How Immigrants Became 'Bad'

Liberalism – the assumptions of which many of us live under – prioritises individual freedom – of thought, of expression, of movement. But at the same time we think of migration – which is free movement – as abnormal. We even mythologise a sedentary past – of villages, farmers, peasants, ‘tied to the land’, living and dying in the place where they’re from.

Yet in the 17th century, around 65% left their home parish at some point in the their lives. We have, what philosopher Alex Sager calls a ‘sedentary bias’. The migrant is presented as a problem, alien, outsider, yet we move around our own countries – commuting, deciding to live elsewhere, holidaying, visiting relatives, making work trips – without thinking its in any way strange.

We are, as a species, mobile, nomadic, built to move. IN 2020, you could count 280 million migrants and each year around a billion tourists. And the numbers are increasing. But so are the objects, ideas, and phenomenon – borders, passports, guards, barbed wired, nationalist rhetoric – that attempt to pin us in our place. Can we find a genealogy of our attitudes? A history of our present problem? To do so, we might start with the 18th century biologist Carl Linnaeus.

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Sources:

Sonia Shah, The Next Great Migration

Alex Sager, Towards a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility

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