The Central Imaginary
Well, first we need to keep our own thinking straight.
I agree with your opening analysis, but the point is not to be pragmatic in that immediate way. It's a question of having a way of being consistent and persistent, over a long period of time, with many interlocutors, at various levels of understanding. A kind of higher level talking point, that can be modified in all kinds of ways as occasion requires. Your own description of the typical leftist shows what other people can come to see over time if this kind of question is kept in the forefront.
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Thanks. Following what you say, the purpose of engaging lefties along these lines would be to *show the lefties to the normies*. (By the way, it's also a way for us to check ourselves, when we lapse into our own "we should"s.)
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If the sovereign has a "someone should," it's functionally identical with "I will." Assuming the sovereign wants to remain sovereign, *that* will motivate his decisions. He will want a coherent chain of command present to him, along with the kind of people capable of taking up their roles in that chain. That's the opposite of ideological and arbitrary. This way, in order to avoid starving, rather than saying "someone should institute full employment with a 15$ an hour minimum wage," there will be someone whose responsibility it is to ensure you and your community have the necessary means of living. And that someone will be in a chain of command leading up to the sovereign.
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You're right that there need to be reasons for what the sovereign does. It would be better to talk about "values" than "ideology," because "ideology" assumes a general view of the world opposed to other views--i.e., it is grounded in, and organizes, systematic conflict. But we don't need to add some value system to a power system: there is already an ethics implicit in the practice of ruling. I have to shift to a someone different level here. The "values" or ethics of any system of institution is to be found in its origin. Any community has an origin, just like humanity does. In fact, any "version" of a community has an origin. What we are always trying to is commemorate the origin--all of the institutions of a society are essentially commemorations of its origin. The sovereign wants to preserve the origin of his sovereignty, and that origin must lie in the transcendence of some conflict, the deferral of some violence. Ultimately a community needs unanimity on its origin--the sovereign wants to preserve that. If you ask why the sovereign wants this, the answer is he can't want anything else. Disagreements and conflicts which impair and divide sovereignty are ultimately commitments to different origins.
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If we lived in a sane society, we wouldn't have to do this much theorizing, would we?
The truth is, immigration is not so hard to explain--it has its roots in imperialism, which in a sense goes back to the 16th century but the kind of "invading the world" that led to "inviting the world" really goes back to the 19th century. (Ancient Rome was pretty "diverse" as well). An empire has clients all throughout the world and many of them will be provided free access. Imperialism leaves open various possibilities for divided sovereignty, without necessarily making it inevitable. But the immigration policies of the last 50 years or so really exploit divided sovereignty and serve much narrower and more partisan interests.
So, you can be anti-imperialist, or in favor of a sane imperialism, and work out the implications of either approach. But none of this is all that hard to explain--in general, having a theory of how things "should" be implies a theory of why they aren't that way.
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Yes, these are good observations, but a few things: first,countries like England and France always had a steady flow of colonials into the mother country, even if it wasn't mass immigration, which wouldn't have been so easy from countries like India, Jamaica, Vietnam and Algeria before WWII; second, America's first mass immigration project of the later 19th into the 20th century could be seen more as a continuation of the original settler project, while post-1965 immigration is most certainly taking place within an imperial context, whether the US has formal colonial possessions or not. Third, and most important, we could and I think should see contemporary globalism as a continuation and intensification of earlier imperial projects, in which the EU, the US (or certain imperial factions within the US) extend their power through global economic and political institutions. There was a geopolitical context even to such domestic processes as the civil rights revolution in the US, which involved the US proving its anti-racist bona fides to decolonized countries it wanted to draw away from the USSR. This is even more the case with immigration today, where different factions prove their universalism by abolishing all boundaries--in a way that benefits the most powerful transnational corporations. There could be other ways of advancing an imperial project, of course, and maybe China is discovering one--even if, as seems to me they case, they are much less ambitious and much more cautious than the West has been. Maybe we could be more precise and say that mass immigration is part of an imperial project advanced under the aegis of terms like "democracy" and 'human rights" (which, as Chris B will tell you in considerable detail, have histories deeply rooted in geo-political struggles).