Immigration and the spirit of freedom

Within the UK’s higher education system, being asked to serve as external examiner for a PhD thesis or for an academic programme is a normal part of one’s service to the profession. In recent years, however, it has acquired a further dimension in that to accept such invitations is immediately to be asked to supply your passport so that your right to work in the UK can be confirmed. External examining is now part of the immigration and border control system – and to supply one’s passport is to become complicit with this system of control. This is, of course, not limited to the context of academia, rather this system has now invaded every realm of employment as well as the rental or purchasing of accommodation, banking services, and numerous other areas of everyday social life. While the explicit purpose of this policy is to create a ‘hostile environment’ for irregular migrants, its effects go well beyond that aim. This is not only a matter of egregious injustices such as the Windrush Betrayal that are mistakenly (if predictably) perpetrated through it, although these are very important, but also the more pervasive normalisation of the loss of freedom that such mechanisms of control bring about. This issue is at the heart of Chandran Kukathas’ Immigration and Freedom as a meditation on the free or open society and the problems that state immigration controls pose for that ideal. More than any other work, Kukathas’ argument concerns the ways in which immigration controls and policies transform and corrupt our ethical relations to ourselves as free beings who relate to one another as equals. In this commentary I will start by drawing attention to Kukathas’ own starting point and use this to raise a question about the ideal of the free society that guides his meditation and its relationship to the sympathy he expresses for open borders and free movement (which he seems to treat as equivalent terms).