Immigration and Hospitality: Thoughts on Camp of the Saints, Exit West, and Kant
Many years ago, in the mid-1970s, I read a novel called Camp of the Saints by a French writer, Jean Raspail. Camp was about the death of the West via an apocalyptic mass migration from South Asia and other parts of the darkest Third World to the shores of Mediterranean France. While unabashedly racist in its portrayal of the arrivals, the real target was weak-kneed Western leftists and multiculturalists (though the word had not yet been invented), who were shown as too soft and wishy-washy to fight back until it was too late.
At the time I was rather down on soft-headed leftists myself, so I basically liked the story but thought the mass-migration scenario was pretty farfetched. Today, of course, it sounds more prophetic. It shouldn’t be any surprise that Camp is a cult favorite of Steve Bannon and anti-immigrant nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic.
The reason I’ve recalled this old book is that I just finished a new novel, Exit West, by the Pakistani writer Mohsin Mahid. Mahid has written a number of good books that revolve around the crisis of modern fundamentalism in Pakistan and elsewhere. Exit West is a kind of reimagining of Camp of the Saints that privileges the immigrant view. In a sprawling unnamed South Asian city, Islamic radicals gradually take over and ordinary lives are crushed between random violence and religious repression. A young couple, Nadia and Saeed, just embarking on an affair, are pushed together for survival. As things fall apart, mysterious gateways begin to appear around the city that allow people to escape, and Nadia and Saeed jump from South Asia to a refugee camp on the Greek island of Mykonos, then to London, and finally to the Marin hills outside San Francisco. They join a huge movement of peoples from all over the world who show up uninvited in the wealthier, established countries of Europe and North America, often emerging from their portals literally inside rich people’s bedrooms.
What Mahid tries to do is imagine a positive outcome from this crisis. It would be easy to go in Raspail’s direction and see this uncontrolled flood leading to civilizational collapse, and equally easy to write a thriller showing how the threatened societies marshal their armies and militias to destroy the invaders. It is harder to picture a new world emerging, a new modus vivendi between the global haves and have-nots. In Exit West, the British stand down from an all-out attack on immigrant enclaves—we aren’t taken inside British decisionmaking, so Saeed and Nadia can only conclude that it would have been too appalling for British citizens to stomach. In America, the new immigrants live in the hills and slowly integrate into the cities; we never get much of an explanation as to why a nationalist backlash doesn’t materialize.
In a short epilogue several decades later, Saeed and Nadia, now long separated, meet again in their unnamed South Asian city, where life has returned to normal. “Half a century later Nadia returned for the first time to the city of her birth, where the fires she had witnessed in her youth had burned themselves out long ago, the lives of cities being far more persistent and more gently cyclical than those of people, and the city she found herself in was not a heaven but it was not a hell, and it was familiar but also unfamiliar, and as she wandered about slowly, exploring, she was informed of the proximity of Saeed, and after standing motionless for a considerable moment she communicated with him, and they agreed to meet.” Their journey has opened them up. Nadia, never religious, has discovered a new sexuality, and Saeed has stayed within Islam but with a broader understanding of its many faces and of the world more generally. Human beings are resilient, seems to be the message, and given opportunity and time will restore a kind of equilibrium.
Mahid’s soothing picture might seem utopian, except that to a large extent I think it corresponds to reality. In the US and Canada and Australia and Western Europe over the last 20-30 years, huge numbers of poor immigrants from very alien cultures have moved in. This has not seemed quite so odd in North America, where there is a long history of this sort of thing, but in Western Europe it has been new and more disruptive. Despite plenty of friction, until very recently the sky had not fallen.
Terrorism shifted the debate, however. ISIS-inspired attacks that turned immigrants into a perceived 5th column, and the huge wave of immigrants in 2015 from Syria and Afghanistan and Libya and sub-Saharan Africa fleeing war and oppression, produced a crisis in Europe. European politics continues to be warped to the right by immigration fears, even though the number of migrants has now returned to pre-2015 levels. East European states like Hungary and Poland seem to have tipped irretrievably towards authoritarianism. Italy is teetering. Angela Merkel may lose her position; if Germany goes to the dark side, the West is indeed in trouble.
America, despite a huge drop in illegal immigration over the past 10 years, has gone into its own largely self-inflicted tailspin. Trump and other right-wing opportunists have pumped up immigration fears as their main vehicle to take power. With little direct impact here from Syria and other terrorist trouble spots, Trump has falsely but successfully held up Central Americans fleeing gang violence and broken states as sources of crime and instability.
Given these trends, maybe it is useful to hear Mahid’s call not to lose heart. Who would have thought 50 years ago (the US relaxed its immigration policy in 1965) that Europe or even the US would absorb so many, so quickly, with so little violence or blowback? The big and many not-so-big cities of Europe, North America, and Australia have been transformed into far more diverse, vibrant, and interesting places. Immigration has added so much to the economies, the arts, the cultures, the social fabric that it is difficult to imagine the alternative. Who seriously wants a New York or London or Toronto made up mostly of white Anglo-Saxons? In the 1980s we feared a rising Japan; today, who owns the future—immigrant-averse Japan, or immigrant-welcoming (until recently) America?
Who, 50 years ago, would have predicted other astonishing successes to the benefit of the world’s poor: that China would become a fast-growing middle-income state, that India would feed itself and generate a dynamic tech sector, that South Korea would become rich and democratic? The great danger of that time, an aggressive Soviet Union fostering left-wing radicals around the world, is a distant memory.
Now that blowback is upon us, it isn’t clear if our current preoccupation with immigrants is a phase we will outgrow or the harbinger of worse to come. Mahid suggests the former. The immigrants as he portrays them are mostly decent, normal people escaping terrible situations. Some bad apples are present—he mentions attempts by Islamic militants to carry out attacks designed to provoke a violent response—but they are not the norm. The receiving peoples are also decent, sometimes confused and fearful but able to see the common humanity in the new arrivals. When they come face to face and must decide whether to share or attack, they share. Eventually, if the world’s haves are generous and patient, the chaos and violence driving people to flee their homelands will abate, allowing for a more stable relationship.
May it be so. But hope is not a strategy, and we will need to navigate some choppy waters to get to Mahid’s equilibrium. Too many places in the world have become unlivable, and unfortunately the reactionary politics that immigration is provoking in rich countries are likely to make things worse. Less positive engagement with the outside world, less foreign aid, less trade, less global cooperation—this is a recipe for a downward spiral. Twenty-five years ago a more confident America negotiated NAFTA as part of a successful strategy to stem out-of-control immigration from Mexico by helping Mexico become more wealthy and democratic. It worked; today net immigration from Mexico is zero. Nothing similar is imagined now for Honduras or Guatemala.
The incentives for politicians in many rich countries to demagogue immigration are very strong. Fear—that a flood of newcomers will take away our jobs, harass our women, shoot us down in the street, or just make us feel like aliens in our own land—has been a potent force that is driving today’s populism. It is far easier to scapegoat vulnerable outsiders than address the real causes of discontent such as growing inequality.
While the threat has been exaggerated, does that mean it doesn’t exist? Is there a size and type of immigration that is genuinely dangerous? There is, of course. Open borders with no restrictions would be unsustainable. Wages would plummet. Social services would collapse. Integration of immigrants into a stable, functioning liberal society would become impossible. Friction between natives and newcomers would escalate, and a harsh nativist backlash could easily lead to a police state or civil war. It would not help anyone, including the world’s poor, if developed countries were destabilized and impoverished.
So we need limits on immigration. But all of us lucky enough to have been born in a country that other people would like to move to should reflect on what we owe to those—the vast majority—not so lucky. To some, those mired in the most extreme poverty or facing imminent danger, we owe immediate help including the boon of immigration. But we can bring in only a fraction of all those in less dire circumstances. At a minimum, it seems to me, we need a long-term policy that offers hope to all, a policy that commits America and its allies to moving the world towards economic development, and decent and effective government.
This used to be the consensus about US foreign policy in the post-war era. In our own slightly myopic but generous way we seemed to say: We would love to let all of you in so you can become Americans, but since we can’t, we will help you become more American. Many of our allies joined in this endeavor. Liberals and conservatives emphasized different tools, with liberals leaning toward direct aid and multilateral institutions like the World Bank, conservatives toward free trade and private foreign investment, but both agreed that helping other parts of the world become richer and freer was in America’s interest and also an obligation that came with our great power and wealth.
This consensus has now disappeared. The Republican Party has been captured by leaders who view relations with the outside world as transactional, short-term, and guided by an America First mentality. Instead of seeing our prosperity and power as implying some moral responsibility to share these good things with others, they see others as perpetually taking advantage of us and trying to cut us down. The long history of Western colonialism and predation and military intervention—processes to which the United States has been no stranger—might make us willing to concede that the problems “out there” are partly our doing. This view is mocked as weak and naïve. People in other countries, emphatically including our oldest and closest allies, are seen as competitors if not outright threats. We owe them nothing.
Immanuel Kant’s essay “Perpetual Peace,” written at the end of the 18th century, and reflecting the same enlightenment principles that had just brought the United States into being, was one of the earliest and greatest attempts to outline how peace could be achieved in a world of sovereign nation-states. Kant says that one of the three Definitive Articles for peace between nations is that “The Law of World Citizenship Shall be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality” (the other two: all states must have republican governments, and all states must join a federation that renounces war). What does this mean? According to Kant, “hospitality” means “the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another…they have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other.”
Today, much more than when Kant wrote, we are one world. We cannot disperse and must learn to tolerate. If Americans are true to our principles, it is impossible to believe that national borders should be undergirded by hard lines of race and culture. This is the zero-sum vision of Camp of the Saints—it’s us or them. The truth is that at bottom borders are arbitrary, and which side of these artificial lines you end up on is largely a question of luck. It is this view that I believe informs Exit West, and Kant, and America in its better moments. We have an obligation to be hospitable. To acknowledge this is the beginning of moral clarity.