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In one of the most celebrated plays of the Enlightenment, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, the eponymous protagonist is summoned by Sultan Saladin to solve a puzzle. Which of the three most prominent civilizations—Christianity, Judaism, or Islam—is superior? The answer, Nathan replies, lies in the future, not the past. It cannot be decided by examining a particular group’s laws, traditions, values, and inherited history, since “history must be received on trust” and each account will look superior to an insider taught to venerate that tradition. The truth of all cultures—if one can speak of truth at all—can only be reconstructed, Nathan suggests, by looking forward, thinking about what we want to be rather than what we are. As he puts it, “If the virtues continue to show themselves among your children’s children after a thousand thousand years . . . then I shall . . . decide.”
Nathan the Wise, set in Jerusalem during the third crusade, has been widely acclaimed for its celebration of the core ideas of the Enlightenment: freedom, equality, solidarity, and the refusal to identify these values with any specific cultural or religious group. Nathan’s Enlightenment is neither European, nor Christian, nor Muslim, nor Jewish; it is cosmopolitan, built on a political aspiration oriented to the future rather than on myths of cultural grandeur looking at the past. In this sense, Nathan represents the Enlightenment motto, sapere aude—to have the courage to think for oneself, outside assigned identities and social roles.
The liberal democratic state has rarely been either liberal or democratic with regard to all those subjected to the power of its institutions.
He does not do so out of naive optimism, nor from a life experience in which those values are naturally affirmed. On the contrary, Nathan must lead an active struggle against hostility and intolerance. A Jew who lives under Muslim rule, his wife and seven sons have been murdered and his house burned to the ground during a Christian-led pogrom, yet he appears to harbor no resentment toward either the Christians or the Muslims. “Is it enough to be a man?” he insists. “We must, we will be friends,” he replies at one point to a Christian knight pressing him on his identity. “We did not choose a nation for ourselves. Are we our nations? What is a nation then? Were Jews and Christians such, e’er they were men?”
Nathan the Wise seems to lose his temper at only one point in Lessing’s play. In the opening, when he returns from his wanderings, the woman who greets him exclaims, “Thank God you have returned at last.” Upon hearing this, Nathan reprimands her. “Yes, but wherefore this at last? Did I intend, or was it possible to come back sooner?” he asks. “I was forced to travel.” The one identity Nathan seems unwilling, perhaps unable, to relinquish is the identity of the migrant—more specifically, the migrant whose displacement is involuntary.
Today we would call Nathan a “good migrant.” He obeys the laws of the countries he visits. He is wealthy. He does not try to settle elsewhere, but eventually returns to his home, however late. In the real world, though, many migrants are not like that—and any attempt to distinguish between good and bad, beneficial and burdensome, economic migrants and asylum seekers, deserving of hospitality and demanding of deportation misses the point.
When I was growing up in Albania in the 1990s, the father of one of my best friends was a smuggler, a man we used to call Ben the Lame. Ben, who was tiny and anemic and walked with a limp, did not look like a smuggler, and indeed, he had not always been one: before the country transitioned from a communist state to a liberal one, he worked shifts in the dockyard, where he made fishing nets and repainted boats. But the privatization reforms that accompanied the arrival of political pluralism forced dockyard managers to make redundancies, so Ben found himself unemployed—at which point he started taking money to help people on dinghies reach Italy. He never thought of himself as a smuggler: for him, it was a job like any other, and he needed the money to feed his children. He was a little afraid of his activity, but never ashamed of it. For decades, Albanians had been murdered by their state whenever they tried crossing the border; in the very rare cases in which they succeeded, the relatives they left behind were persecuted and imprisoned. Finally, Albanians were free, and he was helping them realize their dreams, Ben would tell us with a touch of pride.
One night, Ben disappeared and never returned. Some people said he was killed; others, that he drowned in the Adriatic Sea, eaten by the same fishes he used to build nets for. At his funeral, many people spoke with gratitude about how he had helped their relatives escape, offering them the possibility of choosing another life abroad, and about how the remittances these relatives sent were helping families left behind stay afloat. They also spoke about how times had changed—how, when the Berlin Wall fell and Albanians were allowed to travel outside their state, the discourse around migration suddenly shifted. Now, they said, there was much more hostility toward them in receiving states. What had happened?
In the past, Albanians had been told they could not travel because their state would deny the right to exit. When the Cold War came to an end, state socialism was abandoned and, almost overnight, the state changed its tune. Yet most citizens discovered that having an Albanian passport wasn’t enough. You also needed something called a “visa,” a stamp on a passport that turned out to be the responsibility of another state, and that you had to apply—and pay—for without expectation of it being granted. Visas depended on a range of factors, not all within a person’s control: citizenship, of course, but also income, connections, skills, social status, and the assessment by a visa official of how likely you were to pose a social risk. For the rich, there were now travel agencies, global networking possibilities, residence or citizenship by investment—as sociologist Craig Calhoun has put it, cosmopolitanism as “the class consciousness of frequent travelers.” For the poor, there was only Ben the Lame.
The West had spent decades criticizing the East for its closed borders, funding campaigns to demand freedom of movement and condemning the immorality of states committed to restricting the right to exit. Those who managed to escape used to be received as heroes. Suddenly, though, everything flipped. The heroes became criminals. Political asylum seekers became economic migrants. The poor, the unemployed, people forced to leave their countries were now dangerous subversives undermining the liberal way of life. Now, migration was a problem—perhaps the problem—the West would have to solve.
Borders are, of course, a problem, but not because of any civilizational puzzle to solve prior to establishing who belongs and who doesn’t. Nor because there is a problem of cultural adaptation by some groups compared to others. And certainly not because, as Giorgia Meloni recently told Donald Trump, “the West” ought to become “great again” and migration represents a challenge to that goal. (Indeed, there is nothing more insulting to the wisdom of Nathan than the idea that there is one culture, one way of life, that embodies the truth and values of living together.)
No—the real problem lies not in the fact of migration itself but in what its symptoms reveal: a long-running crisis of liberal democracy that has wreaked havoc both within countries’ borders and beyond them. How ought we to respond? There are two ways of understanding the relationship between forced displacement and contemporary conflict: either as conflict between cultures, or as conflict caused by the political and economic injustices perpetrated by our globalized world. Taking the latter path—opening up to the future rather than essentializing the past—is the only way to reclaim the Enlightenment values of freedom, equality, and solidarity.
If we look at migration only in terms of numbers, the data suggest that although the number of migrants relative to global population growth has increased slightly in the last few years, the vast majority of people still live in their country of birth and the largest migration patterns take place between regions of the same country. And there is little evidence for concluding that migrants, either regular or irregular, are a burden in absolute terms. In host societies, migrants help counter demographic decline, pay into social security systems, and contribute to fill skill shortages. Migrants’ remittances back home have increased in the last few years and now account for three times the money provided by global foreign aid, contributing to the development of sending societies.
Yet in the face of inflammatory rhetoric, facts become increasingly irrelevant. In the United Kingdom, for instance, migration fell sharply in 2024, yet anti-migration sentiment has never been higher. In the United States, where unauthorized border crossings have recently dropped by more than 90 percent, political narratives still frame migration as a dire crisis threatening the future of the nation. A recent YouGov survey conducted across Western European countries showed that 81 percent of Germans consider immigration “too high” despite a significant reduction in the number of asylum applications. The same sentiment was observed in Italy, France, and Sweden, where more than half of the population claimed migration was “mostly bad for the country.” What has allowed this narrative to take shape? The problem is not a social or cultural but a political one: an inability (or, to return to the Enlightenment, a lack of courage) to think critically, beyond the ideology and propaganda that have secured the right’s hegemony over migration discourse.
Migration is less a matter of free choice than the symptom of a broken order: people move because conditions in their homes have been made unlivable.
Even progressives who reject specific right-wing migration policies have bought into the broader politics behind them, offering their own version of anti-migration discourse that, although not rooted in outright
racism, xenophobia, and scaremongering, is no less troubling than its conservative counterpart. Abandoning a reading of political conflict based on asymmetries of wealth and power to challenge the “membership” terms in which migration is framed, certain parts of the left have replaced a socioeconomic diagnosis of the problems of the world with a cultural one based on membership in the liberal state.
One form this discourse takes is the “pragmatic” concern, driven by what its proponents see as strategic necessity amidst tight constraints on electoral politics. In Europe and beyond, social democratic parties continue to lose votes to the far right in traditionally working-class strongholds that have become increasingly susceptible to anti-immigrant rhetoric. Conservatives speak of the failures of globalization and blame it on liberal elites’ relaxed stance on open borders and the failure of certain groups to integrate. Progressives are caught between the imperative to fight and win elections on anti-immigration arguments that appeal to the broader public (or so it seems) and their loyalty to principles of equality and inclusion, which might compromise their electoral chances. More and more, though, some seem to be abandoning any pretense of pursuing the latter. After UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave a speech in May that warned darkly about the nation becoming an “island of strangers,” a Labour representative had only the following to say: “Tough words and tough policy are required to solve tough problems.”
The other form is a seemingly more principled position that claims a “trade-off” between openness to immigration and support for the welfare state. Large-scale, uncontrolled immigration, the argument goes, creates both distributive and cultural conflicts that erode solidarity and social justice. Many politicians of the radical left, such as Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany, have insisted that by increasing the pressure for jobs, access to health care, housing, and schools, immigration undermines the position of vulnerable citizens who depend on welfare subsidies to maintain a dignified life. And by sowing cultural divisions, it undermines the relations of trust and identification required to stabilize democratic values. Solidarity, the feeling of mutual recognition acquired through participation in the political life of the state, is said to be put in jeopardy, threatened either by migrants’ illiberal cultural norms or liberal elites’ use of migration to weaken domestic workers’ power.
The problem with these approaches consists in their idealized account of the liberal democratic state, which as a matter of fact has rarely been either liberal or democratic with regard to all those subjected to the power of its institutions. Instead, it has entrenched asymmetries of property distribution, hierarchies of power, and forms of exclusion leading to a merely formal recognition of equal rights and obligations with little substantive benefit to the most vulnerable social groups (and often, as in the case of the U.S. civil rights movement, even that legal recognition has come late). Except for a few rare and fortunate historical episodes concentrated mostly in the period immediately after World War II, the liberal democratic state has been for the most part the site of struggle rather than cooperation.
In considering whether membership can be an answer to the problems of globalization, we need to take the liberal democratic state as it is. A more realistic account of the transformations of the concept of citizenship—first in its relation to democracy, and second in parallel to the development of the capitalist state—might give us the conceptual resources needed to move away from the current impasse.
At its core, democracy represents a compelling vision: a political space of contestation, argument, and collective deliberation in which all those subjected to the coercive power of political rules are given a voice in the making of them. Historically, this conception of democracy went hand in hand with an expansive understanding of citizenship—not as a static entitlement or commodity, but as an active process through which oppressed agents struggled for ever-greater political representation. Democracy, far from being consolidated in the legal and juridical structure of any existing political community, was rather a political ideal forged in ongoing conflict: between the pressures of globalized capital on the one hand and the emergence of a system of equal rights and obligations promising to temper it on the other.
In its ideal form, a democratic political community can function as a platform through which conflicts between social groups are balanced and mediated in a fair way. Citizenship is the legal tool through which individuals and groups participate in shaping the conditions of joint political rule. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this ideal of citizenship was central to the emancipatory political projects centered on building a type of solidarity that was not found in pre-existing legally recognized membership (characterized by recognition through a common culture, language, or nation) but forged during struggles for political representation. From the workers’ movements that fought for universal suffrage to feminist struggles for women’s political rights, from anticolonial independence movements to civil rights campaigns against racial disenfranchisement, all shared the conviction that expanding citizenship constituted a crucial step toward greater social equality and justice, and that politically constructed solidarity was necessary to this process of emancipation.
Today, this democratic ideal has come to a standstill. For a long time now, so-called democratic societies have been failing on many fronts, of which I will list just three. First is the failure of representative politics: the increasing gap between officeholders and the electorate, a party system that works increasingly like a business cartel, and a relationship of politicians to the people that resembles the relationships of companies to consumers. Second is a failure of social justice: an economic system unable to cater to the concerns of the most vulnerable (both citizens and noncitizens), to manage an economy that works for everyone, and to guarantee mechanisms for fighting against the organized interests of oligarchs, big capital, wealthy donors, and corporate digital platforms—in short, anyone who uses money to purchase political influence. Third is a failure of international solidarity: the incapacity to offer an alternative vision of a global order, including a reform of international institutions genuinely representative of vulnerable people and vulnerable countries, built not on antagonism but on cooperation.
Taken together, these failures generate the very global inequalities that drive asymmetric migration from source states and contribute to heightened migrant resentment in receiving ones. In advanced capitalist democracies, the oligarchic capture of representative politics has meant that traditional left-wing parties who would have once relied on the support of organized labor, accommodating its demands of social justice, now court economic elites and shift the burdens of austerity onto more vulnerable citizens.
At the international level, the neoliberal reforms promoted under the Washington Consensus—fiscal austerity, privatization, trade liberalization, and deregulation—that were presented as pathways to modernization and global integration have often done the opposite. In many post-communist countries as well as those in the Global South, they have weakened state capacities, dismantled social protections, and exposed vulnerable economies to volatile global markets. Instead of fostering convergence, they have deepened structural dependency and inequality. Smallholder farmers were displaced by cheap imports, public sector employment was cut drastically, and debt burdens limited redistributive policy. In many cases, neoliberal restructuring compounded ethnic, sectarian, or regional inequalities, laying fertile ground for insurgency and domestic conflict. The global promotion of neoliberal norms was often backed by coercive military interventions—wars waged under the banner of democratization or humanitarianism, but in practice entrenching instability from the Balkans to Iraq and Libya.
As the White House was posting videos of irregular immigrants literally chained while boarding deportation flights, Donald Trump announced his plans to sell a path to citizenship for $5 million.
As dependency theorists like Giovanni Arrighi have argued, neoliberalism is not merely an economic project but also a geopolitical one, producing a world order where war and instability serve to discipline resistant states and secure flows of capital. In this sense, the neoliberal order has generated not peace through integration, as its advocates claimed, but recurrent crises of sovereignty and violent destabilization. Geopolitical rivalries, the tech race, competition for access to markets and the collapse of solidarity in international institutions leave sending countries vulnerable to political and economic disasters that push people to leave their homes in search of survival. As Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein argue in Trade Wars Are Class Wars (2020), what looks like conflict between nations is often better understood as conflict between classes. Trade imbalances and capital flows are not simply the result of national choices but of domestic elites capturing disproportionate shares of income and suppressing wages, thereby exporting surpluses and instability abroad.
The same logic applies to migration. What is presented as a conflict of adaptation between different cultures is in fact a conflict between classes within those countries. Asymmetric migration, in this sense, is less a matter of free choice than the symptom of a broken order: people move not because they want to leave, but because conditions in their homes have been made unlivable. Migration of this kind, in other words, is rarely the realization of free choice; it is more often the consequence of power relations in which liberal democracies play a decisive role. To understand migration of this kind is to recognize that the failures of liberal democracies are not incidental but constitutive of a system that compels people to abandon the very homes they would otherwise choose to remain in.
Consider two dominant recent trends. The first trend applies to the very poor. Even leaving aside the current projects to deport failed asylum seekers to third states in violation of international norms, the path to citizenship is also no longer straightforward for regular migrants. From minimum income requirements to qualify for residence, to expensive application procedures, to linguistic and civic integration tests to qualify for citizenship, these seemingly innocuous measures can turn into insurmountable obstacles that condemn newcomers to being permanent second-class members of host societies.At this level, migration is nothing but a war waged on the most vulnerable. When people have no political voice, they are much easier to exploit.
The second trend applies to the very rich. For them, borders are more open than ever. Indeed, it has become increasingly easy to earn citizenship in a new state simply by purchasing it. Consider a recent example: in the same weeks in which the White House was posting videos of irregular immigrants literally chained while boarding deportation flights, Donald Trump announced his plans to sell U.S. residence and a path to citizenship for $5 million to rich individuals applying for what he called a “Platinum Card.”
This is by no means an isolated case. Across the world countries are putting financial investors, property developers, or individuals willing to pay a substantial fee in exchange for a different passport on an accelerated and facilitated path to naturalization. Until 2022, under the UK’s Tier 1 (Investor) visa program, for example, those with the ability to invest two million pounds in UK companies could stay in the country for more than three years; those who invested ten million pounds could apply for indefinite leave to remain after only two years of residence (compared to five years for those who had reason to naturalize because of family ties). In the aftermath of the Eurozone debt crisis, Cyprus offered citizenship to foreign investors who had lost at least three million euros from deposits in Cypriot banks. In 2012 Portugal offered a “golden residence permit” with fast-tracked access to citizenship and accelerated family reunification procedures to real estate and financial investors promising to create jobs in the country. In 2013 Malta approved a law that allowed wealthy applicants to obtain a European Union passport in return for investments totaling €1.15 million. In Italy, the Golden Visa or Investor Visa program introduced in 2017 granted a residence permit to non-EU citizens investing at least €250,000 in startups, €500,000 in Italian companies, €1 million in philanthropic projects, or €2 million in government bonds. Here too, the visa issuance process and all other bureaucratic procedures were expedited.
Progressives around the world, while in theory still paying lip service to an emancipatory ideal of citizenship, are surprisingly silent on the transformation of citizenship based on these exclusionary tendencies. Neither social-democratic official policy papers nor left-wing parties’ electoral manifestos seem to show any concern with finding measures that could oppose the current trend. For the most part, the collapse of civic politics into ethnopolitics and the reduction of the universal, progressive ideal of citizenship into a particularistic, conservative one proceeds undisturbed. What does a genuine alternative require? Refusing to play catch. Rejecting the reduction of democracy to membership and of political conflict to cultural conflict. Situating the question of migration in the context of wider social injustices brought about by aggressive globalization, austerity politics, geopolitical conflict, and the decline of welfare states, followed by the impunity of profit-seeking employers and companies who pit poor people (whether native or immigrants) against each other. In short, it requires linking the crisis we currently face to decades of social and economic policies, both at home and abroad, designed to empower organized capital and disenfranchise the working class.
If we do not challenge dominant exclusionary discourses, even at the price of a short-term loss, we risk becoming hostage to them in the long run.
Let’s conclude by returning to Lessing. The cosmopolitan stance Nathan the Wise embodies should not be confused with the good Samaritanism or with the humanitarian ethics that sometimes is invoked in defending the rights of migrants. For many of its champions, the Enlightenment was a political project, not just a moral one, that required rejecting institutions that fail to represent every human being, publicly critiquing ideas that favor one ethnic, religious or racial group, one political community over another. The Enlightenment urged people to reject values that don’t stand up to rational scrutiny, to embrace a critical outlook as opposed to the hypocrisy of those in power, and to resist any claim to authority, including the authority of those who promise to have our interests at heart. The abandonment of this spirit just when it’s most needed is tragic, and not entirely a coincidence. Obedience requires ignorance; ignorance begets obedience.
Yet the universal values we so proudly proclaim are worth very little if they apply to only a few people, in only one part of the world. Freedom, equality, solidarity: these ideas retain their meaning only insofar as they are anchored to a broader commitment to national and international justice that decisively rejects any longing for past greatness, any illusion of civilizational superiority, and any compromise with global egalitarian and radical democratic ideals. Migration, and the injustices that migration reveals, are at the frontline of this struggle. For it is in the commitment to a world in which nobody is forced to leave their home that the universal values to which liberal societies claim to subscribe are most critically tested. Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.
The post The Real Border Crisis appeared first on Boston Review.
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