Liberalism's immigration problem is not a policy problem that can be solved with a better talking point or a more clever distinction between legal and illegal migration. It is a philosophical problem that has been growing for half a century, and the philosophy is missing because liberalism spent the last fifty years pretending that its founding commitments required no particular people, no particular place, and no particular continuity, when in fact the entire liberal achievement of the last few centuries was built inside a container it has now decided to dissolve. The old liberalism, the one that actually built the institutions everyone now takes for granted, was a national liberalism, and it understood something that the globalist version has forgotten, which is that the rights and freedoms and welfare systems that liberals cherish are not self-executing truths that float free of any community, they are the output of a particular people operating under a particular set of shared assumptions, and when you dissolve the people and the assumptions, the output does not survive as pure abstraction, it degrades into the very tribalism and authoritarianism that the globalist version imagines itself to be fleeing. The new philosophy that liberalism needs is therefore not new at all, it is the old philosophy that liberalism abandoned, and the abandonment is the root of every immigration crisis the West is now suffering.
The pre-globalism liberal tradition understood immigration as something a nation did for its own reasons and on its own terms, not as a moral obligation that the nation owed to the world, and that distinction is the entire difference between a self-governing people and a market for labour, which is what the globalist version reduced the nation to. The old liberal position was that a country could admit immigrants when it served the interests of its own citizens, that assimilation was a reasonable condition of admission, that continuity of the national community was a legitimate value worth protecting against dilution, and that none of this was in tension with liberty, because liberty presupposed a demos that could govern itself, and a demos that could not control its own composition was not governing anything. The globalist position that replaced it inverted the entire logic, and it did so by smuggling a moral claim into what had been a prudential question, so that the nation was no longer permitted to ask whether immigration served its interests, because asking the question at all was now evidence of xenophobia, and the only permissible posture was to treat the movement of people as a neutral market flow that any questioning of was bigotry. That inversion is the entire story, and it is why the old philosophy must be recovered, because the old philosophy was the only version of liberalism that could actually defend itself, and the new version cannot even defend its own premises without immediately conceding the argument to us critics.
The core error that the globalist version committed was to treat the nation as a coincidence rather than a project, as a set of geographic borders that happened to contain a random assortment of individuals, rather than a historical community with a particular culture and a particular capacity for self-government that had to be maintained if the liberal freedoms were to survive. Liberalism, in its own founding documents, was always a theory of a particular people governing itself, the American case most obviously, where the Constitution was written for and by a specific people with a specific inheritance, and the rights it guaranteed were premised on the continuation of that people, and the same is true of the British tradition and the French and every other liberal order that has actually lasted. The globalist version forgot this, and it forgot it because the forgetting was convenient, because if the nation is just a society, then there is no reason not to dissolve it into the global market, and the dissolution serves the interests of the very capital that the globalist version claims to mistrust, which is the irony that the whole system is built on, the cosmopolitan ideology that poses as a critique of power is in fact the handmaiden of the most powerful economic forces on earth, because labour mobility is the one thing capital wants more than anything else.
The reason the old philosophy must come back is not nostalgia and it is not a retreat from the world, it is that the alternative has already been tried and it has produced exactly the anti-liberal backlash that the globalists kept predicting would never happen if only everyone were reasonable enough. The globalist version told the native populations of every Western country that their anxiety about demographic change was irrational, that their attachment to their own continuity was bigotry, that their desire to see their own children inherit their own country was a relic that would fade, and then it was genuinely shocked when those populations stopped listening to liberal arguments entirely and started listening to people who had no use for liberalism at all. And the shock was the tell, because a philosophy that is shocked that people care about their own continuity has forgotten something basic about what people are. The old liberal understood that people have particular attachments, that they love their own country and their own way of life and their own children more than they love the abstract idea of a borderless market, and that a political philosophy that cannot speak to those attachments will be replaced by one that can, and that replacement will not be liberalism, it will be something worse.
The recovery of the old philosophy is therefore not a concession to the Right, it is a rescue of the Left from a position that was never its own and was always going to destroy it, because the working class that the Left claimed to represent was the first casualty of the globalist immigration consensus, and the Left's refusal to see that is why the working class walked away. A liberalism that is willing to say that immigration must serve the citizens who are already here, that the border is a legitimate instrument of democratic self-rule, and that the continuity of the national community is a value worth defending, is a liberalism that can actually win elections again, and a liberalism that refuses to say any of those things will keep losing them. The loss is not a mystery, it is the direct and predictable consequence of abandoning the one argument that ever made liberalism defensible. The nation was the vehicle through which liberal values were actually realized in the world, and the globalist version mistook the vehicle for the cargo, and the cargo is now being thrown overboard to save the vehicle. This is the whole problem in a single image, and the only fix is to remember that the nation was never the enemy of liberalism, it was the only thing that ever made liberalism real.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/liberalism-needs-a-new-philosophy
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hey-germany-its-legitimate-limit-immigration