From the European Union’s ‘harmonization’ of its border policies and Australia’s refusal to accept boatloads from Indonesia to the current exodus from Afghanistan, issues of immigration and asylum have moved centre-stage in international politics. Yet serious social and ethical debate around them is still in its infancy. A small but growing body of scholarly work, narrowly disseminated, has typically been drowned out by noisy demagogy and hysterical media coverage. Recently, however, there have been signs of a more generous and critical response. Sebastião Salgado’s epic photography of masses on the move across the world is one outstanding example. Jeremy Harding’s slim but powerful volume is written in something of the same spirit. The Uninvited offers a set of searing eyewitness accounts of the plight of asylum-seekers and immigrants attempting to enter Fortress Europe from the Adriatic and the Mediterranean: Albanians adrift on motorized rubber dinghies, Algerians and Senegalese penned in the detention camps of Ceuta, Guinean teenagers freezing to death in an aeroplane undercarriage, a West African woman, seven months pregnant, scaling razor-wire and then committing suicide in a Guardia Civil cell. Harding’s tone is controlled and understated—the reverse of sensational. But few could remain unmoved. His cameos remain in the mind long after the book is closed, haunting every further news story of desperate travellers found suffocated in trucks or drowned at sea. The bland bureaucratic directives of EU border policy are given their real, savage face in these tragedies.

Around the reportorial core of the book, Harding weaves a series of more analytic reflections, first limning the social and economic pressures building up on the borders of Europe, then considering the reaction of officialdom and public opinion towards them, and finally speculating on the direction that more enlightened attitudes towards asylum and immigration might take. Behind current EU policies, he detects the assumption of a ‘mechanical model’ of migration according to which immigrants and asylum-seekers are ‘pushed’ from one country by persecution or poverty, then ‘pulled’ to another by hope of a better life. European countries wishing to ‘reverse the tide’ of immigration will try to reduce one or other of these forces. Measures to reduce ‘pull’ include placing asylum-seekers in prisons or detention centres while their claims are considered; reducing social benefits or preventing employment; as well as—of course—adopting minimal interpretations of the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees and operating explicitly restrictive immigration policies. Success is not guaranteed. For as Harding notes, the level of local benefits is rarely a determinant of migration: choice of a destination country ‘will have to do with colonial history, family connexions, relays of information and, above all, with the traffickers in whose hands refugees put their lives’. On the other side of the coin, measures to reduce ‘push’ include the ‘regionalization’ of flows of emigration—that is, persuading or bribing states nearer the sender country to take them in; and military or political intervention to ease situations of crisis in the periphery and so prevent further claims on the centre.

Rejecting the set of assumptions behind current official policies, Harding argues throughout that immigration generally yields great benefits to receiver countries. Economically, many studies show that immigrants as a group typically pay more in taxation than they receive in social provision. Part of the reason for this lies in an error in the ‘mechanical model’ itself. For it is not those in the direst need who mostly emigrate, but those with the best means and energies to do so. Immigrants thus provide the host society with a vital injection of fresh talent and entrepreneurial drive. Moreover, in ageing Western societies, they could correct a growing demographic imbalance, offering hope that the workforce might still be able to pay for the welfare state. The costs they incur upon arrival—expenditure on their settlement, language-acquisition and preliminary social payments—represent a rational investment for any forward-looking state. Though it is never quite spelt out, Harding’s recommendation for Europe seems to be something like a quota system on American lines—what he terms a liberal immigration policy, in lieu of the present inhuman sieve policed by barbed-wire and armed guards. The resulting increase in labour migration would then reduce pressures on an overstretched asylum system, enabling fairer determination of claims under the Geneva Convention.

Here, however, there is an obvious difficulty in Harding’s argument. In his frieze of the ‘uninvited’, Harding shows the commonalities that asylum-seekers and economic migrants share. The difference between political and ‘economic’ refugees, he argues, is often not very great. In extreme cases, fear of starvation can be just as acute as of persecution. But when he moves to policy recommendations, Harding reinstates the very distinction he has—rightly—weakened. Whereas economic migration can be licensed by the material gains it affords receiver countries, asylum-seekers need a ‘more open defence, without proviso, which makes no appeal to the self-interest of host communities’. In other words, immigration is largely a question of computing utilities: we can ‘sell’ a more liberal policy by highlighting its benefits to a narrow-minded public opinion. Asylum, on the other hand, is a question of granting rights: victims of persecution are entitled to sanctuary. Harding makes it clear why he thinks the language of rights cannot be extended in the same way to migrants. ‘If freedom of movement is a “human right”, as some argue, there must also be a case for the rights of communities to oppose what they do not want, including immigration’. Since the two claims are intractably opposed, it is only the language of self-interest that can break the deadlock. For the moment, Harding implies, that sets definite limits on the amount of immigration into Europe that can be envisaged, however liberal the system that regulates it. But eventually, governments might come to see the free movement of labour in the way they view the free movement of capital: ‘that it may be an expensive waste of time to try to fend it off’.

Here is the principal limitation of The Uninvited. It lies in the tension between a harrowing picture of the sufferings of the poor and desperate at the gates of Europe, and a too easy appeal to the self-interest of the prosperous and secure within them. In times of economic boom, amid accelerating growth and tight labour markets, rational-choice arguments for more migrant labour may look well judged. But what of conditions during a recession? Harding’s gesture to the right of communities to oppose immigration seems to suggest that our sympathies for others could be justifiably constrained by our selfishness, since he doesn’t otherwise specify the grounds of this right. He clearly wishes to make as broad an appeal as he can, but a desire to please everyone rarely achieves its aim. Although The Uninvited contains a perceptive, indeed devastating, account of the direction of official policies in Europe, it does not actually criticize any government or politician by name. Perhaps Harding thought this a precaution worth taking, in the hope of gaining a hearing, if not from those in power, from those surrounding them. If so, he is likely to be disappointed. Little more than cosmetic changes, at best, are on the horizon.

On Immigration and Refugees is a very different sort of work—in some ways complementary to The Uninvited, in others as contrasting as the distinct tonality of titles suggests. An analytic philosopher who is the world’s leading authority on Frege, Michael Dummett has also been a long-standing activist in the movement against racism in Britain. Where Harding adopts the reporter’s technique of documenting the migrant’s plight and leaving political options relatively open, Dummett offers a lucid philosophical dissection of the ethical principles at stake in matters of immigration and asylum, and a sharp review of the historical ways they have been manhandled.

Taking the Geneva Convention as his starting point, Dummett argues that all adult human beings have the right not just to asylum, to escape persecution, but to self-government within a form of democracy that allows them to be ‘first-class citizens’. The duties that one state has to another thus ‘imply, and rest on, moral duties a state has towards people living outside its jurisdiction’. The Convention is therefore much too restrictive: ‘all conditions that deny someone the ability to live where he is in minimal conditions for a decent life ought to be grounds for claiming refuge somewhere’. It is clear that this would lead to the reclassification of many who are currently regarded as economic migrants as refugees. The right to be a first-class citizen is an absolute right; any failure on the part of the state to help secure this for all is collaboration with injustice.