Migration, political philosophy, and the real world

Abstract

In Strangers in Our Midst, David Miller develops a ‘realist’ political philosophy of immigration, which takes as its point of departure ‘the world as it is’ and considers what legitimate immigration policies would look like ‘under these circumstances’. Here I focus on Miller’s self-described realist methodology. First, I ask whether Miller actually does start from the ‘world as it is’. I note that he orients his argument around a particular vision of national communities and that, in so doing, he deviates from a description of ‘the real world’. In shifting between the descriptive and prescriptive without clearly acknowledging it, Miller undermines his claim to be outlining legitimate policies ‘under these circumstances’. I also question whether Miller’s picture of ‘the real world’ takes sufficient account of past injustice and its ongoing relationship to migration regimes. I maintain that there is a fundamental tension between Miller’s commitments to his brand of nationalism on the one hand, and his version of realism on the other hand.

Keywords:

• David Miller
• immigration
• realism
• nationalism

Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at the Roundtable on Migration, the Association for Political Thought Conference 2016, St Catherine’s College, Oxford. I would like to thank the referees at CRISPP for their helpful comments, and Phil Parvin for all his excellent work on this symposium.

Notes

1. For the original piece, see Collier (2015).

2. Interesting interventions in these diverse debates include, for example, Runciman (2012), Sangiovanni (2008), Valentini (2012) and Miller (2008).

3. Such as the kinds of academics who write about the ‘ethics’ rather than the ‘political philosophy’ of immigration (p. 17).

4. I say ‘almost no mention’ because there is a brief, two-page discussion of ‘particularity claimants’, i.e. ‘those who by virtue of past events already stand in some relationship to the state, but without having an agreement that guarantees them a right of entry’. And he concludes that short discussion with the line that these claims ‘often carry considerable weight, but do not always translate into rights to immigrate’ (pp. 113–115). He also returns to this theme at the end of his postscript, exploring how European states should respond to the refugee crisis, and he cautions that ‘the path of blame and guilt should be avoided wherever possible’ (p. 173).

5. It is worth noting, too, that Miller’s adoption of the conventional ‘refugee’ – ‘economic migrant’ distinction alongside his attempt to adopt a revisionist definition of refugees leads him into some difficulties when it comes to drawing on existing empirical data to substantiate his arguments. For example, he contends that ‘the overwhelming majority’ of migrants into and between liberal democratic countries ‘count as economic migrants rather than as refugees’ on his definition, as they are ‘drawn in by the advantages that their new society has to offer’. Indeed, he adds that ‘very often the incentive to move is strictly economic’ (p. 94). In the accompanying footnote, he points out that ‘in the year ending March 2014, around 560,000 people migrated to Britain, of whom only less than 24,000 were admitted as asylum seekers …’ (p. 194n.1). But we need to be clear that those admitted as asylum seekers are likely to be a far smaller proportion of that 560,000 people than those who meet Miller’s own preferred definition of refugees, i.e. ‘people whose human rights would unavoidably be threatened by remaining in the places they now inhabit, regardless of whether the threat arose from state persecution, state collapse, or natural disasters’.