Immigration and freedom by Chandran Kukathas

Restrictions on the movement of people to the countries developed west are often defended on the grounds that it is necessary to protect the liberal democratic values that might otherwise be undermined by uncontrolled immigration. Pre-eminent among these are the values of freedom and equality. More careful examination, however, suggests that the threat to these values comes not so much from immigration as from efforts to control it. Though it might appear that immigration restrictions are controls on would-be immigrants, they are in fact, to a very significant degree, controls on citizens—controls not on outsiders but on insiders. The more vigorously immigration control is pursued, the more surely is the freedom of people within a society compromised. This lecture elaborates of the ways in which this is true, and considers the question of whether immigration control might be warranted nonetheless because of the benefits it brings in spite of these costs that come with it.

Biography

Chandran Kukathas holds the Chair of Political Theory in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. He previously taught at the University of Utah, the University of New South Wales (at the Australian Defence Force Academy), the Australian National University, and Oxford. He was also a visiting professor in the departments of Philosophy and Political Science at the National University of Singapore from 2009-2014. He is the author of a number of books including Hayek and Modern Liberalism (Oxford University Press 1989) and The Liberal Archipelago (Oxford University Press 2003). He is currently working on a book entitled Immigration and Freedom.

This talk is part of the Darwin College Lecture Series series.

[deeliciousplum]

Exceptional and enlightening talk. Within the span of the length of this Chandran Kukathas talk, I was exposed to the use of control as a costly tool which affects people of all ilk.

[gintasvilkelis]

A very simplistic mode of thinking, where the speaker fixates on a few small elements of a big and very complex picture, while completely ignoring that BIG picture.

His main argument appears to be that all immigration laws should be abolished because it's “population control” (hence undemocratic). But isn't enforcement of ALL laws and regulations also “population control”? Is there a *single example* of a law or a regulation that *does not* contain population control as an integral and inseparable element of it? If Chandran Kukathas were logically consistent, then he should be advocating the abolishment of ALL laws and regulations!

At 6:50 he says that "It's not an argument for open borders". But if his argument is that border control is a bad thing, then how can his argument be NOT about open borders? And if he genuinely believes that he's NOT advocating open borders, then what exactly does he think he's advocating in this speech?

And if he thinks that uncontrolled immigration does not change the country, maybe he should ask the American Indians if the uncontrolled arrival of a large number of people from the totally different cultures did not change the prevailing culture(s) in the Americas...

Is this the kind of mental reasoning abilities that the Political Science degree produces?

[matacabrones]

he's saying: European peoples must adopt a system based on abolishing frontiers and making that people a minority in their lands, and eventually dissapear, in the shortest spam of time any people have become extinct. Not doing so will erode the system that enables that extinction. Is preposterous to think this is considered a great thinker in what was known as the West