Anti-Immigration and White Solipsism

Anti-immigration politics are on the rise everywhere. In the US, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is, as a matter of course, carrying out extra-judicial arrests and deportations with increasing and alarming frequency. At its core, anti-immigration is almost always rooted in racism. Of course, many people will staunchly claim that they are anti-immigration but not racist, which—should one wish to see the silver lining—at least means there is still some shame in being seen/believed to be racist. That means both that racism is considered a bad thing by (at least some people) on the anti-immigration right, and that there is some cognitive dissonance happening in their distancing themselves from the racism that they engender through anti-immigration agitation. Many on the right may also claim that they don't care if they're called racists; this is also, however, a rhetorical device that betrays latent insecurity around the term. If they did not actually care about being called 'racist', they would not actively claim not to. They are also often called 'white' by the left explicitly as a shaming tool, but none of them claim "call me white, I don't care" because there is no societal shame around being white, nor have they internalised such a shame from the label being used in derogation.

Some of the claims made to reinforce this cognitive dissonance include: (1) anti-immigration positions itself as being against anyone coming to Britain from outside of Britain, legal or otherwise, regardless of skin colour (and therefore is not racist); (2) It is not racist for people to be worried about becoming cultural/linguistic/ethnic minorities in their own native country (reflected in Keir Starmer's "island of strangers" speech); (3) that immigrants are responsible for the problems of social welfare, meaning that those against immigration have 'legitimate concerns' about the scroungers coming in from other countries and claiming benefits without contributing to the country; and (4) that the vast majority of people against immigration are in fact, poor/working class white people who are the real/as much the victims of rich/the capitalist class as the people they agitate against.

All of these claims are false. The last one however, is particularly pernicious. It is often not a claim made by those against immigration themselves, but by people waging the class war on the left. Their goal, for most part, is to unite the working class (presumably migrant and British) against capitalism, an attempt to build class solidarity across racial lines as a means to the end of building a (slightly more) socialist and welfarist state. Unfortunately, this goal makes a crucial mistake of believing that class solidarity, while necessary, is sufficient to achieve the stated goal. The hidden problem that goes unaddressed (and will continue to plague politics) is that racial politics is not a part of the superstructure dependent on class; rather, it forms a co-dependent hierarchical structure that both creates and is sustained by class. I deal with each of these claims, paying most attention to the last because of what it reveals about our society.

Dealing with the Claims

1. Anti-immigration ≠ racism

To begin with, anti-immigration positions are racist. This is not because all immigrants are non-white people (even if most might be), or even because anti-immigration is a dog-whistle that often hides racist intentions (which is also true). Rather, it is because race is a construct, and while racialisation can and has taken up the character of largely being constructed around skin-tone in our world today, it has historic roots in being constructed as a devaluative hierarchy around a combination of ethnicity, language, and culture. This is why Irish people were once not considered white, while the Germans and French were: French and German cultures, languages and ethnicity, while often being derided in Britain, were never devalued; the Irish, however, were. This situation has substantially changed, and ethnically Irish people are largely considered to be white across the global North, while people from Eastern Europe are being devalued in the racial hierarchies as 'ethnic whites'. It is also why those against immigration into the UK rail against the small boats, but have no beef with the Common Travel Area despite Ireland being the most common non-British place of birth of people in the UK, and consistently in the top five countries from which immigration to the UK occurs. This is not to say that the CTA should be attacked, but to point out an inconsistency that reveals the implicit racism hidden in the claim.

2. Island of strangers

The claim of being against 'immigrants' betrays a loose understanding of who counts as 'British', and who will be allowed to belong. The construction of the 'other' who is not British co-produces the racist structures and encourages violence enacted against racialised minorities in Britain (and likewise in other nations across the world). This means that (white) British people get to determine what counts as "British" culture to the exclusion of others, and who gets to participate in it. It is no accident that many things considered British are very much imports from marginalised immigrants, from tea, fish and chips and chicken tikka to the language; racial hierarchies operate to invisiblise minorities while valuing their contributions when (and only when) consumed by white people. Simultaneously, it distances from 'Britishness' any kind of violence, both by ignoring Britain's own history of violence and by externalising violence onto racialised others.

This is why, for example, Enoch Powell gets to endorse anxious hypothesisations of futures where "the black man will have the whip hand over the white man" while erasing Britain's complicity in the trans-atlantic slave trade by claiming that Commonwealth immigrants never faced discrimination in Britian in the same speech. Likewise, when Starmer complains that taking control of borders is about 'fairness' in immigrants' contributions, he erases Britain's brutal and unfair colonisation of large swathes of the world that built Britain's development and wealth. Starmer appears to be tracking back on some of the anti-racism by claiming he regrets his 'island of strangers' comment and attacking Farage's racism, but it doesn't go nearly far enough as long as he continues pushing the rhetoric against illegal immigration, doubling down on it with the introduction of digital ID cards to increase scrutiny on people's right to work.

Community and a vague notion of diversity get to be 'British values', while very British histories of unfairness, violence and enslavement are conveniently hidden away; at the same time, the qualities of unfairness, violence and enslavement are dumped onto the 'bad' immigrant. This is textbook operation of racism that creates a valuation hierarchy; anything done by those at the top is—quite literally—whitewashed, while things done by those at the bottom get derided and devalued. The fear of becoming ethnic minorities is in itself telling of one's belief in how ethnic minorities are treated. It betrays the racist's knowledge of the existence of racism, and their beliefs about how it should operate.

3. Social Welfare

The belief of immigrants being responsible for the social welfare crisis is a lot more difficult to unpack, because it is a manner of motte-and-bailey performed by those against immigration. An invisible separation is constructed between asylum seekers (the motte) and economic migrants, while the overall position of being anti-immigrant includes both (the bailey). Asylum seekers are actively prohibited by the state from working (but are entitled to state support and therefore cost the state in terms of social welfare). This does not mean that it comes at the cost of social security for local citizens, or that the cost is not something the government can afford. Of course, the choice to ban asylum seekers from working in the country while waiting on the decision—ostensibly to discourage migrants from falsely seeking asylum—is questionable at best.

The anti-asylum claim here is, however, a double-edged sword: if asylum seekers cannot work, they are a strain on the welfare state; if they can, they are taking away jobs from citizens who are left to seek welfare. Starmer's speech also replicated this contradiction, when he criticised businesses that favoured lower-paid immigrants to investing in 'our' youth. At the same time, it's much harder to claim that economic migrants are a drain on resources when (1) documented migrants usually pay the NHS twice over: once through the immigration NHS surcharge and again through their taxes and are not entitled to any welfare from the state besides healthcare; and (2) undocumented migrants are not entitled to receive any social welfare and cannot claim it even if they needed to.

Unfortunately for the anti-immigration folks, hostile policies neither reduce the total number of immigrants, nor do they raise the wages or increase available jobs for citizens. This is because the factors driving immigration: whether war, persecution and devastation (in case of asylum seekers) or economic opportunity (for most other migrants) are not significantly impacted by the hostile policies enacted. Indeed, businesses will often favour stronger immigration control explicitly because it renders the working immigrant population more vulnerable to exploitation, effectively driving down wages.^[1] Social welfare is absolutely being decimated, but the cause of that destruction is not migrants and asylum seekers, but the widening gap between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else. Not only did the destruction of unions cause businesses to stagnate living wages and increasingly appropriate profits, but the ultra-wealthy have been incessantly pushing propaganda against wealth taxes both directly and through their 'independent' think tanks. Massive transfers of wealth to the wealthy also occurs regularly through inflation and crises like the Covid-19 pandemic. Governments are also under increasing pressure to increase the available annual spending on defence (in case of the UK by nearly 100% over the next 10 years), while cutting welfare to meet this cost. No amount of cutting migration, whether through austerity, Theresa May's Hostile Environment, Brexit, and Covid has ameliorated the social security problems in this country because those are fundamentally problems of funding and management.

White Solipsism

Many argue that white working class people are victims of systemic impoverishment being manipulated by the rich. This claim has become a sort of meme in the left, whether through comics or through platitudes, that those against immigration are fundamentally disenfranchised poor and working class people seeking any form of control and bereft of any power, used as pawns and manipulated by the wealthy and powerful. The claim belies a truth that remains hidden: that the people being manipulated gravitate towards that particular narrative for a reason: it fits well with the racist narratives they already believe. The left has been consistently pushing a counter-narrative: that wealth inequality and capitalism are ultimately unsustainable and that it is the ultra-wealthy who are to blame. This isn't taken up as much explicitly because the narrative that blames the immigrant matches their pre-existing beliefs of the racial inferiority of non-white people. This is confirmation bias in action.

Now, many on the left (or at least, on the side of taxing wealth) will argue that that calling anti-immigrant protesters racists is futile, because it serves only to agitate them further into refusing to listen to the counter-narrative. Unfortunately, this argument misunderstands why they don't listen to the counter-narrative in the first place. It assumes that the two narratives are operating in a libertarian-esque marketplace of ideas on an equal footing. They are not: those against immigration are already primed to believe one over the other because of explicit, implicit, conscious or sub-consciously nurtured racist beliefs. The argument paradoxically assumes that anti-immigrant folks are both devoid of bias/feelings when being presented with the two narratives and choose rationally between them, while simultaneously being too fragile and touchy to be safely confronted with the reality of their racism. This paradox is rooted in what has been called white solipsism^[2]: nothing outside of the thoughts, beliefs and feelings of white people is real enough to be considered.

White Solipsism treats whiteness and the problems faced by white people as the ultimate truth. It doesn't matter that white people hold systemic racial power and privilege in society, any form of oppression (in this case class/poverty) renders them absolute victims with no power at all, because the relative power that white people have over non-white people (including within the same class) is rendered invisible; the experiences and relative positionality of racialised working class people is barely considered. It also ignores the large number of white and non-white working class people who do not endorse the anti-immigration tirade; why is it that they were not as easy to manipulate, despite being in the same positions of vulnerability as those that believe it? (Hint: the answer is still racism).

In a recent video, Gary Stevenson suggested that the way to prevent Reform from winning the next election is to aggressively pursue common ground. He accurately identifies that the anti-immigration policies will ultimately fail to raise living standards, creating the need for the far right to invent new internal "enemies" to exterminate. However, he advocates that the centre and the left need to aggressively pursue our common ground of fixing the economy. He advocates that the left be very careful not to call people racists, because that is divisive and likely to alienate them when they are facing the same problems as everyone else. This is where I believe that he is mistaken. It may be possible for people to, one-on-one, convince a Reform voter that their living standards will not be impacted by stopping small boats, and that Farage actively supports the ultra-wealthy and will privatise every last public service we have (including the NHS), there's a good chance that some Reform voters might listen. I suspect that a large majority of them, however, will not.

My best reading of Gary's position is that some of the people in the anti-immigration crowd are not actually racist, they're just anti-immigrant. As I explained earlier, this is simply not correct. Anti-immigration is inherently tied to racism. White solipsism plays out here in whom Gary focuses on as needing to pursue this 'common ground': it is assumed that the anti-immigration protesters are the ones who need to be pursued. It is our job (for those on the left) to cajole and convince racists that they will not get what they want through Reform. I believe that Gary underestimates the extent to which Reform voters are fuelled by hate, and overestimates their willingness to trade this xenophobia for better living standards.

Fighting Racism

If confronting and calling out racists is likely to anger them and alienate them from working-class solidarity, how do we deal with the problem of anti-immigration sentiment rising in society? How, in effect, do we actually deal with racism?

The answer lies in eschewing White Solipsism. Strategically choosing not to anger racists is effectively a policy of appeasement. Appeasement seeks to mollify a powerful antagonist by giving the antagonist what they want; unfortunately this merely reinforces the power of the antagonist to continue to do as they please. Ignoring implicit and explicit racism has the effect of legitimising it in the discourse. The reason anti-immigrant anger is such a boogeyman in political discourse is because it is allowed to be. White anger is accepted as legitimate in our racist society because of White Solipsism. Consider how nobody argues that confronting climate/wealth tax/communist activists alienates them. This is because nobody cares about the feelings of climate/wealth tax/communist activists, nobody gives any of these groups power by caring about this anger. Such anger is illegitimate and censured.

That is ultimately the reality of racist anger: it is anger that is centred and given power because white solipsism is structurally and culturally embedded in our society. The way to really confront this, then, is to actively dismantle this in our beliefs, behaviour, and activism. Solidarity requires actively confronting racists for what they are, and consistently demonstrating to them that their beliefs are unacceptable. In his research, Mike Slaven suggests that actively calling out racism and sustained community boycotts have successfully reversed anti-migrant policymaking.^[3] The point is to actively make it very costly for people to espouse racist ideas in society, such that it becomes an obviously bad trade-off for most people to make. A video made by another YouTuber, J Draper, demonstrates this very point in discussing how the National Front was defeated despite rising popularity in the 1970s. The things that worked were diverse groups uniting under the single banner of getting Nazis out, sustained and constant counterprotesting, and outing the National Front as Nazis and fascists. While it definitely appears to be a lot less embarrassing for people on the right to be called fascists or even Nazis today, there is a lot to be said about the kind of solidarity that can defeat rising fascism: a refusal to tolerate it.