I had a conversation tonight that reminded me that I had started to collect notes for an article I wanted to write for Jacobin on immigration as the organizing principle of proper small d democratic politics back in 2020. And when I went back to look at the notes of that brief evening foray into writing again… things have gotten so much worse 5 years further on.

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“…for all men are entitled to present themselves in the society of others by virtue of their right to communal possession of the earth’s surface. Since the earth is a globe, they cannot disperse over an infinite area, but must necessarily tolerate one another’s company. And no-one originally has any greater right than anyone else to occupy any particular portion of the earth.” Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’.

I invoke Kant because he is a beginning – an early and eloquent purveyor of a liberal cosmopolitanism. One which envisioned a great league of peacefully coexisting, Republican governed nation-states as the highest end of human society. And that peace and self-governance fundamentally derived from the notion of human beings as equals, ends in themselves and having a moral right to the common earth. I also invoke Kant, because his flaws as a thinker are manifest in the way in which liberal cosmopolitanism inhabits our age – namely the juxtaposition of the gated communities of the conceited democracies in the west with the notion that economic liberalism somehow inherently opens the world to the free movement of people and embraces the earth as common. The quote prior to the above ellipsis is as follows:

“… hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives in someone else’s territory. He can indeed be turned away, if this can be done without causing his death, but he must not be treated with hostility, so long as he behaves in a peaceable manner in the place he happens to be in. The stranger cannot claim the right of a guest to be entertained, for this would require a special friendly agreement whereby he might become a member of the native household for a certain time…”

Here we see the limits of liberal cosmopolitanism. While making grand claims to the earth as common and the universal right to freedom of movement, in actuality it purports you are welcome to travel, not settle. And even further, we might not let you travel either if we don’t like you and your kind, insofar as our rejection of your travel doesn’t cause your death. Our ‘league of nations’ is quite happy with tourism, the exchange of ideas and cultural diversity – just don’t try to actually live with us – and maybe we can unilaterally revoke that ‘universal right’ as well, if we feel a bit uncomfortable with you – but so long as it doesn’t cause your death, we’re good. Of course, this is also reflected in Kant’s anthropological pronouncements:

“[Whites] contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all dispositions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones who always advance to perfection.”

While the overt racism of an 18th century German would be frowned upon in the polite societies of western liberalism, it is still the unspoken underbelly of their very existence. Our elite economic ‘achievements’ are borne on the backs of the brown and poor the world over – and we don’t want them to live within our countries. I mean, surely, we can’t have open borders, we’d be overrun! Our social welfare states would be crippled! Our jobs gone! Our way of life lost! And this is precisely where we get to the false universalism of economic liberalism. It is not interested in the free movement of people – only the free flow of capital.

Within that framework, it is not inconsistent to create a ‘zone’ in which people of various countries are free to move and settle. It is not inconsistent to have immigration policies that encourage the best and brightest from non-western countries to work and settle; to encourage anyone of ‘merit’ to attend the best educational institutions in said countries and potentially settle. What the free movement of capital fosters is an illusion of freedom of movement, a ‘meritocratic’ vision where people of means or talents can move freely, but no one else. This vision is shattered by the reality of human migration.

This is a finite globe. This is a world beset by famine, environmental crisis, economic hardship and war. People move. People are forced to move – and increasingly so. While liberal cosmopolitanism staunchly asserts we cannot turn people away to their certain death, the pressure of the sheer number of refugees and migrants and the concurrent economic failings of liberal policies are undermining that belief. And the western world is starting to turn – shedding the polite liberal cosmopolitanism with the unfortunate underbelly and manifesting outright nativism. We are turning to fascism.

The response of the left and center-left in the west to this turn should not be the propping up of a failing liberal order, but rather an embrace of the radical equality referenced in its platitudes – the earth is common “and no-one originally has any greater right than anyone else to occupy any particular portion.” In fact, the condition of possibility for the free movement of people fundamentally corrals all of the crucial issues of the day: climate change, universal human rights, small ‘d’ democracy, economic justice and equality. In order for us to foster an open world, we in the west must undertake the crucial steps to addressing all of those fundamental issues at home, in our foreign policy and in the economic policies we impose via trade, debt and currency regulation.

The left has struggled for years focusing on specific, but related problems; subdividing into factions without recognizing an organizing principle. Of course, this is the nature of any small ‘d’ democratic movement which seeks to recognize all of the voices within it. If you fundamentally believe in equality, there is no way to escape the dissent of difference – be it cultural, racial, gender, religious or otherwise. But through all of that dissent and difference, the one thing that has always united all of us is the recognition of the fundamental equality of human beings.

From there, we can form a movement; a movement for free movement; a movement to bring together all of our fundamental concerns within a single demand. “For all [people] are entitled to present themselves in the society of others by virtue of their right to communal possession of the earth’s surface.” The planet itself is a shared world – and our freedom a condition of that commonality.

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