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. Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Or send me a one-off tip of any amount and help me make more videos: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=JJ76W4CZ2A8J2 Buy on Amazon through this link to support the channel: https://amzn.to/2ykJe6L Follow me on: Facebook: http://fb.me/thethenandnow Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thethenandnow/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/lewlewwaller Subscribe to the podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/then-now-philosophy-history-politics/id1499254204 https://open.spotify.com/show/1Khac2ih0UYUtuIJEWL47z Sources: Sonia Shah, The Next Great Migration Alex Sager, Towards a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/dec/18/tucker-carlson-immigrants-poorer-dirtier-advertisers-pull-out Credits: Races of Mankind image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/apsmuseum/2783559335 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/) Eugenics, Wellcome Library, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Thumbnail, Ggia, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20151030_Syrians_and_Iraq_refugees_arrive_at_Skala_Sykamias_Lesvos_Greece_2.jpg Tucker image: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tucker_Carlson_2020_(cropped).jpg