Adam Smith on immigration

UKIP claims that its tax policies are derived from Adam Smith. But what would the great man make of its anti-immigration policies? I suspect the answer is: not much.

Now, immigration was not much of an issue in Smith's time so he said little about it directly. But he did point out that some forms of migration, such as the settlement of new colonies, greatly increased prosperity. And his argument that import duties encouraged smuggling has an obvious parallel with how immigration controls encourage people traficking.  smuggling.

But I'm thinking more of a passage in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (III.I.46 here). He acknowledges that we lack sympathy with foreigners. We would, he says, "snore with the most profound security" upon learning of the destruction of an "immense multitude" of Chinese in an earthquake. But this lack of fellow-feeling must be resisted, he continues. The "impartial spectator", or our conscience:

calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration...
One individual must never prefer himself so much even to any other individual, as to hurt or injure that other, in order to benefit himself, though the benefit to the one should be much greater than the hurt or injury to the other.

This, I suspect, is an argument for open borders. It tells us that we must not impose harms upon would-be immigrants, even if immigration is costly to us (which it isn't, but let that pass.)

You might object that by "others", Smith means only other members of our society, or fellow nationals. You'd be wrong. Later on, he writes:

Our good-will is circumscribed by no boundary, but may embrace the immensity of the universe...
The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society. He is at all times willing, too, that the interest of this order or society should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the state or sovereignty, of which it is only a subordinate part. He should, therefore, be equally willing that all those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the universe, to the interest of that great society of all sensible and intelligent beings (VI.II.44).

We should, then, read Smith as being a cosmopolitan thinker. Samuel Fleischacker, for example, says "there is no question, I think, that Smith aspired to provide...a structure for morality that reaches out across national and cultural borders."

Such an attitude is surely inconsistent with the little Englander anti-immigrant policies of UKIP.

I say this not simply to point out that UKIP's drawing on Adam Smith is rather selective. I do so to remind readers that Smith was a greater moral philosopher than economist;this passage, for example, is just wonderful.

Comments

[A]

As has been said often on this blog, the problem with immigration is that Islamic cultural values are not compatible with Western enlightenment values. Small numbers of immigrants can be assimilated but large numbers cannot, and this leads inexorably to ghettoised communities in addition to wonderful cultural imports like genital mutilation, forced marriage, religious extremism, gay-bashing, censorship, grooming gangs etc.

Understandably people do not like it, and their (justifiable) emotional response drowns out any economic arguments to be made.

Remember, Islam has never had a reformation like Christianity has, and is largely unchanged from centuries ago. Brutality and repression reign supreme. It is sheer madness for Britain to indulge that totalitarian belief system...the King Joffrey of religions.

[Keith]

You are correct about Smith. The passages quoted are sublime indeed which is why it was called an age of enlightenment. He also would have disagreed with UKIP on Tax and other policy no doubt as well.

Mr or ms "A" has a downer on one religion. But discrimination can hardly be justified on grounds of opinion. Smith would have said that a good conversation resolves misunderstandings. The same logic was used to defend discrimination against Quakers and catholics. That some people are in some way incapable of improvement or holding common values. It is a very pessimistic view of the world.

[yeah ok]

24% of violent sexual crime was committed by Asians, i.e. Muslims, who comprise 7% of the population. If that doesnt indicate a cultural problem, what does?

[Rahul]

"A" and "yeah ok" are providing concrete evidence of Baroness Warsi's claim that islamophobic comments are perfectly acceptable polite conversation at dinner parties in Britain.

[yeah ok]

Good point Rahul, people who don't like Islam are "Islamophobic". How can they possibly not like it? The only explanation is that theyre racists.

...dream on

[George Carty]

"A" clearly doesn't understand the Reformation -- Martin Luther was of course a vicious Jew-hater, and Calvinist Geneva was almost as repressive as Taliban Afghanistan.

What the Muslim world hasn't had is Enlightenment and secularization -- something which perhaps only happened in the West because Western rulers (sickened by the carnage of the 30 Years' War, which dwarfed that of any Sunni/Shi'a conflict) secularized their regimes to prevent a repeat.

"Modernity: the nuclear winter of the Reformation." -- Abdal-Hakim Murad (aka Timothy Winter)

[yeah ok]

What the Muslim world hasn't had is Enlightenment and secularization

Right. So why then are we indulging it at every opportunity, and allowing such a backwards bum-fuck doctrine to flourish? As much as (some - most?) Muslims may wish it were so, we don't live in the Mddle Ages

[rogerh]

Adam Smith had no problem with immigrants because in his day (and until recent times) they pitched up, and worked hard or they starved - there were no benefits to be had.

I am sure Adam would welcome immigrants today but only if they inflicted no 'injury' upon the society there were joining. Morality and kindness deserve a two-way flow of obligation.

The EU is said to have 9% of the world's people, 15% of the GDP and 50% of the world's benefit payments - attractive yes but only sustainable if everyone works - whatever their colour or religion.

[Adam Bell]

The internet is apparently full of the sort of people who vote for UKIP, judging by this comment thread. I can only assume they've all been put of work by sharia-compliant workaholic muslims, and so have time to emphasise how terrible this Islam thing is.

On the subject of the post, Fleischacker's interpretation of Smith is excellent, and I would strongly recommend his 'A Third Concept of Liberty'.

[jim]

rogerh is right to say that "morality and kindness deserve a two-way flow of obligation." Immigrants have a responsibility to integrate, a responsibility it seems is largely being shirked.

And anyway, Britain has loads of available labour. I don't see why jobs can't be filled by people who already live here. If British citizens are incapable of working at high-level jobs because, for instance, they don't have the skills, surely that is an argument for improving education in Britain, not importing more cheap labour and all its attendant cultural problems!

[Ralph Musgrave]

I’m always puzzled by why those who want to Islamise the UK don’t migrate to some Muslim country where they can get what they want more quickly: lack of democracy, Halal animal cruelty, killing the cartoonists and authors not approved of by Muslim clerics, holocaust denial, anti-semitism – the list of goodies is endless.

It’s reminiscent of when Harold Wilson was in power and central economic planning was being seriously pushed by Labour. But amazingly not one in ten thousand Labour supporters chose to migrate to Eastern Europe where they could have enjoyed the wonders of central economic planning first hand.

I conclude that a significant section of the political left is too dumb to do anything more than advocate the absurd and with a view to stirring things up and attracting attention to itself.

[Luke]

Ralph, who is actually trying to Islamise the UK? Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Romanians, Bulgarians aren't that Muslim on the whole. Serious question. I'm not talking here about unintended consequences.

[Straus]

I don’t see anything wrong with UKIP subscribing to Smith's views on tax but not his apparently liberal take on immigration. This does not strike me as being inconsistent per se. No more than it would be to accept Locke’s belief that property lies at the root of liberty, while rejecting his views on child labour. There’s something a bit fundamentalist or Soviet about this implied insitence that the entire corpus of Smith’s works should be treated as gospel.

[George Carty]

Forced marriage in British Asian households (Hindus and Sikhs have been doing it too, not just Muslims) is itself a kind of immigration racket, designed to secure British citizenship for the spouse back in the mother country.

[George Carty]

Oops, I was trying to link to http://www.ruqaiyyah.karoo.net/articles/forcedmarr.htm -- does XHTML markup not work here any more?