their

principle home of residence. As migration becomes easier, people will develop important and

durable relationships that are political, economic, social or cultural in more than one nation-

state at the same time (Castles and Miller 2009, 3). Safeguarding against the vulnerabilities

inherent to these relationships, and enabling the opportunities such relationships offer,

presupposes the extension of membership to more than one nation-state.

Economic integration

If the perpetuation of immigrant segregation is to be avoided, open borders must be

accompanied by policies that address economic disadvantage. Economic marginalisation

remains a principal impediment to cohesion. Yet this more prior cause of social disunity is

often obscured by a concern to generate cultural conformity on the mistaken belief that this is

a solution to divisions involving immigrants.

Economic marginalisation causes social disunity in a number of self-perpetuating ways.

Immigrants who experience underemployment, low incomes and high rates of

impoverishment are forced to cluster in low-income neighbourhoods, as this is where they

can best support one another (Castles and Miller 2009, 256, 275). However, far from seeing

the structural roots of such segregation, the broader population typically perceives it as a

voluntary choice among immigrants wishing to isolate themselves. This rationalises

prejudices towards immigrants and therefore impedes their upward mobility through

exposure to discrimination in the employment and housing markets (Young 2000, 207, 210).

To be sure, not all neighbourhood clustering is driven by economic disadvantage. Some of it

is at least partly a preference by immigrants to be near those with whom they feel a cultural

affinity. The social ties formed in these milieus function as a source of self-organisation, self-

esteem, relaxation and resistance to discrimination (Young 2000, 216–17). However, where

immigrant residents experience a depreciated standard of living due to poor transportation

access, poor-quality housing and proximity to unpleasant industrial facilities, then clustering

is the result of structures of disadvantage (Young 2000, 203). The presence of such

neighbourhoods is both unjust and likely to have a corrosive effect on national solidarity.

At the heart of economic disadvantage today is the neoliberal global capitalist system, which

is hostile to redistribution programs, contributes to deteriorating working conditions and

encourages gaps in income levels (Castles and Miller 2009, 275). To the extent that states are

integrated into this system, they are increasingly constrained in their ability to address

economic disadvantage. States shy away from regulating their domestic economies or raising

taxes to support social security schemes, as they fear such intervention will trigger capital

flight from their shores. Interrupting the cycles of poverty this perpetuates requires the

cultivation of polities beyond the nation-state, as it is only in this way that global markets can

be brought under the democratic control of the individuals who must bear their adverse

consequences (Habermas 2001, 84).

Beyond this ambitious macro measure, there is more immediate action states can take

domestically to ensure that immigrants are provided with the same opportunities for

economic success available to others. Relevant measures would include services enabling

immigrants to learn the national language of their new society with relative ease. The benefit

of such services is that they ease the financial burden of language acquisition for the

economically underprivileged, while at the same time broadening their horizons in the job

market by equipping them with the linguistic skills required to access a wider array of

professions (Bauböck 2001, 5).

Also of importance is the cultivation of an ethos of mutual respect so that immigrants feel

welcome to participate in public life. There is no easy answer in terms of how to achieve this,

as respect cannot be induced on demand, but is instilled through deep and prolonged

processes of identity formation in multiple spheres of association, such as the family,

friendship circles, the education system, the workplace or one’s place of religious worship.

Moreover, while these spheres can be vital schools of tolerance, they can also serve as the

very breeding ground for racism. Nevertheless, there are a number of policies that states can

introduce to encourage civility and respect for others. Some examples would include anti-

racism programs, workplace or school harassment codes against racist behaviour, cultural

diversity training for the police or healthcare professionals, regulatory guidelines on ethnic

stereotyping in the media, and revised history and literature curriculums within public

schools that recognise the historical contributions of immigrant groups (Kymlicka 2001,

163). Where such measures are successful, they help the least advantaged immigrants

overcome economic barriers stemming from prejudice, and discourage the emergence of

oppositional subcultures among immigrants that are hostile to mainstream institutions.

Conclusion

The most formidable challenges to reconciling the objectives of free migration and cultural

continuity are political rather than philosophical or sociological in nature. Popular

perceptions of the cultural threat posed by immigration remain so far off the mark of where

that threat actually lies that any level-headed public debate on the merits of free migration

remains impossible. Such misguidedness has been aided by the virulence of far right parties,

which continue to shape the terms of discourses on immigration. It has also been aided by

immigrant terrorism in western democracies in recent years. This has further amplified the

perception that free migration poses an existential threat to nation and state by permitting

entry to individuals who are culturally incompatible and unwilling to integrate. I have sought

to uncover the irrationality of such opposition to open borders and at the same time I have

sought to bring into focus the circumstances under which open borders do indeed pose a

threat to the survival of national cultures. In doing so, I hope to have laid the ground for a

more considered and open-minded appraisal of free migration than has been possible in

public debates distorted by misinformation and fear-mongering.

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1 Rainer Bauböck (2009, 14) lucidly illustrates this point with a hypothetical example involving the mass

migration of half of Sweden’s population to Norway in a short space of time against the backdrop of open

membership policies. This would leave Norwegians unable to self-govern, as the majority of the electorate

would become Swedish. 2 See also Dummett (2001, 50–3) for a further discussion on this matter.

3 For example, a poll showed that a third of Germans agree with the Islamophobic views expressed in a best-

selling book written by the controversial former politician Thilo Sarrazin. In this book, Sarrazin asserts, among

other things, that Germany is becoming ‘naturally more stupid on average’ as a result of immigration from

Muslim countries (Habermas 2010). 4 For a critical analysis of these competing positions, see Bauböck (2009).