Don’t Worry About the Backlash – It’s Not Your Job

Unjust immigration policies have become increasingly normalised and implemented by mainstream political actors, either with the support of the far-right or as an attempt to stem their support. Many political theorists have considered this increasing hostility towards immigrants in liberal democracies as a feasibility constraint on just immigration policies. They have particularly worried about how the implementation of more just policies given this hostile climate might create a ‘backlash’, where people become less trusting of democratic institutions and less solidaristic. In this way, overturning unjust immigration policies may increase the support for authoritarianism.In this paper, I argue that political theorists do not need to worry about the risk of a backlash, because political theorists are not policy-makers. Instead, political theorists should seek to diagnose and explain the injustice of existing immigration policies as a way to disrupt their normalisation. This is not a particularly controversial view. Much, if not most, political theory, whether ideal or non-ideal, aims at explaining why certain political and social phenomena or relations are unjust. Yet many theorists have convinced themselves that this task lacks value because it is apparently not action-guiding. This scepticism, I believe, is unwarranted, for at least two reasons. First, it assumes that the target agent for political theory is necessarily the state. But there are lots of political agents, such as social movements, that are crucial for political change, many of whom are much more responsive to seemingly radical theories that ‘say it as it is’. Second, to achieve political change, authoritarianism needs to move (back?) into the category of beyond the pale. When political theorists explain why something like dehumanising immigration policies are unjust, they contribute to this end. In this way, seemingly radical normative accounts such as those pointing to the fundamental injustice of existing border regimes are not utopian in the sense that they are futile in hostile climates. Instead, they are necessary to resist the normalisation of injustice. It is this normalisation, and the risk of legitimising it through various concessions to authoritarians, that theorists should worry about. We should not worry about a potential backlash to just immigration policies that we are in no position to implement, and that have a very slim chance of being implemented precisely because of the normalisation of authoritarianism.