Immigration and Herrenvolk Democracy

Democracy and immigration are often said to be in tension. Democracy is meant to realize the collective self-government of the people. This requires a relatively stable public culture and high levels of trust and social cohesion among citizens, all of which is allegedly undermined by high levels of immigration. Thus, open and permissive immigration policies are, supposedly, antithetical to democracy; from a democratic viewpoint, there are good reasons not to implement such policies. It may be that justice or beneficence requires opening borders and welcoming immigrants, but democracy speaks against it. That is, open and permissive immigration policies may help promote and realize some values, e.g., justice, but the specific value that democracy is meant to realize, i.e., that of collective self-government, is undermined, rather than promoted by such policies. In this paper we argue against this view; we show that given the circumstances under which contemporary global immigration takes place, for most democracies not implementing open and permissive immigration policies would, in fact, undermine the specific value of democracy instead of promoting it. Global migration today takes place against the background of considerable material and status inequalities as well as structural injustice. Restrictive immigration policies entrench the systemic subordination and vulnerability of migrants, especially of the Global South, both internationally and within receiving societies. Even if this secures the ability of the native population for collective self-government, e.g., by preserving social cohesion and a stable and coherent public culture, it so by creating a domestic and global underclass of migrants, increasingly stigmatized as undesirables and excluded from public life. The so-called democracy thus preserved is a kind of two-tier democracy, with the majority native population enjoying full membership and collective self-determination and immigrants increasingly occupying a subordinate social position. We argue that the result setup shares structural similarities with what is sometimes called “Herrenvolk democracy” – a concept used to describe the political system of apartheid South Africa with the white population enjoying democratic self-government among themselves, while the Black population is systematically subjugated. Since Herrenvolk democracy is, on any viable theory of democracy, is merely apparent democracy, which fails to realize the characteristic value of collective self-rule, any social arrangement that produces structures such as Herrenvolk democracy, undermines, rather than promotes democratic values. This, we argue, is true of restrictive immigration policies under contemporary circumstances.