THE BORDER IS BACK

Immigrationism has been the anthropological arm of hyper-globalization. The old dogma of a frictionless world is yielding at the very borders it tried to delegitimize.

Five hundred meters of heresy are floating off Tarajal.

The pneumatic barrier installed off Ceuta rises only a few dozen centimeters above the Mediterranean, sinks below the surface, runs parallel to a line of buoys, and leaves enough room for Guardia Civil patrol boats to monitor the maritime border with Morocco. Madrid had it deployed after the crisis of July 30, when between 50,000 and 60,000 people entered the Spanish enclave within a matter of hours. Pedro Sánchez arrived in Ceuta the following day, met security forces at Tarajal, and described what had happened as a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity.

Sánchez remains a socialist. Spain has not signed up to the National Conservatism manifesto, and no one in Brussels is preparing a restoration of Westphalia. Yet the barrier is there. As it is inflated on the water, the European Union has already reached a political agreement on a new common system for returns that provides for return hubs in third countries and makes forced return mandatory in several circumstances; the Pact on Migration and Asylum entered fully into application on June 12. The Commission now writes that an effective return system is necessary to “disincentivise illegal arrivals” and to keep Schengen functioning. Ten years ago, language like this would have been enough to trigger a public trial for crimes against solidarity.

London is even more interesting. The Labour government titled its immigration white paper Restoring Control over the Immigration System. Introducing it in the House of Commons, Yvette Cooper described the previous policy as a “free market experiment on immigration”: employers had been allowed to recruit abroad without being required to address domestic skills and labour shortages. The government document now explicitly links immigration, labour-market policy, and domestic training, with the stated aim of reducing dependence on international recruitment.

In the United States, Trump has pushed this reversal much further, declaring a national emergency at the southern border on the day he returned to the White House and involving the armed forces in territorial control. The turn, however, had begun under Biden. On June 4, 2024, his administration restricted access to asylum for people crossing the southwest border irregularly; the following month, Border Patrol encounters between official ports of entry fell by 29 percent, while the daily average was less than half the level recorded before the measure.

The laziest reading would say that the right has won on immigration. It is too early for that. More importantly, it is too little.

What is giving way runs deeper than the old divide between parties that favor or oppose restrictive immigration policies. One of the core beliefs of the post-Cold War order is losing its force: the idea that the growing mobility of people belonged to the same historical direction as the growing mobility of goods, capital, information, and production. Politics could slow it, administer it, perhaps correct some excesses. Stopping to ask whether that direction was desirable increasingly seemed like an illegitimate question.

It was the privilege of inevitability. Immigrationism exercised it for thirty years.

The last theology of the frictionless world

In 1987 Joseph Carens published one of the most radical and intellectually coherent arguments for open borders. He took Rawls, Nozick, and utilitarianism - profoundly different theories of justice - and tried to show that, followed through to their consequences, all three offered few moral grounds for preventing a human being from moving from a poor country to a rich one. The distinction between citizens and foreigners looked to him like a modern form of feudal privilege: a status received at birth capable of determining an enormous share of a person’s life chances.

The argument deserves to be taken seriously, because it is far more interesting than its talk-show version. If the individual is the fundamental moral unit and two human beings possess equal dignity regardless of where they were born, the border does indeed present a problem. A man born in Tijuana can reach San Diego in twenty minutes and multiply his economic opportunities by crossing a line. Another receives those opportunities at birth because his mother happened to give birth a few miles farther north. Seen from the standpoint of the isolated individual, the border looks arbitrary.

The problem begins with those two words: isolated individual.

Patrick Deneen has built his critique of liberalism precisely around the progressive emancipation of the individual from inherited attachments and obligations. In Why Liberalism Failed, he argues that the pursuit of individual autonomy has simultaneously expanded state power and weakened civic commitments; elsewhere, he has described contemporary elites as especially capable of living a deracinated mobility, turning upward mobility itself into a form of departure from place and from the communities that formed them.

Christopher Lasch had seen something similar by 1995. The Revolt of the Elites described an increasingly mobile, cosmopolitan professional class able to work and live inside networks that crossed borders and made it progressively less dependent on the places it physically inhabited. Lasch inverted Ortega: the problem facing Western democracy no longer arose only from a revolt of the masses, because part of the elite had begun to separate its own fate from that of the rest of society.

Immigrationism developed inside the same mental landscape. Its originality lay in turning a fact as old as humanity - migration - into an implicit philosophy of history. Mobility acquired a presumption in its favor. A person capable of crossing countries and cultures seemed better suited to the new world than someone tied to a factory, a province, a language, a church, a home. Portable identity was modern; inherited identity was required to explain itself.

Here cultural progressivism met economic liberalism with surprising ease. The first looked at the border and saw an arbitrary privilege. The second discovered, in the same border, friction in the circulation of one of the factors of production.

Karl Polanyi would have recognized the problem immediately. In The Great Transformation, he called labor a fictitious commodity: the market treats it like a commodity even though behind it stands a person, and that person cannot be separated without consequence from the social environment in which he lives. Later scholarship on Polanyi has continued to locate here one of the decisive points in his critique of the self-regulating market.

The migrant worker makes the contradiction almost visible. To the firm, he is labor supply. To universalist progressivism, he is the bearer of rights that precede national membership. To the state, he becomes a taxpayer, resident, user of services and, in many cases, a future citizen. In real life he enters a neighborhood, enrolls a child in school, and brings memory, religion, habits, expectations. A history begins between him and the people who were there before.

The market can put a price on his labor. Politics has to decide everything else.

It is difficult to find an area in which hyper-globalization tried more stubbornly to avoid precisely that decision. Dani Rodrik formalized the economic problem in his famous trilemma. Deep international integration, national sovereignty, and democratic politics cannot all be maximized at once; hyper-globalization inevitably requires something to retreat. In the model of recent decades, a substantial share of national decision-making space was subordinated to the demands of economic integration.

Then came Covid, war, energy dependence, industrial competition, and the vulnerability of global supply chains. In only a few years, the Western vocabulary filled again with reshoring, economic security, strategic autonomy, national production. A semiconductor now has a homeland. A refinery has a geopolitics. Even a container can become a security issue.

For a time, immigration remained the last great exception. Here friction still appeared morally suspect. It is a remarkable oddity. If human beings possess a value incomparably greater than that of goods, their movement should require more politics, more prudence, more judgment about consequences. We did almost the opposite.

Who has the right to enter the “we”?

Michael Walzer begins from a very different point than Carens. Before asking how wealth, security, education, or power should be distributed, he writes in Spheres of Justice, we must confront an earlier good: “membership in some human community.” Membership then structures the other distributions because it establishes with whom we make decisions, from whom we demand obedience, whom we tax, and toward whom we assume obligations.

That observation already contains a theory of the border. Consider the European welfare state. A worker in Turin helps finance a school he will never enter, an operation for someone he will never meet, the pension of an elderly person he may have seen once on a bus. Such a system requires an extraordinary degree of impersonal trust. It works because millions of strangers agree to regard one another as members of a community of obligations.

Legal citizenship helps build that trust. History, language, institutions, and shared memory do the rest. The border marks the space in which that solidarity takes political form.

David Miller brought this line of reasoning into contemporary political theory of migration. While acknowledging responsibilities owed by rich countries to the poor and particular obligations toward those in need of protection, he rejects the existence of a general right to immigrate. For Miller, control over admission belongs to the capacity of a political community to determine itself.

At this point the dispute with Carens becomes much more serious than the usual choice between kindness and severity. Carens looks at the border from the moral equality of the individual who wishes to cross it. Walzer and Miller also look at the community waiting on the other side. Both perspectives see real human beings. One adds a question that universalism tends to compress: who may decide the composition of the community that will then have to govern itself together?

Gregory Conti addressed precisely this point in Compact in “Immigration as a Constitutional Issue,” arguing that immigration and naturalization have an almost constitutional character. In a democracy, the people choose their rulers; a policy capable of changing the composition of the citizen body over time affects the very subject that will exercise sovereignty. Hence Conti’s provocation: major immigration choices should be treated with instruments closer to constitutional politics and direct democracy.

One need not follow him all the way to a referendum. The question remains. A decision on a tax rate changes what a people will do. A decision on citizenship helps determine who that people will be.

This is why the border is the first institution of politics. Before laws there is a space in which those laws have authority; before representation there is a demos that can be represented.

Immigrationism needed to make this question embarrassing. A community that claimed the right to choose who might enter was easily forced to prove its moral innocence. The center of the frame shifted toward the right, need, or aspiration of the person arriving; the interests of those who already lived in the country acquired a faintly suspicious tone.

Yet that person exists too. He lives in a neighborhood, competes for housing, sends a child to school, works in a local labor market. He may be generous, wary, enthusiastic, or afraid. In a democracy he possesses, above all, a title that no theory of openness should erase: he participates in governing the community in which the consequences of those decisions will become concrete.

Robert Putnam showed how delicate this subject is. In his famous E Pluribus Unum, he found that in the short run greater ethnic diversity in the United States was associated with lower trust and social capital: people tended to “hunker down,” reducing even their trust in members of their own group. The second half of the argument is quoted much less often. Putnam also regarded immigration as capable of producing substantial long-term benefits and pointed to new shared identities and common institutions as the means through which immigrant societies had historically overcome that fragmentation.

This is assimilation without adjectives. A society can incorporate enormous differences. It needs something strong enough to turn strangers, gradually, into fellow citizens. And it needs time.

In “The Case for Working-Class Nationalism,” Alex Hogan recovered in Compact an American scene from 1935 that says more than many conferences on integration. In Homestead, Pennsylvania, four thousand steel and coal workers marched carrying American flags; Slovak, Lithuanian, Italian, and heavily accented English could be heard in the crowd. Industrialists had long exploited those ethnic divisions to weaken labor organization. The slowdown of immigration after the First World War and the restrictions of 1924 helped, together with the institutions of organized labor and New Deal politics, create the conditions for a new American working-class identity that cut across older affiliations.

No one should import the racial legislation of 1920s America into the Europe of 2026. History does, however, hand us a variable almost expelled from the contemporary debate: pace.

Assimilation does not depend only on the willingness of the newcomer. It also depends on the receiving society’s capacity to absorb, transmit, transform, and eventually produce a new belonging. A community incapable of asking anything of those who enter reveals a weakness that predates immigration: it has probably begun to doubt that its own culture still contains anything worth inheriting.

The class that could afford to live without borders

There is a reason Lasch becomes useful again. Globalization did not distribute mobility evenly. Those with education, capital, professional networks, and portable skills can change city, country, company, sometimes continent, and turn that mobility into an advantage. Place weighs much less heavily on their lives.

Others remain. The school is still the one down the road. The hospital is the provincial one. The value of the apartment depends on what happens within three streets. The wage is negotiated inside a concrete labor market.

The cosmopolitanism of the elites described by Lasch contains this asymmetry as well: those who benefited most from the globalized world were able to experience place as a choice, while a substantial part of the population continued to experience it as fate.

Deneen places the same fracture inside the post-liberal critique: a new aristocracy selected through education and mobility is able to turn deracination into opportunity while the local institutions on which others depend grow weaker.

This is where immigration and the social question meet. The Congressional Budget Office offers an American picture sophisticated enough to irritate both sides. According to its projections, the large immigration surge that began in 2021 raises cumulative U.S. nominal GDP by $8.9 trillion between 2024 and 2034 and significantly improves the federal budget outlook. At the same time, through 2026 it slows wage growth for U.S. residents with twelve years of education or less because the supply of workers with similar skills rises. Over the longer run, CBO projects that productivity effects reverse that pressure.

All of these conclusions can coexist in the same report because the economy is not a referendum. The country becomes richer in the aggregate while some workers pass through a period in which their bargaining power declines. The federal government may collect more revenue while some state and local governments bear higher costs for schools, housing, and other services. GDP records the aggregate; politics encounters the distribution.

Part of the economic right took a long time to notice. Part of the left, which had built an entire political tradition around conflict between capital and labor, showed curiously little difficulty accepting an expansion of labor supply when immigration was producing it.

The British Labour government is now saying almost exactly what that left might have said twenty years ago. The continuous importation of workers can allow firms to postpone investment in domestic training, wages, and productivity. Its white paper therefore aims to prevent economic sectors from using immigration structurally in place of developing the British workforce.

In the United States, American Compass has built an entire conservative agenda around tight labor markets: restricting labor supply can strengthen the bargaining position of lower-paid workers and force firms to compete through better pay and conditions as well.

Even the civil war inside the new tech right eventually reached this point. When Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley figures defended high-skilled immigration through H-1B visas, Compact, in “The False Promise of High-Skilled Immigration,” argued that a permanent supply of imported skills could subject the professional middle class to the same competitive pressure that parts of the working class had already experienced through globalization and lower-skilled immigration.

Patrick Deneen identified a deeper philosophical fracture in that dispute: populist conservatism emphasizes borders, national production, and social continuity; technological libertarianism remains drawn to the global circulation of talent and to permanent transformation.

Here the word post-liberal finally begins to mean something. Immigration policy ceases to function automatically as an answer to needs expressed by the market. If an industry declares that it needs one hundred thousand workers, that claim enters the balance of national interests alongside wages, productivity, birth rates, training, the absorptive capacity of communities, and industrial strategy.

The National Conservatism Statement of Principles says this with unusual clarity: Western nations have benefited, at different moments, from both liberal immigration policies and periods of restriction; its stated goal is to move toward policies that are more balanced, productive, and assimilationist.

Immigration thus returns to being an instrument of national policy. That formula matters more than any quota, because an instrument has no moral direction of its own.

When even liberals build the fortress

And so we return to Ceuta.

Leo Greenberg called this new posture among part of the European establishment “Fortress Liberalism” in Compact. His insight matters precisely because it complicates the right’s triumphalist story: European liberals are adopting more restrictive immigration tools in part to protect the liberal order from the political backlash produced by mass immigration and the rise of populist parties. The fortress becomes a strategy of survival.

The possibility is perfectly coherent. A government can police a border harshly while continuing to regard the nation as an administrative district. It can demand assimilation to secularism, sexual tolerance, and liberal procedures because it needs to protect the existing order. It can reduce admissions because the polls are becoming dangerous. The barrier exists. The political conception that justifies it may remain exactly what it was before.

For that reason the return of the border opens the battle rather than ending it. Immigrationism has already lost part of its force now that even progressive governments and European institutions have again begun to treat control over admission and the effectiveness of returns as necessary components of a functioning political system. More importantly, it has lost something more valuable: the right to present the continuous increase of mobility as a natural event whose consequences politics could only organize.

What comes next remains unsettled. American data suggest that citizens are already reasoning with categories less primitive than those offered by political polarization. In June 2026, 73 percent of Americans still said immigration was a good thing for the country. A 62 percent majority nevertheless supported maintaining a strong military presence at the border with Mexico, while 52 percent said the Trump administration was going too far on deportations.

Within those three numbers may lie part of the future of Western immigration politics. A society can value immigration and demand control of its border. It can admit and select. It can offer protection to those entitled to it and regard the return of those without a right to remain as indispensable. It can want new citizens and ask them to enter, in a real sense, the political community receiving them.

The old immigrationism needed to compress these distinctions because part of its strength came from moral simplification. Opening meant generosity; limiting easily became a symptom to be explained. The world now taking shape appears less willing to reason in those terms.

This is also where the post-liberal critique must resist being satisfied by the first wall it sees. Carens still forces us to confront the arbitrary fortune of birth. Putnam reminds us that diverse societies can build new solidarities. The American experience shows that an immigrant can enter deeply into a national identity and transmit it to his children. The dignity of someone seeking a better life elsewhere does not disappear because the border has returned.

Post-liberalism adds to that dignity a reality universalism tended to lose from view: historical communities possess the right and the duty to govern their own continuity.

The same idea of national self-government animates the National Conservatism manifesto: independent nations able to determine their own course according to a particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance, and to maintain their own borders.

This is where Fortress Liberalism and a post-liberal politics take different roads. The first has discovered that it needs walls. The second has to remember why the house exists.

At Tarajal, that difference cannot yet be seen. A pneumatic barrier has no political philosophy. It stops a body, marks a space, allows the Guardia Civil to patrol a line. Everything else happens behind it.

There, the question will be whether a nation is merely the place in which certain procedures operate or a community able to recognize a common past, exercise obligations in the present, and choose who will take part in the future. We will have to discuss assimilation again without pronouncing the word apologetically; the labor market without giving employers the right to determine the size of the population; solidarity without forgetting that every politically organized solidarity requires someone capable of saying “we.”

For thirty years, hyper-globalization made circulation into a promise. Obstacles fell and history advanced. Now obstacles are returning. Some will be wrong. Others necessary. Many will arrive late.

The great political question will be which limits are required for a community to remain capable of governing itself, and through which institutions that power should be exercised.

Five hundred meters of rubber float off Ceuta. The old world would have called them a relic. The new one has yet to decide what to make of them.

THE BORDER IS BACK.

Now we have to think seriously about what it contains.

MILITANT.MEDIA