Vital Interests: You have recently published a book entitled Migration and Integration: The Case for Liberalism with Borders, which is a timely and significant work on the realities not only on the southern border of the United States, but also in Europe where the flow of migrants is challenging the liberal order. 

You begin the book with a definition of liberal ideals and why it's important for liberal states to come to grips with the challenge of migration and integration. Can you explain your approach?

Tom Farer:  I began with a hierarchy of values. Human Rights is at its pinnacle.  However, since I believe that, in large measure, the defense of human rights occurs within states and that a liberal democratic political order is an essential condition for the protection of those rights, and since I see the authoritarian right using migration-related issues to erode the liberal order in the rich states of the West, the central question driving the book is “How can liberals take effective possession of those issues with the least compromise of human rights norms?”   

In the book, I recognize the power of moral arguments in favor of a right of persons to cross borders in search of a better life or to escape persecution in all cases where they do not individually constitute a threat to public safety or the rights of others. But the political, economic and administrative implications of such a right are enormous. Just consider the demographic facts. Although the birth rate in most of the Global South is declining, there is today a huge hangover from previous periods of growth. 

Take, for instance, the Middle East and North Africa. In 1950, the population of that entire area was just a bit over 90 million.Today it is about 380 million and that figure is projected to grow to 680 million in thirty years. In Egypt alone about a million people are added to the population every six months. Or consider Nigeria, the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa. Today it has roughly 180 million people. In thirty years it will have 500 million. The result today and into the future is a huge youth bulge in countries with a demonstrable inability—for reasons including profound corruption and mismanagement of government institutions-- to absorb more than a small fraction of that bulge into the workforce.  

Is it any wonder that in a survey of persons living in Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, 40 percent said they would move to wealthy countries if they could?  Add to those numbers the 140 million people the World Bank predicts will be displaced by climate change over the next 30 years and you can begin to question whether anything like open borders is possible without overwhelming the liberal political and economic order of the wealthy democracies. Moreover, I argue, just as there are strong theoretical arguments in favor of relatively open borders, there is conversely a strong moral case for recognizing the right of a democratic electorate to decide how many can enter and on what conditions.     

The integration of migrants from the global south is linked to the initial migration issue. Samuel Huntington famously wrote about a clash of cultures in societies when there is not a homogeneous pool. My thesis is that there is a conflict between, let's call them liberals or people who participate in the discourse of human rights, and people who don't, and that conflict exists not between so-called “cultural zones, as Huntington would have it, but within each of them. Some potential migrants share the values which social liberals in the West have - through unremitting struggle and sacrifice - managed to institutionalize and some don't. Should social liberals welcome migrants who believe, as many Ugandan Evangelicals do, that gay sex should be punished with all the might of the law or those persons who believe that a husband cannot be found  to rape his wife since she has a religious obligation to satisfy his sexual urges? 

Implicit in what I have already said is a certain conception of liberalism. My own liberalism draws upon a number of sources. One, of course, is John Locke with his emphasis on the independence of the individual from the state and the consequent need to restrain the state. An exclusive emphasis on the state as the threat to individual autonomy leads down the road to the pitiless and narcissistic individualism championed by Ayn Rand and her followers, a condition in which individuals lack responsibility to the community of which they are a part. For a more responsible and sustainable version of liberalism I look to the idealism expressed in the French Revolution’s balanced emphasis on equality and fraternity along with liberty.

I think of liberals as falling very roughly into one of two categories. One is the category of people who say, "let everybody do their own thing", and "everybody" can be other individuals or other cultural groups within the national society. Let's call that laissez-faire liberalism. I'm reminded of the English grande dame, maybe she was a creation of Oscar Wilde, who when asked about gay sex says, "I don't give a damn what people do as long as they don't do it in the high street at noon or, if they live in rural areas, as long as they don't frighten the animals." Then there is a more muscular liberalism, liberalism as a faith. It's a faith, a non-deistic faith to be sure, but still a faith as Marxism was once a faith. You have a set of values and you are prepared to fight for their realization.  In extreme circumstances that may paradoxically require some compromise with a strict interpretation of human rights norms.   

VI: In the past, waves of migrants have come into Europe as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union, decolonization, and the crushing poverty of the Global South. How is the current situation, with millions of migrants and refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East and repression in Africa, different?

Tom Farer: The difference is partially a matter of numbers, partially a matter of growing cultural polarization between liberals and fundamentalists (or the parochial  and the cosmopolitan), partially a matter of economics: the rich states are no longer experiencing the kind of growth which absorbs very large numbers of lightly-skilled workers.  

Another problem is the increasing difficulty of distinguishing, at least on moral grounds, between people who fall within the classic definition of refugee, that is people who are fleeing persecution from the state and those fleeing the consequences of climate change, civil conflicts, organized crime, abusive spouses and families, and generalized social chaos.  

As far as the United States is concerned, because Europe is putting in place higher barriers to migration, there's going to be a certain amount of deflection of migration. Where can it go? Well, North America is the most obvious alternative. The demographics, at least for the next 30 to 50 years, guarantee that the issues of migration and integration-- it's really a cluster of issues-- are going to remain of very high salience in US politics.

VI: As you describe, there is now a migration problem that will quickly get more acute. This is a major crisis for Western liberal nations because there are few workable integration solutions. You give examples of migrant integration in the Nordic countries, in Great Britain and in France. Are there models that could be expanded as roadmaps for liberal societies?

Tom Farer: I think their experience is useful, although the American condition is significantly different than the European one. Why? The United States has much more flexible labor markets, and we have a very exiguous welfare state. This is a country where, if you don't work, you could actually starve and at best find shelter under a bridge. So the incentives for people to go to work here, and the opportunity for people to find jobs, to price themselves down to a job in this country, are considerably greater than they are in Europe. That's an important distinction. 

The United States federal government really does very little for refugees or for migrants. States and municipalities do more. In addition, as de Tocqueville remarked more than 150 years ago, we have a very strong civil society.  Churches form an important part of that society because most of them incorporate a philanthropic mission. Our strong civil society helps to integrate, to support, and to orient new arrivals. 

Civil society is not as strong in most European countries, although it is strengthening. One reason it was weaker historically, I believe, has been the larger role of the state. In the countries I studied the state is much more active than the U.S. federal state in trying to integrate refugees as well as migrants simply seeking a better life, although because of increasingly rigorous migration laws, most of the people going to Europe now at least try to claim refugee status.

So what have European states been doing? Well, the Scandinavian states enter into a contract, a personal contract, with each new migrant or asylum claimant, in which the claimant recognizes certain goals such as achieving competence in the local language and studying to acquire or refine skills needed in the economy. Of course, there has to be a bureaucracy to make this work. To a considerable extent, this bureaucracy is a local bureaucracy. The state provides resources to municipalities to assist the migrant and to, in effect, monitor the migrant’s progress toward the realization of these goals. It provides financial incentives to the municipalities to facilitate the integration of the migrant, both economically and socially. This, I think, is a useful model.

Now, another issue you were raising is, how have European states dealt with the problem of, let's call it cultural conflict or cultural difference? Here I spent considerable space comparing the UK and France, because it's commonplace to regard their views about how best to integrate people from other cultural zones as antithetical. 

For many years, the British were seen as the epitome of multiculturalism. It was official British government policy that each community - the Afro-Caribbean, the Muslim, the Nigerian, Hindu, etc.--should be free to organize itself to maintain its cultural practices, to sustain them through private schools and so on. Moreover, the British state funded culturally exclusive groups in their community-building activities.

Consistent with a tradition dating back at least to The Revolution, France was the country that sought assimilation. Particularly in the early twentieth century the French state set out to flatten the very real regional differences that existed in France even as late as the end of the 19th Century. Assimilation of peoples from other countries was a continuation of this older policy. 

VI: Whatever the model, isn’t the challenge these days coping with the numbers? How many people can you bring in without threatening to overwhelm the culture and values of the indigenous population?

Tom Farer: There's a certain irony here, because the indigenous white culture is itself very divided. Take the case of France. When the French National Assembly was considering the question of gay marriage, there were two groups of protesters out in the front of the Assembly. One was French Catholic traditionalists and the other was Muslim conservatives. I don't know if they mingled but they were both there. Surely there is irony here in the fact that these days conservatives are more hostile than liberals and centrists generally to large-scale immigration from the Global South. 

But some cultural practices like child marriage, polygamy, and extreme isolation of women from society and economy are alienating to liberal and most conservatives in the indigenous populations of the West. Michael Walzer has argued that a viable democratic political order requires some shared moral perspective not a mere cultural archipelago without any shared vision. I have tried to suggest how governments might negotiate cultural tensions. Still, as you suggest, numbers will make a difficult task far more difficult. 

There are a number of reasons why migration and integration are closely linked in terms of public policy and why the velocity of migration matters so much. In the first place, large numbers surging against the borders deprive even willing governments of the time needed to sell a generous migration and refugee policy to their electorates. Liberals and centrists and principled conservative leaders can, I believe, sell a fairly generous policy by appealing both to the electorate’s Samaritan and to its utilitarian sensibility. The contribution of immigrants over the past few decades (and before, of course) to the economic dynamism of the United States is incontrovertible. The economic stagnation of migrant-allergic Japan and the suffering of unattended old people in the Japanese population are also valuable political selling points.

In the book, I argue that the parties of the center, whether it's center left or center right, the socially liberal rule-of-law parties, have for decades failed to make the case for a generous and prudent migration policy to the electorate in a sufficiently open and consistent manner. Of course it's hard to make that case when suddenly 800,000 people are arriving at your frontier, which was the experience of Germany in 2015.

You want to be able to regulate entry, and one of the reasons you want to be able to regulate entry is you want to assure municipalities that they will have the resources to deal with the increased use of their medical facilities, their schools and so on. There are places in Britain where probably the lines for access to hospitals, primary care physicians, and housing did increase as a consequence of migration either from Eastern and Central Europe or the Global South. So did the population of primary schools. Governments need to provide assurance and back it up with resources so that the indigenous population doesn't feel negatively impacted.

Now, that may not be enough for some because there's a significant proportion of the electorate in the United States and in Europe which isn't moved by economic concerns. I think that centrist governments can demonstrate that managed migration can actually reinforce or support the welfare state. What it cannot and should not do is try and protect the sense of higher status over people of color to which certain elements of the indigenous population cling. 

I am talking, of course, about White Nationalism. If being white has given you, in your mind at least, a certain status in society, so you're not at the bottom of the social rung, and suddenly you see in our celebrity culture that people of color are now your newsreaders and your star athletes and your singers and are portrayed in commercials, on television as living upper middle class lives, then you feel the rage of the deprived.   

There's nothing governments can do about that portion of the population that feels it has been losing status. In the United States, it's not just the question of migration. It's really a question of attitudes toward African Americans and Hispanics and people who successfully challenge the gender binary tradition. In Europe, it's more a question of the arrival of migrants or this second generation of migrants in positions of prominence like the mayor of London and the Minister of Home Affairs, both sons of very poor Pakistani immigrants.

VI: Because of the flood of migrants, Europe has closed its borders, allowing in a small quota of asylum seekers and qualified migrants. As a stopgap measure, the European Union is also paying countries like Turkey and Greece to host migrants. These are very short-term solutions. What is the responsibility of liberal states to somehow create viable passages for people from conflict nations and the Global South into their societies?

Tom Farer:  I do have a comprehensive strategy with a fair number of elements. One is offshore processing of applications for asylum. It is true that the EU has been paying a number of countries to contain the flow. What it has not done, on anything like a sufficient much less a generous scale, is deploy the resources necessary to build and maintain off-shore asylum havens that function like real communities. It is a repellant fact that the resources the EU has invested to date could be greatly enhanced by diverting the hundreds to millions of Euros it is dispensing to oligarchs and anti-liberal governments in Eastern and Central Europe. Europe has the resources to build what would, in effect, be communities where desperate people in the Global South could find refuge.

This is how I envision, ideally, these offshore processing centers. They would be places with schools, places where the language of European countries would be taught and where there would be economic activity as well. That is, European governments would use incentives to move some elements of the big corporate supply chains to processing centers (I think of them as “havens”) in North and sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. 

In the case of the United States, the haven(s) I envision could be in southern Mexico, possibly the poorest part of Mexico. They wouldn't be just places to assess claims. They would become communities giving a decent life to people who have never had it as well as preparing them for effective integration into the economy of Mexico itself or the United States.

In addition, I propose a combination of a lottery and a point system. We have had a small lottery, which was actually designed to bring more West Europeans into the United States. One of the advantages of a lottery is it provides hope for people who would like to migrate to the West. An aspiring migrant might get into the potential migrant pool through the lottery. Once you get into the pool through the lottery, you could through your own efforts accumulate points for getting into a European country or into the United States. You could learn English or another rich-country language, refine skills potentially useful to the economies of the states to which you wish to migrate, learn about their constitutional systems and cultural traditions.  You could try and find a sponsor in the West, forming ties through social media. To some degree you would have a sense of helping to determine your future, convert fate into possibility. 

Meanwhile, in the Western democracies, the government, in consultation with the Parliament, National Assembly, or in our case, the Congress, would establish numerical limits, perhaps on a biennial basis for migrants, both for refugees and for the generality of persons seeking to move, to a more promising place in the world, a place which will give them more space in which to shape their lives. Once those numbers were established, then each year, on the basis of the points that people had accumulated--.    by, for example, learning a language or improving their language proficiency, and certainly by qualifying or appearing to qualify for refugee status. The latter would be a very important source of points. It might not be definitive, but it would be a significant step to getting within the pool of people that are actually admitted. Then people who were allowed to enter would be flown to the country, the United States or a country in Europe. They would sign their individual migration contracts setting the bars that they are going to try to reach in a specified period of time.

Is this strategy plausible from a financial perspective?  Certain additional elements of the strategy I outline help to address that question. First, by having offshore processing in relatively low-wage countries, you're going to save a great deal of money if you compare costs with those you would incur processing in rich countries. 

Secondly, I propose a national service program, which would have to begin, I think, on a voluntary basis but in some countries might ultimately be compulsory. Young people would have a wide range of choices as to how to carry out their national service. Among them would be working in these processing centers, coaching sports, teaching language, generally helping to prepare people for settlement in a host country. People doing national service would be paid a very modest sum for doing so, and this would help to finance the transformation of mere camps into real communities.

VI: Those seem like very practical ideas. Young people now sign up for Teach for America, and the Peace Corps. Do you think these centers should be set up and administered by individual countries or by an international organization like the United Nations?

Tom Farer: I think the most effective way of overcoming host-country sensitivities about  having what amounts to a foreign presence in wherever it is - in Niger or Nigeria or Senegal or Morocco -  would be processing centers/havens established under the UN flag or the African Union flag, but possibly run by nonprofit foundations, which would have on their boards distinguished members of the host society as well as eminent philanthropists and academic experts from rich countries. It should be possible to avoid resemblance to those enclaves cut out of the side of China and other places during the Nineteenth Century Imperial era. 

Now, in the case of the United States, my conception is that it would be a joint Mexican-United States initiative. Again, we could create a nonprofit, a non-governmental institution, with representation of both Americans and Mexicans. Let me add another element, that the local people could use the schools, the playing fields, the language programs and could work in the factories and could establish shops in the communities that we would be creating. Otherwise, you will have intense local resentment of the standard of living that you had in these communities.

VI: It would be a win-win for the local population, where these communities would be established, where the local people could benefit by helping others.

Tom Farer: Exactly. I think you have to have that element. Otherwise, and there are examples of this, you develop a tremendous sense of resentment by locals because they accurately perceive that they're living worse than the people that their government is hosting within their frontiers.

VI: We've covered a lot of ground in this conversation - the dimensions of global migration and integration, how it's been handled in the past and serious proposals to confront this global crisis. Certainly, the worst is yet to come with climate change and continuing social and political disruption. Let’s hope liberal democracies can rise to this challenge.

Tom Farer: The Right is using the issue of migration to batter the gates protecting liberal democracy from the barbarians. The issue is in part symbolic in the sense of standing for all the anxieties and felt losses arising from the tumultuous changes in political economy, social hierarchies and cultural norms which have marked the past several decades. The Right promises to impose order with a mailed fist. The liberal center needs to demonstrate that it can be an agent of order while preserving liberties still valued, I believe, by substantial majorities in Western democratic societies.   

Migration is an issue area where the center can demonstrate the will to formulate and execute strategies authorized by the persuadable majority, a majority not committed to freezing the present population, not hostile to accommodating substantial cultural differences, but a majority that wants assurance that it will be consulted and that the borders will be controlled within parameters electoral majorities set. If the liberal center fails to take possession of this issue, the Right will not have to batter down the gates of constitutional democracy. For it will discover that its liberal enemies have conveniently left them ajar.

Tom Farer is University Professor at the University of Denver, a position he assumed after serving for fourteen years (1996-2010) as Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies.  He previously served as President of the University of New Mexico, of the Inter- American Commission on Human Rights, and of the Association of Professional School of International Studies (APSIA).  He has been a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment and The Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C.  He has worked in the Department of State as special assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs and in the Department of Defense as special assistant to the General Counsel.  He has consulted for Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other human rights organizations.  At the United Nations he served as legal advisor to the UN operation in Somalia (1993) where decades earlier he had served as law and karate instructor to the National Police force.  He is on the editorial boards of the American Journal of International Law and the Human Rights Quarterly and was co-editor of the journal Global Governance.