Why is the right obsessed with ‘defending’ borders? Because it sees citizenship as a commodity
“I know that the left and all the gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement’,” the Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently said on his show, “but they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually.” By accusing the Democratic party of trying to “replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the third world”, the prominent conservative commentator shows that while Donald Trump may have left the White House, Trumpism is alive and kicking.
Carlson has already faced condemnation from Jewish groups and calls to resign over his seeming endorsement of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory – the false claim, which has motivated fascist mass murderers from El Paso, Texas, to Christchurch, New Zealand, that governing elites have conspired to undermine majority-white populations by encouraging immigration. (His employer defended him, pointing to his words during the segment: “White replacement theory? No, no, this is a voting rights question.”) But it’s just the most extreme example so far of the US populist right’s growing rhetorical assault on the Biden administration.
Since the start of the year, the right has focused its attacks on border crossings at the frontier with Mexico, attempting to blame the continuing displacement of people from Central America on Biden’s recent, tentative liberalisation of migration policy. The new president, according to Trump, is guilty of “recklessly eliminating our border security measures”, an attack line echoed by several other prominent Republicans and conservative media outlets in recent weeks.
These claims are clearly overheated: as the journalist Arelis Hernández points out in the Washington Post, the US-Mexico border is currently far from open. But their resurgence shows just how central the idea of a “border crisis” remains to the populist right, even when it bears little relationship to the reality on the ground.
Something similar is true in Europe, where governments nominally of the centre still allow their policies to be shaped by the populist backlash to the refugee crisis of 2015, even though the number of refugees entering Europe today is far lower. Authorities in Italy, Malta and Greece continue to obstruct rescues at sea, while Denmark, whose centre-left government was elected in 2019 after stealing its rightwing populist rivals’ platform on refugee policy, has revoked the residence permits of some 189 Syrian refugees, on the spurious grounds that it is now “safe” to return to some parts of Syria, such as Damascus. The UK government, meanwhile, has unveiled a draconian new plan to restrict the rights of asylum seekers who enter the country without permission, in response to last year’s moral panic over small boats crossing the Channel.
The right will usually defend such positions on the grounds of security, while the left – correctly – attacks the xenophobia and racism on which they are partly founded. But is there another way to understand the particular role that the border crisis plays in our current politics? The economist Branko Milanović has argued for the importance of seeing citizenship – not just for who it excludes, but for the benefits it confers on the holders – as a crucial factor in shaping the way that the rich world relates to the rest of the globe.
In recent decades, according to Milanović, your place of birth has become an increasingly important predictor of your income, as opposed to class or ethnic background. This has led to a phenomenon he terms “citizenship rent”, or the relative privileges that citizens of wealthy countries receive – for example, higher wages than someone doing the same job in a middleincome country – simply by accident of geography. Since 2008, as the top 1% have hoovered up increasing amounts of wealth while the living standards of most people in the west have stagnated, defending the relative privileges conferred by citizenship has become an increasingly attractive proposition to many voters.
For the top 1%, citizenship is literally a commodity to be bought and sold: the global trade in passports is now worth an estimated £20bn a year. For most inhabitants of wealthy countries, however, it is more symbolic, something that populists promise to aggressively defend through the harsh treatment of migrants deemed to threaten these privileges. The historian of ideas, Malcolm Bull identified this dynamic in 2016, at the outset of the populist surge, and it continues today: the border crisis is what the populist right uses to rally voters to its cause, an implicit promise that it will protect their interests by maintaining global inequality.
This also helps explain the apparently contradictory approaches taken by governments who make border crackdowns at the same time as they actively encourage other forms of immigration. The current UK government is a case in point: its attack on the human right to asylum has unfolded at the same time as it makes a show of offering a safe haven to Hong Kong residents with overseas UK citizenship who want to flee China’s dismantling of liberal democracy within the former British colony. As many as 300,000 people from Hong Kong are expected to be resettled in the UK in the next few years under a special visa scheme that launched in January.
Emigrants from Hong Kong have a genuine need for protection – only recently the former politician Nathan Law was rightly granted asylum in the UK – but so do people from other countries with what are euphemistically described as “historical ties” to Britain, such as Iraq. One reason the government has been so open in the case of Hong Kong may be because of the wealth and skills that people are expected to bring with them: one survey found that a typical emigrant has a university degree and an average salary of £33,270 a year. Home Office guidance for the visa scheme states that an emigrant from Hong Kong must be able to support themselves in the UK for six months without access to public funds: wealth barriers are a typical condition of UK visas.
The reason this apparent openness coexists with the authoritarian posturing on boats in the Channel is because the government is treating citizenship as an asset whose value on the global market needs to be maintained. This may seem like common sense to some. Yet – as the Biden administration is now discovering – for as long as the global inequality on which this system rests continues, the image of the border crisis will remain a powerful mobilising tool for the populist right.
Daniel Trilling is the author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe