The Immigration Debate

Those who oppose immigration | Enriching Ireland | Before and after the Famine | The American experience

Anti-immigrant campaigners around the western world come from many perspectives. Only occasionally is their rhetoric actually overtly racist. They may actually believe in the superiority of one "race" over another, but they don't have to say so.

Instead, they are likely to focus on the idea that nations are entitled to determine the conditions of residence in their territory; that cultural unity is the hallmark of a nation; that unrestricted immigration leads to economic pressures and social chaos.

One of the reasons such groups are fairly successful in the politics and culture of many countries is that these ideas are actually widely accepted by the mainstream. They may be taken to an unpleasant extreme by Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, by Pat Buchanan in the US, by Aine Ní Chonaill in Ireland, but the difference between them and the governments of these countries is often only one of style.

While their warnings of the dangers of "multiculturalism" can sound like rants, they strike a chord with some people who are familiar with racial conflict in other societies. And their basic point, that a state's duty is to look after its own, is widely shared - with some finer arguments about what constitutes a genuine refugee entitled to a bit of hospitality.

So to truly oppose them on principle, one must start from a genuinely opposing position: that the rights of individual human beings, wherever they come from, are more important than the rights of states. You have to accept that if people are willing to take the chance of uprooting themselves from their home countries, for whatever reason, they deserve a chance to make their way freely to somewhere more hospitable, to travel without restriction, to work where possible, to get the support of a community where necessary.

A critical view of the idea of a culturally-unified nation also helps. Even "homogeneous" Ireland has a history that's awash with different groups and nationalities mixing, fighting and mixing again. It's even more absurd to suggest that the borders surrounding European states, the US or even the ocean around Australia actually seal in unified entities. These "nations" are ever-changing accidents of history, of conquest, of migration.

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