Can Liberal Democracies Control Immigration Without a Massive Loss of Freedom? Bill Kristol Moderates a Debate Between Chandran Kukathas and David Goodhart at LibCon2025
Stopping immigration requires draconian enforcement but not stopping it fuels populist demagogues
This year’s “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference—or LibCon2025, for short—convened by ISMA, publisher of The UnPopulist, featured a friendly debate between , former chair of the political science department at the London School of Economics and author of The Liberal Archipelago and Immigration and Freedom, and , founder of Prospect magazine and author of The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics and Head, Hand, and Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century. The lively debate was moderated by Bill Kristol, the founding director of Defending Democracy Together, editor-at-large at The Bulwark, and host of the podcast Conversations with Bill Kristol.
The debate focused on whether, and to what extent, restricting cross-border movement is compatible with liberalism. Some of us believe that immigration controls and enforcement are simply not compatible with liberal democracy. Others believe that without controls and enforcement, liberal democracy will unravel. Chandran and David addressed this divide head-on with Chandran taking the first view and David the second. Bill weighed in with some spirited comments of his own.
What follows is the full video of the debate, as well as a transcript that has been lightly edited for flow and clarity. (We’ve also created a video playlist on YouTube of almost all LibCon2025 events—check it out and make sure to subscribe to our channel.)
Bill Kristol: David and I know each other a bit—he started Prospect in Britain around the time we started The Weekly Standard in the U.S., and we had friendly exchanges. David was then on the center left, I think it’s fair to say, and I was on the center right. Now, of course, I’ve moved to the left of David—that’s what happens as you grow up and learn new things, or unlearn things. And Chandran, I’ve really admired his work on immigration and democracy, among other topics.
I’ve been in so many debates, which tend to be point-scoring affairs as opposed to actually discussing and learning. This one will be different. So we’ll have a discussion and actually learn and think through this very interesting and complicated topic.
To start, I’ll ask Chandran and David to take a few minutes to lay out what we need to know about liberal democracy on the one hand and different immigration regimes on the other, and their complex intersections. Chandran?
Chandran Kukathas: Well, I agree that we won’t agree—so that’s a friendly start.
Immigration is clearly the big topic not just in the United States but in Britain and in Australia and, indeed, in many other parts of the world. The first thing I want to stress is the extent to which the debate about immigration is not about a conflict between citizens or natives and outsiders—it’s really a conflict between people within a society. The only reason we have this debate is because people within the society disagree about what they want, both for themselves and for their society. So this conflict about immigration is not about us-versus-them, if the “them” is outsiders—it’s us-versus-them within the society.
The worry that I think most people have with respect to immigration is that, somehow, immigration is going to be harmful to not just their own particular interests but to the interests of their fellow citizens, and sometimes to the interests of their institutions—their cultural, political, social ones more broadly. And the point that I want to emphasize—and I’ve done this in my book and in other writings—is the extent to which the threat, if we see it as that, from immigration comes not so much from immigration itself as from attempts to control immigration.
The reason for this is quite straightforward: If you want to try to control immigration, you’re not simply trying to control the movement of people—the entry and exit of people into a country—you’re really trying to control what they do. What you want to do is you want to control, probably most importantly, the labor market. You also want to control the extent to which people come in and go to college, buy property, engage in society in various ways, stay for longer than you would like. You have to control not just border crossings—in fact most countries welcome people coming in as tourists and as exchanges in all kinds of ways—but what people do.
The problem is that to control what people do, you’ve got to control what your citizens do, because your citizens are all too ready to welcome people, a lot of the time, because they want to employ them, teach them, trade with them, rent to them, help them open bank accounts. All of these things will have to be controlled if you want to control immigration. So, immediately, there is going to be a cost that society will bear, to the extent that it will be more and more controlled by institutions within the society.
Now, I think one of the things that is maybe underappreciated is the difficulty of doing this. That is because we are a recalcitrant species. We don’t take well to being controlled. So we resist. The more significantly you want to control immigration, the more vigorously you’ll have to control your own citizens. And the short answer is that you can control them, in the sense that you can impose policies that will have certain effects, but it’s another matter altogether to actually establish policies that will achieve your ends, because labor is just like capital in that people will find a way around things. The more you try to control what people do, the more you’ll have to ratchet up the extent of controls.
Essentially, what we’re talking about here, I think—because neither David nor I are at extremes: I’m not arguing for open borders, I don’t think he’s arguing for zero immigration—is what we do in the middle. And what I’m trying to say here, in a nutshell, is that the more you try to control, the more you will have an effect on the freedom of your citizens.
So, the question is: How far do you want to go? The more you try to control, the more you will in fact end up affecting your citizens—the more you will control your employers, your university institutions, the more you will have to establish courts and police and laws, and so on. To the extent that you’re worried about the success, the more you will be tempted to get around these institutions in order to achieve your ends, and the more society will in fact resist, and the more difficulties you’ll face. And at some point you’re going to have to say, “How far am I prepared to go?”
My argument is that if we’re going to look for an equilibrium, we should find one in which we’re actually much more welcoming of immigrants. Because the cost that we’re going to have to pay if we really want to control immigration is a much greater loss of freedom than you would like.
Kristol: I’m personally very sympathetic to the notion that the threats from trying to control immigration can often outweigh the threats from immigration. But it’s also true that those threats—the attempts to more radically control immigration—do seem to come up when people have the sense, correctly or incorrectly, that immigration is out of control: too high, too much, too illegal, too uncontrolled.
So, just take a minute on the question of that balance, because it’s the obvious objection: One could say, “I don’t like our crackdown on immigration, but the reason we’re having to crack down on it is that people were insufficiently concerned about mass immigration.” This is the sense people have that immigration is out of control.
Kukathas: I think the crucial thing to do is actually look at why it is that immigration is, as you put it, “out of control”—bearing in mind that it was never something that was in control because it’s not something you can really control in the sense that you’ll achieve the specific objectives that you’ve got in mind when you try to control it. I think what you’ve got to ask is: What are the factors that are leading to the increase in the number of people trying to move? What are the factors that are affecting the channels through which they move?
“If you want to try to control immigration, you’re not simply trying to control the movement of people—the entry and exit of people into a country—you’re really trying to control what they do. What you want to do is you want to control, probably most importantly, the labor market. You also want to control the extent to which people come in and go to college, buy property, engage in society in various ways, stay for longer than you would like. You have control not just border crossings—in fact most countries welcome people coming in as tourists and as exchanges in all kinds of ways—but what people do. The problem is that to control what those people do, you’ve got to control what your citizens do.” — Chandran Kukathas
To give you just one simple example: Why is it that so many people are now claiming asylum or seeking pathways through the refugee process, so much so that it’s crowding out genuine refugees? Well, one of the reasons is you’ve asserted controls that make it more difficult for people to move through normal channels. If you push out bulges in one way, the bulge is going to appear somewhere else. So simply saying, “We’ve got to control this” is not sufficient; what you’ve got to talk about is the mechanisms that you’ve got in place.
And here I think there are very few sensible ideas around, because people simply think—not everybody, but many people think—that what you need is to somehow cut off the supply. Well, this is a demand problem. There are all these people who want these people to come in. How are you going to address that? You can’t even keep drugs out of a prison, how are you going to keep several million people out of the country? The way to address this is to think about what the sources of the problem are.
Kristol: That’s helpful. David?
David Goodhart: Well, I agree on at least one thing with Chandran: we are arguing about that middle ground. Neither of us are extremists. I don’t want zero immigration, Chandran doesn’t want open borders. I ought to add, perhaps to establish a credential, that I’m not only arguing against Chandran, I’m also arguing against my family ghosts. I’m actually half American—I’ve got two American grandfathers. My great-great-uncle was a U.S. senator, Herbert Lehman, who was one of the most significant voices behind opening up immigration, paving the way for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. He actually died in 1963, but he had been a very powerful voice pushing for an end to that period of restriction, perhaps not coincidentally the great social-democratic period in U.S. history between the early ’20s and the mid ’60s. So, I’m arguing against great-great-uncle Herbert as well as Chandran here.
Kristol: Can I just say that I did not have on my bingo card the close relationship of David Goodhart and Herbert Lehman, who, growing up in New York, I remember as a very distinguished liberal governor and senator?
Goodhart: I think probably most people would agree with this: it’s about quantities. Well-managed borders, moderate legal immigration, and the lowest possible level of illegal immigration, is a really significant public good—one of the biggest public goods. Yes, it does require small—I would say small—infringements on freedom to achieve a bigger freedom.
We have such trade-offs in our public policy and social contracts all the time. In the U.K., we still believe in the state having a monopoly on the use of violence. We, therefore, except in very exceptional circumstances, make it illegal for people to carry arms—which is something that perhaps many people in this country would rather envy. Similarly, on immigration itself, we live in welfare states and have quite thick labor market regulations. We can’t allow employers just to import anybody who they might want to import from abroad, and pay them at any wage. We also have rules for bringing in spouses, to stop trafficking.
So what is the bigger freedom that control and moderate immigration enables? In one word: it is security. Of course, we all believe, or at least almost all of us believe, in the moral equality of all human beings. But we don’t believe that we have the same obligations to all human beings. We live—and liberalism thrives—in bounded political communities. I think most of us would agree—I hope Steven Pinker would agree with this—that it’s a pretty basic truth of human psychology that when we feel more secure, when we feel more in control of our lives, we’re more likely to be open and trusting of others. It’s why richer people tend to be more relaxed about large-scale immigration than poorer people. For poorer people, high immigration often means less security, more competition for housing, jobs, and public goods. And high illegal immigration rewards bad employers and creates a pervasive sense of lawlessness in the inner city.
So what has the immigration story been in recent years? It’s been very high and it’s been, at best, semi-controlled. In the U.K. now, about 16% of the population is foreign born. The majority-white British population in the U.K., at the turn of the century in 2000, was about 90% of the U.K. population. It is now around 70% of the U.K. population. We’ve seen an extraordinary, rapid demographic change. The proportion of school children in London who are white British is 20%.
In the U.S., I know the focus is much more on illegal immigration than on legal immigration. Your illegal immigrant population is anywhere between 10 and 20 million. You had 2.2 million people coming in in 2022 alone. This is incredibly unpopular. It’s the single biggest failing, I would say, of the political class both in my country and the U.S. in recent decades. It’s possibly the biggest failure of liberalism in that time. It’s led directly to Brexit in the U.K., to Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 in the U.S.
Liberalism and the rule of law flourishes in high-trust societies—high-trust societies with at least some sense of national citizenship and solidarity. Society is not a random collection of individuals, and when change happens too fast people do withdraw, become resentful, “hunker down” in Robert Putnam’s famous phrase.
Now, obviously, the control I’m talking about needs to be achieved legally. We shouldn’t be going around breaking the law as President Trump is doing. But if laws don’t allow us to assert this basic control then we need to change the laws—for example, the international laws and regulations on refugees that were drawn up in 1951 when virtually nobody had the wherewithal to move. So change the laws—don’t break them—for the achievement of this great public good.
Let me finish with a quote. I wrote an article about 20 years ago in the magazine that Bill mentioned that I founded and edited, Prospect magazine. In 2004, I wrote an essay called, “Too Diverse?” I was very much on the center left, then—the essay was republished in The Guardian and caused a bit of a furor. Lots of people accused me of being a racist because I was drawing attention, to my friends on the center left, to this tension between the progressive priorities for diversity and solidarity, to the fact that they are, to some extent, in tension. I argued that we need to think about how to mitigate that tension. I ended the essay saying this:
People will always favor their own families and communities. It is the task of a pragmatic liberalism, nevertheless, to help to shape local and national communities that are open enough to include people from many different backgrounds but not so open that they lose a sense of stability and familiarity. In the words of Jonathan Sacks, the late chief rabbi, we are striving to create a home not a hotel.
Kristol: Since you mentioned actual nations—the U.S. and the U.K.—and somewhat assimilated their experience, the challenge would be that our histories are very different. The U.S. really is—it’s not just a cliché—a nation of immigrants in a fairly unique way in the world. And the U.K. has exhibited different attitudes towards immigrants over decades and centuries, but has basically been a reasonably homogeneous society—an island somewhat suspicious of all those people across the channel.
“Well-managed borders, moderate legal immigration, and the lowest possible level of illegal immigration, is a really significant public good—one of the biggest public goods. Yes, it does require small—I would say small—infringements on freedom to achieve a bigger freedom. We have such trade-offs in our public policy and social contracts all the time. … So what is the bigger freedom that control and moderate immigration enables? In one word: it is security.” — David Goodhart
It seems like one could look at the analysis in your framework and say that the trade-off would be at a pretty different place on the spectrum, so to speak, in the U.K. than in the U.S. That’s part of Chandran’s point: You’re giving up more in the U.S. to go in a more restrictionist direction, because you’re cutting much more against its central ethos and something that is much more bound up with our civil liberties—which is not, I think, the case in Britain. There’s no Statue of Liberty in the U.K. that merges, as it does in our collective consciousness, with the other forms of liberty that are important.
Goodhart: Sure, public opinion is still historically more open to relatively high levels of legal migration in the U.S. than in the U.K.—although the difference may be narrowing. But there’s just as much anxiety, possibly more anxiety, about illegal immigration in the U.S. than in the U.K., partly because there’s just so much of it, and it is where most of the debate concentrates.
But I would say it is possible to be in favor of very restrictive immigration policy—now probably 70, 75% of people in Britain say that immigration is too high, and probably nearly 40 or 50% of people say it’s much too high—and yet remain liberal. You know, the U.K. is a very liberal country with very liberal people. I mean, 6% of British people say you have to be white to be truly British; I think 6 or 7% of people think that a man should go out to work and a woman should look after the household. We are a very liberal society. But we’re also very worried about dramatically fast change in many of our towns and suburbs.
Kristol: Interesting. Chandran?
Kukathas: Well, let me make one point that doesn’t so much respond directly to some of the substantive points you’ve made but maybe offers a perspective on the way in which your points have been framed.
The way this issue is often framed is that there is a population which has a view and has interests, and the assumption is that we’ve got to figure out how to track that population’s interests and their opinions. And of course there is something to that. But it’s also true that the interests that they have, the opinions that they hold, also reflect the kind of debate that’s going on, the kinds of claims that are made, including claims about immigration about the nature of immigrants, about the nature of identity, and so on. And these things all get mixed up.
So one of the things that I would like to do is not so much ask, “What policy should we be framing in order to track people’s interests?” but instead, “From a liberal point of view, what do we need to say to people about the way we should conceive our society so that this divide between citizens about a whole range of issues, including immigration, is not as polarizing as it is?” Because I think part of the reason for the polarization may in fact be the debate itself, and the debate has its shape not just because of interests that are there in the citizenry, but also because there are people within the discourse who want to say, “We should frame it in this way.” Sometimes it’s because there are particular economic interests, and sometimes it’s because there are particular ideological or cultural interests. These interests have an important role in shaping the debate—there isn’t a kind of natural state of the country, a natural state of popular opinion.
I don’t want to belabor this point, but I’ll give you one example. So, at the end of the Second World War in the United Kingdom, Britain presided over an empire of somewhere between five and eight hundred million people, depending on how you counted. All of these people, until the Citizenship Act of 1948, had British nationality. But over the next 20 or so years the nationalities of these people were slowly changed or eroded, so that they became less British subjects or British nationals and instead became nationals of their own particular countries—whether they wanted to or not. Now, in the 1940s, British parliament debated whether this was possible, or defensible, partly because those countries that were going to cease having British nationality were nonwhite countries. Many conservative members of parliament were very worried about this process of simply removing people’s citizenship—nationalities, because there was no “citizenship” yet—and this was the context of that debate. It’s not as if there was a kind of natural order of things. What people came to think of as “British” was something that was fluid and transforming.
So this isn’t to say that this gives us a clear guidance on what the policy should be, but I think it does tell us something about the whole idea of thinking there is a kind of interest and a kind of opinion, and now we’ve got to think, separately, about how to track it. I think the two are entangled in a way that is underappreciated.
Goodhart: Yes, I mean, if we go back to 1948, the main argument made then—and you’re right, mainly by conservatives—was that we should keep an open door to all the 600 million people in the empire and commonwealth, because of the imperial family. We were one, big, multi-ethnic family. This was not an idea that appealed to the supporters of Indian independence, or any of the anti-colonial movements. I mean, this was an incredibly reactionary idea. But it did mean that we kept an open door to 600 million people, much in the same way we had an open door, when we were part of the European Union, to all of the European Union people. Basically anybody could come to Britain from India or Kenya or wherever and enjoy the full rights of citizenship up until 1962 when we joined the modern world, as it were, of modern nation-states.
I don’t think anyone really regrets that. Yes, of course, these things change, historically, but I think you’re getting a bit too close to making the argument that immigration is sort of special and should be removed from the democratic marketplace, because people aren’t necessarily very well-informed and their opinions are often based on prejudice or anecdote. But you can make that argument about any aspect of public policy.
I think there’s a real danger. It’s one of the reasons why there is a sense that the priorities of the “anywheres”—the highly educated people who are mobile and comfortable with change, in favor of openness—have completely dominated this debate. Which is why we’ve now had five, maybe even six, elections in the U.K. in which political parties, aware of what people think, have put in their manifestos, “We are going to restrict immigration more.” They’ve then done the opposite.
That’s partly because it’s classic pressure group theory—there’s a sort of generalized feeling in the country that things are changing too fast, that we want to slow things down, but there are these specific interests, whether it’s employers or universities, that have a very strong and immediate interest in maximizing the inflow of people.
I think we’ve just got to take democracy more seriously. This is one of the areas that has been sort of pushed to one side of the democratic conflict, and the result has been Brexit and Trump.
Kukathas: I’m not sure you’re right in suggesting that I’m saying we should take democracy less seriously, or that I think that the population is somehow misinformed or misguided or has a poor understanding of so many things. What I’m talking about is what we should say within the democratic process. And that is to recognize that there are interests at work here.
“The U.S. really is—it’s not just a cliché—a nation of immigrants in a fairly unique way in the world. And the U.K. has exhibited different attitudes towards immigrants over decades and centuries, but has basically been a reasonably homogeneous society—an island somewhat suspicious of all those people across the channel.” — Bill Kristol
I think one of the reasons why governments have actually behaved precisely as you’ve described, promising one thing and doing another, is that while the demos seems to have a view—and certainly you can tell from opinion polls and elections and so on what a majority might think at any one time—within every society there are still very strong constituencies and interests that want the opposite of what the other parts of the society want. No government is going to be able to satisfy all constituencies. So I think immigration policy in the end is the reflection of two things: (1) attempts by governments to placate those interests that it needs to in order to achieve its own ends, to keep the end of getting reelected, and (2) the sheer difficulty of achieving the goals that they’ve set with respect to immigration control.
Recall that, in the 2010s, Theresa May’s government promised to get immigration down to a hundred thousand net immigrants, and shortly after that it went up to 300,000. It was not for want of desire—the problem is how do you actually achieve this? And of course at times they’ll try to achieve it by fiddling with the statistics: Do you count students as immigrants or not? Well, one day you decide you will because that makes things look better, and the other day you say you won’t because it makes things look worse. They’re really caught in a bind. It’s not so easy to implement the policies that you advance.
Goodhart: I agree with that. And, actually, to your example, they did have some success in the Cameron government—May was the home secretary—and she did have some success initially. I think she brought it down to like 130 or 140 thousand net immigration a year. And then we had the E.U. crisis—we were then still in the EU and subject to free movement. And tens, hundreds of thousands of young Spanish and Italian people came to the U.K. to work and the figures went through the sky—which, again, was one of the factors leading up to the Brexit vote in 2016.
I do think that this inability to focus on why it is that it has been so difficult ... I mean, when Boris Johnson was elected in 2019 to get Brexit done—he did sort of get Brexit done, albeit in a not particularly brilliant way. He promised to restrict immigration. Then, after the Covid period, we had this extraordinary explosion. We had net immigration of close to a million in one year, 800,000 in the following year. These are extraordinary figures.
It is partly because their insouciance about it. Because it was not something that they felt in any way disadvantaged or threatened by—that was something for other people. They went along with it because there was a democratic consensus. But that is why it was such a failing. And it has to do with a kind of economic short-termism. So, in the year when I think we had net immigration of about 900,000 people, it was now controlled—Europeans couldn’t just come in the way they had been able to when we were in the E.U. You had to come with a visa. And we just started handing out the visas like there was no tomorrow. Three-quarters of the visas were either for students or for people working in the health and care sectors, and in both cases it’s because there is also a very strong impulse in our societies to get things on the cheap. International students account for nearly 30% of the income of British universities, which allows our own students and academics a kind of a free ride or semi-free ride.
And the same with health—nearly half of our hospital doctors were trained abroad. I mean, this is absolutely appalling. Many of them from very poor countries. I think there are said to be more Ghanaian health workers working in the U.K. than in Ghana. We do have to think of the other side of the equation when we’re talking about immigration: the brain drain problem. Eighty-five percent of Jamaican graduates leave the country, probably many of them end up in the U.S. There is another side to the balance sheet here, and we shouldn’t just be using immigration as a way of supporting a short-termism. We should jolly-well fund the National Health Service properly, and fund our universities properly, rather than relying on immigration as a way of getting it on the cheap.
Kristol: Let me just add one footnote to each of your points. It seems to me that the obvious challenge to your point, Chandran, is: I would like to have the discourse that you would like to have, but this is a democracy. There are always demagogues in democracies, and at some point it’s just empirically probably the case that if people see—maybe incorrectly—certain things happening because of large immigration, whether large legal or certainly illegal and border crossing-type immigration, demagogues will flourish. And, to be serious about public policy—and you are, obviously—one has to take that into account. It doesn’t mean one capitulates ahead of time to the demagogic instinct, but it means one doesn’t get to wish it away.
And I would make the similar point on the other side of things. I’m not saying you’re wishing it away, but you know that people sometimes do. We’re putting aside all the unpleasant stuff that’s happening because we don’t like it. I don’t like it either. But we do have to come to grips with why it might be happening. One could be too fatalistic about public opinion or democracy.
I do think, incidentally, that immigration maybe should have a slightly special status among different issues. We do set aside several issues apart from democratic decision-making and democratic discourse. We do it explicitly in our Constitution and with our courts. Britain does it more informally, but there’s always been an understanding that you can’t simply let public opinion—which is always an amalgam of reasonableness and prejudice, and misinformation and real information—simply govern. I’m not saying you’re saying that, but I think there’s a tendency to say, “Well, what can one do?”
Democratic statesmen—this is the flip side of the demagogue point—have an obligation to educate and occasionally constrain public opinion. I remember talking to Jeb Bush after the 2016 election, which he didn’t do too well in, and he was so annoyed. But he had been challenged: “Why didn’t you see Trump coming?” Well, he said, “I saw it coming.” “Why didn’t you understand that immigration was such a potent issue and there was so much resentment at the border crossings and at Hispanics?” And Trump, of course, exploited that, and exploited the 2015 migration crisis in Europe, which was also very central to his success, and said things like, “Mexican judges,” and the rest of it. And Jeb Bush just said, “Look, I wasn’t going to say racist things, I wasn’t going to say nativist things, I wasn’t going to pretend that these people are not contributing to our society, and so, I’m sorry, but the public at that point simply wanted Trump.” I’m slightly sympathetic to that. There’s a little too much breast-beating about, “How could you let this happen?” when some of what one let happen was stuff that, to not let it happen, would have meant joining in a sentiment that perhaps, ultimately, is even more unhealthy than trying—and failing—to resist it.
So I think that the practical points are very important, too. I do think that the actual unintended consequences of policies matter, and people have to take responsibility for that. Those of us who are on the liberal side need to take some responsibility for—well, it did seem to work out badly, for those of us who believe in liberal policies, if you look around at what’s happening in L.A. and D.C. right now. And maybe that didn’t have to happen—history’s contingent and all that.
I think, on the other side, the same thing: One has to ask, “What path are we going down when we talk about “homes, not hotels.” It’s obviously an interesting metaphor, but it’s giving fuel to a certain fire that maybe one shouldn’t fuel.
Goodhart: There are some very nice hotels—we’re in one. But I’d want to stick up for public opinion. I mean, the public are not a mob any longer. Racism is the biggest public taboo there is in the U.K.—as I said earlier, 5 or 6% of people have kind of semi-racist views. Although I do hear from Black and brown friends that they actually have, for the first time in their lives, been experiencing prejudice, partly because this feeling that the level of inflow is so high and, in the case of the cross-channel boats, so uncontrolled.
But, actually, if you look at public opinion on immigration and anxiety about it—i.e., how high you put it among your list of political priorities—it has actually tracked the real inflows over time. If you look back over 20 or 30 years, public anxiety goes up when the numbers go up and it goes down when the numbers go down. Public anxiety about immigration disappeared after 2016 when we left the European Union and ended free movement. It disappeared for two or three years until we had what is called the “Boris wave” coming in in 2022, and then anxiety rocketed again.
Kukathas: I’m not suggesting that we should disparage public opinion, and I agree with you that the accusations of racism are way over the top and it’s just too easy a way for people to abuse their fellow citizens. I completely agree with you on that. But the thing that I’m interested in, as a contributor to the debate, is not so much discounting public opinion as trying to reshape public opinion. What we’re doing right now is a contribution to the public opinion debate, and I want to say to my fellow citizens and people everywhere, “I think you should look at this whole question a little bit differently.” And one of those ways, for example, has to do with how inadequately the British state has responded inadequately to certain problems that has actually led to greater immigration.
“Immigration maybe should have a slightly special status among different issues. We do set aside several issues apart from democratic decision-making and democratic discourse. We do it explicitly in our Constitution and with our courts.” — Bill Kristol
You mentioned the case of universities taking in foreign students, well, why does Britain take in so many foreign students? Not that I’m against it, but when I was at the LSE, I was told by the pro-director for finance that it cost us 11,000 or 12,000 pounds to educate a student. We were only allowed to charge British students 9,000 pounds, so you had to make up that 3,000-pound shortfall. Well, what do you do? You can increase the money that you charge domestic students, but if the government says no, you can shut down your programs or you can go abroad. Same with the NHS: If you’re not training domestic doctors, of course the institution is going to go looking for foreign doctors and foreign nurses. Now if this is the case, it doesn’t seem to me that the solution is to say, “Well, we’ve got to stop immigration.” Because you need doctors, you need nurses. So, this is one of those cases where the appropriate tool is not immigration control; the appropriate tool is domestic public policy …
Goodhart: … in order to become less dependent on immigrants. I was making the same point that you made earlier: that one of the drivers of very high immigration in the U.K. is economic short-termism, is the state not investing enough in universities and the NHS. Clearly, it should invest more. But the scale of demographic change in the U.K. ... it’s obviously something that we differ from the U.S. on. The ethnic majority in the U.S. has always been “white Americans” or, what’s the phrase, “non-Hispanic white Americans.” Still, just about the majority of the population, probably about 60%. But in 25 years in the U.K. we have gone, as I said earlier, from 90 to 70%. That is a really dramatic change, and you do not have to be racist to be discomfited by that. If your whole neighborhood changes and fills up with people you don’t share a language with, or a way of life or a culture ... the social norms matter, and if they change in your neighborhood too fast, it’s going to be very discomfiting to you.
And I think it’s not only economic short-termism that has driven high levels of immigration, but it is the insouciance of the “anywhere” class. He won’t be a popular person here, but Christopher Caldwell’s idea of the two constitutions I think is very powerful: the first constitution being the basics of democracy and the rule of law and so on, and the second constitution being the way that public life is filtered through the courts, the media, civil society, which tends to be dominated much more by a kind of “anywhere” liberalism. And when the second constitution gets too powerful, then the first constitution hits back by electing Donald Trump.
So we go back to this question—as David Frum said, “If liberals won’t control immigration, then fascists will.” That’s our choice.
Kukathas: Could I respond to that by drawing attention to some analysis in your book? One of the things you pointed out was, in the U.K. context, the difference between London and the rest of the country. (And there are lots of things that go wrong within the society when so much wealth and power is concentrated in London, but I’ll leave that aside.) You pointed out the extent to which London really is quite different. Most immigration tends to focus on London—that’s where most people come in, although they do go to other parts of the country. And you pointed out—I think, quite rightly—that the parts of the country that are most anti-immigrant are the parts of the country where there is the least immigration. But, again, your argument was that people outside don’t see themselves just as being in Newcastle or Lincolnshire—they see themselves as British. But they see themselves as British in a quite different way to the way that Londoners might see themselves as British.
That analysis sounds very persuasive. But the question now is what do you do about that? If this is the nature of the situation there, how do you actually control that? It seems to me that you can certainly bring about policies, but you have to exert a degree of control that is simply beyond the capacity of any state. And what worries me is that when there is this pressure to act, what the state will end up doing is actually focusing on much softer targets, because then you look like you’re doing something. So you don’t actually make or implement policies that have real effects in terms of reducing immigration—instead, you take dramatic actions that pick on targets where you can make a difference. You can pick on students or you can make it harder for some people to get visas.
Goodhart: Or ban the burqa or whatever, yeah. We end up talking about integration, which is often what people do talk about. But integration in liberal societies is incredibly difficult to mandate. You can’t tell people where to send their children to school or where to live. So I would say that the best integration policy is a pretty restrictive immigration policy, because we also know that communities—particularly Muslims from Pakistan or Bangladesh, who tend to live pretty separate lives in the U.K.—when you get beyond a certain critical mass, the pressure to integrate reduces. You can live your entire life within your own community— you have your own media, and so on.
And the areas of Britain where immigration is most contested, and where people are most uncomfortable, isn’t so much places where there is very little immigration. It’s the places like the northern mill towns in Yorkshire and Lancashire where we have had Pakistani immigration since the 1950s, where people were brought in to work in the mills to combat competition from Japan. This was a time when the British economy was booming, there were lots of better paid jobs elsewhere, and the mill owners, in one of the most disastrous acts of British public policy since the Second World War, invited in tens of thousands of people from completely different cultures. And it’s not all been a disaster, but these are not immigration success stories by anyone’s account. We have parallel lives in many of these places. You go to places like Bradford—they are completely transformed. And this has not been a good thing.
How we deal with that over time ... I think that the hope is actually probably with the young Muslim women who will want to break out of the very controlling, patriarchal culture they come from. I think over generations there will be an integration, but it’s going to be much slower than is the case with many other groups. Integration is just bloody difficult in liberal societies.
Kristol: I’ll just say that that’s a very British point of view. I do not feel that in the U.S. I came to Washington in 1985 and everyone was so worried—not unintelligently—about Hispanic immigration. They were going to one, two, or three states. They were concentrated together. They spoke Spanish. They had newspapers—which, incidentally, the U.S. has always had newspapers in different languages. And majorities of states in 1870 were foreign born, and were foreign born in one place. Iowa is now part of the United States, even though it was once 70% German, and they read German newspapers. But the Hispanic thing for the U.S. ... immigration continued at high levels from Mexico, and then expanded to Central America, and it just turned out that the melting pot in the U.S. is extremely strong. A third of them married non-Hispanics—intermarriage is a very good solution, incidentally, a very good pathway towards assimilation, much more common in some societies and much more common across certain ethnicities than others, obviously.
I actually think you both understate the importance of race from a U.S. point of view. There’s very little evidence of immigration leading to ... what? Crime rates went down during this huge wave of immigration in the U.S. Race is much more behind it in the U.S.; maybe race/religion/non-Christian immigrants is more behind it in parts of Europe. And, again, that may empirically take longer and be harder for those people to assimilate, though the ones who are fleeing and coming to these countries probably do want to assimilate. Then you do have the interesting question of why some of them do and some don’t.
I guess my final point, if I could be sort of to the left of both of you, is: Is it so terrible that Jamaicans are coming to the U.S. and Britain and becoming nurses or other professionals?
Goodhart: Well, it’s terrible for Jamaica.
Kristol: No, it isn’t terrible for Jamaica, because there aren’t jobs for a lot of them in Jamaica.
Goodhart: That’s because all the clever people keep leaving.
Kristol: I’m not so sure that Jamaica’s GDP has grown less quickly in the last 20 or 30 years than it was in the “wonderful” days when everyone was just stuck in Jamaica and there was no industry and no employment there. I think this is Chandran’s point: We’re going to stop people who really want to leave from leaving, stop them from contributing to the country that they’re coming to.
“In order to become less dependent on immigrants … the idea of the two constitutions is, I think, very powerful: the first constitution being the basics of democracy and the rule of law and so on, and the second constitution being the way that public life is filtered through the courts, the media, and civil society, which tends to be dominated much more by a kind of ‘anywhere’ liberalism. And when the second constitution gets too powerful, then the first constitution hits back by electing Donald Trump.” — David Goodhart
Same with the universities, it’s not so obviously terrible that Britain is educating a lot of people from outside Britain, that it’s helping the balance of payments to the universities in Britain. The students seem happy enough to have foreign students with them. The foreigners probably are learning a lot. It’s probably mildly beneficial for liberal values around the world because they’re hopefully at LSE getting a modestly liberal education.
Goodhart: But don’t we want wealth and prosperity to be spread out across the world, not everybody coming to a few great nations?
Kristol: And a lot of them send money back. Look, this has been empirically studied a lot: It is just not true that Mexico suffers from having a lot of Mexicans in the United States. They all have relatives in Mexico and they send money back to Mexico; many of them come temporarily and go back to Mexico. This is Chandran’s point that in fact you get more transient immigration—whatever the technical term would be; “temporary immigration”—if you have a more relaxed immigration policy. If you make people come and ask for asylum, then they have to stay here and they can’t go back and so forth.
Kukathas: One thing that might be worth noting, with respect to the brain drain in particular, is that we often have the sense that when people move, especially people like nurses and doctors and various kinds of workers, what’s happening is that they they’re turning up at the border or they’re applying for visas independently and just arriving. Whereas, in fact, there’s a huge network of international agreements between governments, and governments and private bodies, in order to supply their labor needs. Think about the Philippines, for example, which is famous for sending out nurses all around the world. Well, one of the things that the Philippines is very good at doing is actually producing nurses for export. This is an export industry—people go in not because they want to get jobs as nurses in the Philippines but because they want to have jobs as nurses somewhere. And there are agreements between hospitals and healthcare systems and countries. And it’s not just nurses—it’s domestic workers in Indonesia who are exported all around the world, whether it’s to the Middle East or to Taiwan. So it’s very complex.
Goodhart: The Philippines is sort of sui generis. I mean, it does have a whole political economy based around exporting people. But, actually, this brain drain problem is partly going to solve itself, because there are going to be far, far fewer brains to drain because of the global collapse in fertility. And, actually, a lot of countries that have been exporting a lot of people to richer countries, like Nigeria, are now starting to say, “Actually, we need the nurses here.” This is the point about Jamaican graduates. The fact they’re graduates, they will have had a very expensive education paid for by Jamaican taxpayers and then they’ll have hopped off to New York, and this is not fair to Jamaica. And it’s not fair to Nigeria that we take their doctors and their nurses. So Nigeria is actually implementing a system where after you’ve had training in nursing you have to stay for a certain number of years. That seems to me to be a reasonable compromise.
Kristol: Well this would depend partly on who’s paying for their education there.
There should be a slight preference, all things equal, for people to be able to go where they want. If it doesn’t hurt the country they’re going to. It’s questionable, I suppose, whether it hurts the country they’re leaving. I think this is where the agreements come in: If the hospital system in the U.S. is willing to pay the Nigerian government for what they spent to educate this nurse, then it’s all even. Isn’t there some prejudice for liberty here and for freedom? And, in that respect, isn’t immigration a bit of a special case? It’s not just a welfare state question.
Kukathas: This is a kind of bedrock position that I share with you, that it’s not right to say to people in different parts of the world, “No, you can’t move because you owe an obligation to stay where you are.” Now, I completely agree that if you’ve been the recipient of public funds and you’re told that you’re obligated to pay some of that back, whether it’s in cash or in service, that seems not unreasonable. And many places do exactly that. If you get a degree in medicine in Malaysia, it’s not that you can’t leave the country without paying back—you also have an obligation to go to certain parts of Malaysia and do your service because your education is being paid for.
But at the same time, it’s not as if, in a free society, you would say to someone, “No, you’re stuck here forever because we need you” any more than you could say to an American, “No, you’re from Iowa and I’m afraid there’s been a bit of a labor drain from Iowa to the cities—you’ve got to stay here.” It may be too bad for Iowa and may be better for New York, but I just don’t think you can do that in a free society.
Goodhart: But the world is not a single country. We have nation-states, and I think nation-states are very important and are going to remain important. We’ve got huge challenges facing us that that our political classes need legitimacy to tackle: we’ve got climate, we’ve got aging societies, we’ve got—certainly in Europe—slow economic growth, we’ve got huge ethnic diversity in our societies. All of these things will work better if we have a degree of national citizenship. And that has to be bounded within nation-states. We need moderate national feeling to enable our politicians to deal with many of these problems, and I think if your society is changing too fast you erode that, amongst other things.
Kukathas: I’m not sure I would agree with that as a generalization, because I think it’s going to vary from place to place. If you took the UAE, for example, it’s 80 or 85% immigrant, but it’s not a democracy.
Goodhart: But they don’t have rights.
Kukathas: Yeah, I agree that that’s a different case. If you looked at Singapore, which is a democracy, you’ve got a population of six million, and two and a half million of those are non-citizens. Some of them are permanent residents; some of them are short-term residents. It’s a perfectly cohesive society. There’s more than enough national sentiment to make the institutions work properly. So the question of how much you need ... I don’t think it’s just a matter of numbers—it’s a matter of what is the ethos that’s shaping the society.
Now you could say, and I think this is a part of your thesis, “Well, what we need to do is control immigration to develop that ethos.” But I’m not sure that that’s necessarily or even obviously the case. Whether or not you have the right ethos may be something that’s sourced from all kinds of other factors. In fact, if you have the right ethos you could have a much greater extent of immigration and still be fine with your institutions. If you’ve got a very different sort of ethos, even a handful of immigrants would be a real threat.
Many years ago, I debated the immigration issue in a townhall in Prague, and there was great anxiety among the citizenry about immigration. But everybody agreed that no one wanted to immigrate to the Czech Republic. They were all using this as a route to Sweden or to Germany or to Britain. Yet there was this great anxiety that people were coming through, and the numbers were trivial—hardly anyone was stopping to make their lives in Prague. So what was it that was the source of the anxiety? Well, it couldn’t be the immigrants, because there weren’t enough of them. The problem was the way people thought about their society. So that, I think, is the issue.
Goodhart: Well the ethos often flows from the form of immigration you have, too. So, lots of countries—Canada, I think; possibly Singapore, too—have been incredibly selective in who is allowed in. My point about Pakistanis in Britain is that it was completely unselective—they were the poorest of the poor in Pakistan and they brought their very clannish society to the U.K. and reestablished it there. That is why there was an issue with integration. Muslim immigration in the U.S. has tended to be much more, you know, Iranian dentists, not Pakistani small farmers from Mirpur.
“It’s not as if, in a free society, you would say to someone, ‘No, you’re stuck here forever because we need you’ any more than you could say to an American, ‘No, you’re from Iowa and I’m afraid there’s been a bit of a labor drain from Iowa to the cities—you’ve got to stay here.’ It may be too bad for Iowa and may be better for New York, but I just don’t think you can do that in a free society.” — Chandran Kukathas
And similarly with Canada—Canada was seen as one of the great success stories of global immigration, but that’s because it was ruthless. You had to virtually have three PhDs to get into Canada until quite recently. Now more people have come through the refugee channel, but highly educated people who have good jobs make for good immigrants and can fit in quite quickly. But when you have much less selective immigration, then you have a much bigger problem.
Kristol: Final word on this?
Kukathas: I’m not sure that Canada or Australia have been quite as selective—or Singapore. And, again, I don’t want to defend the immigration policies of these places, including Singapore, because I think there are lots of things that are wrong with it. But I guess I would just go back to my original point, which is that it’s very, very difficult to actually control immigration. It’s very difficult to control it and get the outcomes that you want, even though you can put policies in place. It’s very difficult to actually control a society without then infringing upon your citizens’ freedoms. So the question then is: How far are you prepared to go? I think, David, your view is that it’s actually not as bad as I’m suggesting, that there’s a lot less infringement of people’s liberties than I’m fearing. I think you’re mistaken about that, but this is probably a debate for another time.
Goodhart: Well, the examples you gave in The New York Times I didn’t think really cut the mustard. Employers, should they be allowed to import anybody they want? Should you be able to import any spouse you want, without any controls at all? One can argue about what the rules should be, but these are concerns that, compared to the public good of a well-managed immigration system that means that your population (particularly the bottom half of it) are not anxious about it, and they’re not voting for populists because of it, this is a very small price to pay, is my point.
Kristol: We should stop, but I don’t think there’s a lot of resentment about people marrying non-Americans—at least here in the U.S.—and bringing them here. Obviously sexual trafficking is an entirely different issue, but I don’t think you’re importing spouses. People should have some right to marry, they should be encouraged to marry the person they want to marry, and it should be made easier. I mean, what you describe as an employer importing a laborer is also a laborer choosing to work somewhere else, just to make that obvious point. You’re right that there can be exploitative situations, and also that it can take jobs away from local people. But we’ve had pretty large immigration and pretty low unemployment here in this country.
These things are somewhat contingent on different countries having different histories and economies and societies and so forth. So I think there’s a case for really distinguishing countries and what the trade-off is between liberty-constraining and the security-threatening sides of immigration.
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