On Being a Realist about Migration

Abstract

Does political realism have anything to contribute to the debates about migration in normative political theory? Anything well-established ‘moralist’ theories do not already acknowledge, that is? Addressing Jaggar’s (Aristotelian Soc Suppl Vol. XCIV, pp. 87–113, 2020) and Finlayson’s (Aristotelian Soc Suppl Vol. XCIV, pp. 115–139, 2020) critical intercessions into contemporary discourse about migration I argue that a political realist approach to the theory of migration faces what I call the ‘surplus challenge’: realists supposedly have no normative surplus over (liberal) cosmopolitan and nationalist moralist approaches. This nothing-more-to-add narrative is a common argument against the possibility and integrity of political realism (as seen in, inter alia, Leader-Maynard and Worsnip in Ethics 128(4), pp. 756–787, 2018). I show how it misconstrues the realist agenda. Finlayson, on the other hand, paints the realist intervention as primarily about paying closer attention to colonialism’s long legacy. A properly radical intrusion, however, addresses the unchecked and unwarranted, overbearing normative power of moral principles. I will conclude that for the realist, shaking up the discipline will not come as easy as pointing at some overly historicised facts. However, and despite this, the realist intervention rightly problematises contemporary philosophy of migration for its moral normativism. A radical realist approach to issues of migration, which unmasks the unjustified ‘microphysics’ political power hiding behind normative veneers, is a properly cataclysmic intrusion and the right way forward.

The Decolonial Project and Political Realism

In her paper Decolonizing Anglo-American Political Theory: The Case of Migration Justice (2020), Alison Jaggar challenges the contemporary (liberal) philosophy of migration for a lack of attention to concrete injustices and their colonial legacy. Contemporary philosophy of migration ‘neglects or actively obscures real history and politics, and in particular the history and continuing legacy of colonialism’ says Finalyson (2020, p. 115) in a reply to Jaggar.¹ Liberal theory of migration suffers from taking ‘populations as givens and borders as fixed’, Jaggar says (2020, p. 96). It ‘does not ask how populations were constituted, how ethnicities evolved, when states were established, or how their borders were drawn’ (ibid.). It also leaves unaddressed the question of why and how ‘some states [could] become so rich and some so poor? How did the regions of the world come to be divided first into the colonizing and the colonized; later, into the Three Worlds of the Cold War; and, later still into global North and global South?’ (ibid.). Premised on this lack of careful historical and contextual analysis, present-day normative political philosophy ‘is directed away from specific migration flows and away from the background histories and current geopolitical structures that shape these flows’ (ibid.). Jaggar rejects this dominant approach for its normativism. A normativist theory is one that is purely prescriptive, and all analytic work is done by (usually moral) normative premises. According to Finlayson, ‘political philosophers who think about immigration should begin instead from concrete injustices, situated in their historical context’ (2020, p. 116). In other words, philosophers of migration should be (Finlaysian) realists. I sympathise with this realist pull, but for a theory of migration to be realist it takes more than (just) pointing at some fact. Realism is not historicism. That is the critique I offer in the essay, but I get ahead of myself, so let us take a step back.

I agree with Finlayson and Jaggar, the philosophy of migration must be decolonised, cleared of tacit (and not so tacit) assumptions, habits of thought, and perceptions that favour the perspective of the coloniser over the colonial subject. As part of this decolonial project, Lorna Finlayson’s If This Isn’t Racism, What Is? The Politics of The Philosophy of Migration (2020) discusses the prospects of a special case of methodological realism: a realism about migration. Realism in the context of migration is understood not as the downright denial of moral principles in political reasoning, as too often it is.² Finlayson’s methodological realism is characterised by a heightened awareness of the historical injustices of colonialism and their repercussions today, or, to put it differently, the political reality of migration and the historical dimension of migrants’ experienced reality.

Finlayson’s realist proposal faces a challenge. I call it the surplus challenge. Crudely put, the surplus challenge says that the realists’ methodological ought—the ought to pay attention to colonialism past and present—is empty. It is empty because practising philosophy of migration in this methodological realist key will not provide us with original, alternative, or teleologically speaking ‘better’ normative solutions to the practical-cum-ethical conundrums that migration policy-makers face today—other, or better, that is, than the policy payoff of well-established cosmopolitan or nationalist theories. There is, so to say, no ‘normative surplus’ gained from looking at issues of migration through the realist lens, the argument goes. There is nothing to be gained from being unduly reminded to pay closer attention to historical injustices of colonialism and their repercussions today. The realist has nothing more to add. As it happens, any conceivable realist solution to the most pressing concerns of migration policy is already covered by either (liberal) nationalist or (liberal) cosmopolitan theory and the associated positions of closed and open borders. Both being moralist theories in the eyes of the realist because their normativity is based on some or other moral principle, as discussed in more detail below. What then justifies the realist push to reflect on the real experience of migration and the real migration flows and their colonial legacy?

Interlude: The Argument from Normative Surplus

For the record, this nothing-more-to-add narrative is a common argument against the possibility and credibility of political realism. We can take as an example one of Leader-Maynard and Worsnip’s (2018) arguments against realism. Rehearsing it and indicating why it is ultimately toothless might help, didactically speaking, to clarify the surplus challenge, which I will address in the next section.³

Leader-Maynard and Worsnip’s argument concerns the realists’ distrust in the legitimacy of the unrestricted enforcement of universal moral claims. Schematically, it goes as follows:

(P1) Just because a moral principle is either true or reasonable it does not follow that it is legitimate to enforce it politically. In other (realist) words, even if A morally-ought to ϕ it does not follow that B politically-ought to force A to ϕ.

The realist, Leader-Maynard and Worsnip correctly recognise, is committed to saying that it is (at least) possible that a moral claim is true and reasonable and yet there are nevertheless political reasons that speak against enforcing it—a commitment realists may wish to derive from Bernard Williams’s thesis that the Basic Legitimation Demand requires a political power-holder to provide a legitimation story acceptable to those over whom the power-holder wishes to have authority (2005, p. 7).⁴ If Williams’s machinery involves a non-moral concept of acceptability—some things are moral but still not acceptable, or acceptable but still not moral—the realist concept of legitimacy can escape the confines of morality. Thus,

(C1) political realists can claim to have found a non-moral yet normative political value, legitimacy, and thus to have unveiled a genuine political source of normativity.

Leader-Maynard and Worsnip then agree, qua moralists, with the realist’s observation that

(P2) just because a moral principle is either true or reasonable it does not follow that it is legitimate to enforce it politically. In other (moralist) words, even if A morally-ought to ϕ it does not follow that B morally-ought to force A to ϕ.

Since the (in)acceptability of forcing others to abide by some true or reasonable moral principle ‘can itself be moral in nature’ (p. 767), Leader-Maynard and Worsnip contend that

(C2) the normativity of (P2), the observation that sometimes a true and reasonable moral principle should not be enforced on others, springs from a moral source of normativity.

On that basis they conclude that

(C3) moralism is true and realism has been refuted, as it is either redundant or false.

Given the assumed diametrical opposition of realism and moralism, C3 supposedly follows because moralists can assert P2. As Leader-Maynard and Worsnip put it, ‘it can be true that actor A morally ought to do action X, while also being true that actor B morally ought not to force actor A to do action X. Since this possibility is evidently coherent, even reading both “oughts” as moral, there is no need to introduce a distinctive political “ought” to make sense of such a structure’ (ibid.).

There are now two ways to formulate the bottom line of the argument: either realism is false, which is a non sequitur, or realism is redundant, which simply has not been shown. Or, if anything, why should the burden be on the realist to proof its raison d'être, even if it has nothing more to add. Realism being false, as suggested by C2, simply does not follow from the (mere) presence of moral normativity and the obvious bias of established political theory towards this mode of reasoning. Why treat on the conservative favouritism? In any case, as I will later indicate, the realist has something to add, after all. I hope this has clarified the structure of the argument. The surplus challenge is set up on similar terms.

The Surplus Challenge

The purpose of the realist intervention into the philosophy of migration is, according to Finlayson, to ‘make an antagonistic move within an opponent’s chosen game […] The methodological critic rejects that game entirely or seeks to rewrite its rules’ (2020, p. 116). The realist’s opponent is the (liberal) moralist methodological approach to the philosophy of migration, embodied to equal extent in both mainstream nationalism⁵ and cosmopolitanism.⁶ Roughly, moralism about migration is here understood as an un-historicised, uncontextualised normative theory of migration, typically based for its normativity on independently to be justified moral principles.

It is not too difficult to imagine how a moralist about migration will respond when confronted with the decolonising efforts of the realist. Let us look at the liberal cosmopolitan first. As Finlayson points out, cosmopolitanism ‘can refer to the view that there should be no independent nation states, but rather a “world government”. Alternatively, it may refer to a position which accepts the existence of individual states, at least for pragmatic purposes, but which recommends “open borders”’ (2020, p. 117). It is a moralised theory. Cosmopolitan moralism is grounded in concerns for the equal moral worth of human beings. Colonial injustices past and present will thus trouble the cosmopolitan. Colonial injustices are precedents of inadmissible partiality, after all. The fact that humans past and present have suffered from colonial states’ unequal moral treatment grounds the cosmopolitans’ policy recommendation for open borders. Facts, however, do not have any normative valance here. On a closer look at the cosmopolitan moralist position, it is the concern for the equal moral worth of human beings that does all the normative labour. The cosmopolitans’ recommendation for liberal states to admit immigrants and refugees is grounded in a principle of equal moral worth. In the eyes of a realist, that makes cosmopolitanism a moralist approach. Facts about colonial injustices past and present carry no normative weight whatsoever.

For the decolonising realist with normative aspirations, historical and contextual evidence will also ground a policy recommendation. But if having the ‘right awareness’ of colonial legacy means opening borders, assuming that this is the argument, then how is the realists’ decolonial activity a challenge to the moralism alive and well in liberal cosmopolitanism? As Finlayson (ibid.) puts it, the cosmopolitan ‘conclusion is not fundamentally altered by the addition of detail to the picture, or of a full causal backstory as to how global inequality came about’. In other words, it seems like there is no ‘normative surplus’ to be gained from being a realist. If therefore we infer that realism has no right to exist as an independent methodology, them the surplus challenge mirrors Leader-Maynard and Worsnip’s conclusion, C3: moralism is true and realism has been refuted, as it is either redundant or false. In any case, the argument fails, but further we can ask, is this really realism? Might this not be a crude from of historicism? More on this later.

The cosmopolitan could furthermore ague that without any predetermined moral principles we would not even know what is so problematic about colonialism. If there is a normative conclusion or policy recommendation that springs from a predetermined moral principle, such as the principle of equal moral worth, historicising and contextualising it is ‘neither necessary nor sufficient for political philosophy’ (ibid.). The realist’s decolonial ought seems empty.

Might the liberal nationalist have a harder time rejecting the realist intrusion? Not if we suspend any moral judgement to the effect of a mere awareness of colonialism and its legacy implying a normative position. If the realists can deny any predetermined moral principles, then realism about migration is prima facie silent about what possible normative conclusions can be drawn from the dispute between nationalists and cosmopolitans.

Just like its moralist sibling cosmopolitanism, then, (liberal) nationalism starts from a set of facts and burdens a moral premise with all the normative work. Nationalists such as David Miller think that states have stronger moral obligations—obligations of justice—to their own citizens than to non-citizens. Justice is a partial concept for the nationalist. Justice does not require us to treat people as equals. What the state owes to its citizens it may not owe to those it deems outsiders, including those seeking refuge or wanting to immigrate. The nationalist is therefore already a realist in the sense of entertaining an inside-outside the polity distinction. From a historical perspective, the nationalist must determine what ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ mean. This can be difficult in a colonial context. Miller’s (2016) notion of the ‘particularity claimant’, for instance, is thought to help in situations where in a colonial context the state’s boundary has been or still is a fuzzy line.⁷ This is not to say that a particularity claim is sufficient evidence to override any other criteria held against the admission of outsiders. What is more, as Finlayson (2020, p. 119) rightly observes, ‘Miller’s acknowledgement of this category of migrant seems to have little impact on his theory’. All it does, it seems, is to satisfy a desire for pigeonholing. More on this later.⁸

Either way, the nationalist can say they are already sufficiently aware of the ‘real history and politics, and in particular the history and continuing legacy of colonialism’ (ibid. p. 116). This is supposed to successfully avert the realist decolonial challenge. An increased awareness of colonial history does not change the nationalist policy recommendation to close the borders, not in the slightest. Once again, the realist’s decolonial ought seems empty. There is no ‘normative surplus’ to be gained from looking at ‘mere facts’.

By now, it should be clear that on moralist theories, whatever we think normatively about the issue of migration is determined not by facts—on which nationalists and cosmopolitans arguably agree—but by the moral priors brought to the table. So, what is the point of the realist alarm clock screaming ‘historise and contextualise!’?

Let us recapitulate the surplus challenge, this time schematically:

(P1) There are certain facts about the historical injustices of colonialism and their repercussions today, or to put it differently, the political reality of migration and the experienced reality of migrants.

(P2) Realists point out that established moralist theories do not take seriously enough those facts.

On that basis the realist critique concludes:

(C1) Moralist approaches to issues of migration are defective.

But:

(P3) It turns out, contrary to realist critique, moralist approaches to migration issues have been paying attention to the facts of real politics of migration all along. And those facts make no difference whatsoever to the normative conclusions arrived at.

Therefore:

(C2) Realism’s decolonial ought—to take seriously the reality and history of real injustices—is empty.

The Contingency Rebuttal

It seems ‘disconcertingly easy for both liberal cosmopolitans and nationalists to brush off a methodological critique’ of the realist type, says Finlayson (ibid. p. 119). This is true. It is indeed disconcerting because it feels like the realist’s methodological critique is still a poignant one yet misses the mark when judged about whether it can make a normative difference. Various facts about real politics and history are expected to make a difference, but on closer consideration they do not. It is not as if the moralists’ neglect of the facts (or them being more attentive to the facts) will change the conclusions.⁹

For what concerns the realist, there are now at least two ways of going about navigating this seemingly hostile moralist environment. The first, which I call the ‘contingency rebuttal’, argues that what the surplus challenge seems to forget is that it would be wrong to understand Jaggar’s call for decolonisation (or any realist’s call for an increased awareness of the facts of real politics, for that matter) as a purely descriptive claim. A realist view should make a difference to the way we think about the most pressing questions in the philosophy of migration and political philosophy more generally. In any case, it might. The fact that by mere chance it does not make a difference to the normative set-up of our conclusions says nothing about the normative valence of a (decolonial) realist project in toto. This is the ‘contingency rebuttal’.

Since when are facts considered to have normative valance in the first place? This misguided but initially appealing attempt at brushing off the challenge disregards the is-ought gap. It claims that the realist meddling cannot be judged on whether it does, in the end, make a difference to our normative conclusions, but on whether it might. This is to get modality wrong: if facts do not make a normative difference now and around here, they are not going to make a normative difference somewhere someday.¹⁰ The rebuttal fails and yet it pushes in the right direction.

More Than Just Facts

The second rebuttal, which I call the ‘radical realist rebuttal’, takes the surplus challenge as further evidence that realists in their insistence on fact-grounded political normativity are barking up the wrong tree. It shares with the contingency rebuttal the thought that the decolonial efforts must not be understood as more purely descriptive devices. It urges us to reconsider the actual cataclysmic potential of the realist programme. Those taking this route will argue that the realist project must not be abandoned entirely, it is insistence on taking facts seriously however reconsidered, and it is ‘source of normativity’ relocated away from a ‘genuinely political normativity’ and towards some other non-moral kind. Realism is more than normativism (of whatever kind). And it is more than (mere) historicism, too.

We need to know what, if anything, besides the insensitivity of history, moralist theories of migration get wrong. This rebuttal shifts the attention away from facts and problematises the overbearing normative power of moral principles—the very core of the realist operation. In other words, we must problematise the prevalent moral normativism in the philosophy of migration rather than (merely) its lack of historical sensibility and knowledge. The radical realist programme (cf. Rossi 2019) does just that, with its fact-sensitivity and reliance on epistemic normativity replacing the fetishised idea of ‘genuine political normativity’ (whatever that is). Let me expand on this operation.

The key is to ‘focus less on where we should end up than on how we should proceed, in order to think better about the topic of migration’, says Finlayson (2020, p. 116), and yet Finlayson’s realism is condemned to stagnation if the sole concern of her methodological rift is historisation. If anything, the nothing-more-to-add narrative should make us suspicious of the overriding forces of moral principles and their susceptibility to abuse by political power-play. It is neither the fact’s lack of normative force that must worry us the most, nor is it the theory’s lack of historic and contextual sensibility. The surplus challenge must make us wary of moral principles’ micropower to fully determine the normative conclusions, so that nationalists can infer a closed border solution and cosmopolitans can infer an open borders policy from the very same bundle of facts (but with different predetermined moral principles underlying their reasoning). It is precisely this table-thumping normative power of moral principles that realism urges us to keep at bay.

As Geuss (2008) reminds us, facts alone may suggest a certain policy proposal; there may be intuitions guiding your evaluative thinking in a certain direction, but only when we are already in the grip of one or other moral (or otherwise) normative principle will normativity ‘flow’ through your argument. Without that superimposed normativity, facts are indeed just facts. And facts are normatively innocent. This (Finlaysian) type of realism practically amounts to a call to prioritise empirical work of migration and colonisation over moral theory. If what matters the most is addressing the facts of the matter then realism is not an alternative political theory but merely a call to suspend normative judgement (at least until we have all the relevant facts; until we really know who did what to whom).¹¹ A normativity-free evaluation of the realist and colonial legacy of contemporary migration, that is for the historians, not the realist theorist.

Radical Unmasking

Some words on this alternative, radical methodology are in order—and about where it takes its normativity from, because, as we know, facts really are just facts. I will keep this excessively brief and schematic. Spelled out properly, we may be talking about a new form of ideology critique (see Aytac and Rossi 2022), or perhaps even possibly an entirely new (and yet deeply familiar, modernist) way of practising social theory.¹² In the roughest outlines: such as psychoanalysis and other great genealogical adventures, radical realism is an exercise in suspicion. It uncovers flaws in our political beliefs from where they become symptomatic. Flaws, that is, the exposure of which must undermine the political belief in question. Psychoanalysis infers the suppressed complex from the ambivalences of language and behaviour. Criminology infers the course of a crime from the traces left at the scene. Realist political theory infers the microphysics of power concealed in moralist reasoning from symptoms, clues, or defects, a betrayal in the epistemology, instrumentality, or aesthetics of that reasoning.¹³ Like all other modernist modes of suspicion, it infers the invisible from the visible.

Let us make this more tangible by locating this in the context of migration. Since, as we saw, the normativity of morality is immune to facts, and morality one of the sanctuaries of power, radical realist analysis and critique eschews the common cut and thrust of moral principles, as in, for instance, the debate between cosmopolitans and nationalists. In other words, realists will not indulge in arguments over the universality or partiality of justice in migration. Like suppressed trauma, the flaw it seeks to unmask shows elsewhere, in the cracks, traces, clues, and symptoms: an epistemologically unreliable moment, an aesthetic absurdity, imprudence, the breakdown of instrumental reasoning, or indeed the misrepresentation of history and evasion of the factual—the latter, however, which is Finlayson’s focus, is only one of the many cracks in the pearl.¹⁴ If morality is silent, the betrayal will ooze from elsewhere, from the epistemic or historical, Freud might have said.¹⁵ Seeing through the crack gives us the opportunity to uproot the unmasked belief.¹⁶ The normativity flows from where the flaw shows itself: from the epistemic, the aesthetic, the prudential, etc.¹⁷

How can this framework of realist critique address the surplus challenge, i.e. the concern that realists have no alternative to advocating for either closed or open borders and that is what moralised theories have done all along? For a start, the question might be ill-posed. The entry ticket to the social sciences hall of fame should not be the contribution of some unheard-of policy proposal. Providing the tools by which we can unmask the cracks in, say, Miller’s particularity claimant proposal—which looks suspiciously like a rationalisation of some underlying commitment to moral partiality claims and therefore, for epistemic reasons having to do with circular reasoning, unfit at supporting a selective partiality-policy at the border—could be everything the realist may hope to achieve. And that is already a substantive achievement—unless one enjoys groping in the dark or profits from hiding the torch.

Conclusion

Voicing one’s discontent with an alleged misapprehension of the ‘reality principle’ is a radical interference with moralist ways of thinking about issues of migration. However, and despite this, even though ample contemporary philosophy of migration—and political philosophy in a moralist key generally—can rightly be accused of unwarranted (moral) normativism, shaking up the discipline by decolonising the discourse will not come as easy as pointing at some set of facts (no matter how evaluatively important they are). Finlayson paints the realist intervention as primarily about paying closer attention to colonialism’s long legacy. The real radical intrusion, however, addresses the unchecked and unwanted, overbearing normative power of moral principles. Realism urges us to suspend judgement on our moral (and other normative) priors before addressing the facts of the matter. The interventionist question posed by the realist challenge is thus not ‘How will the policy recommendations of moralist theories of migration change when confronted with empirical reality and the long legacy of colonialism?’ but rather, ‘Might the monster of (unjustified) political power be hiding in the closet, behind the doors of morality, and are there any cracks—be they epistemic, aesthetic, prudential, or perhaps, although less likely, moral—through which we can spot, contain, and defeat whatever haunts us?’