“We’ve had enough!” — “There’s no more room!” — “They’re to blame for the housing shortage!” — “They’ve taken all our jobs.” — “Our country is full.”
Variations on these anti-immigration slogans can be heard in one form or another across much of the Western world. In 2013, a director of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise (NHO), an employers’ association, asserted that “Norway has no more room for Swedish people,” then a sizeable labor migrant population engaged in low-paid service jobs in Norway. In the run-up to the Brexit referendum, The Guardian’s liberal columnist Zoe Williams published a commentary responding to claims that “a lack of room” in Britain was driving a necessary tougher stance on immigration. More recently, New York’s mayor Eric Adams pronounced to an audience in Mexico that “there is no more room in New York” for arriving migrants, before adding, in a cynical twist: “Our hearts are endless, but our resources are not.” Meanwhile, under the headline, “No more room for refugees in Germany?”, the broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported that the “country's municipalities say they cannot take any more” Ukrainian refugees. In Ireland, in the wake of anti-immigrant rioting, Dublin’s city authorities announced that it had “run out of room for refugees,” the Financial Times reported.
The sense that a country is “full” or “running out of space”—for foreigners, asylum seekers, refugees, (im)migrants, or ethnic minorities—has very little to do with physical space. Instead, it has everything to do with symbolic space, that part of the inner mind where shared, internalized mental representations reside—the interior collective consciousness, containing norms and categories, concepts and precepts, where friends and foes are allocated their proper place and the boundaries of group-identity are drawn, maintained, and policed.
Policing (ethnicized) national group-identity is extremely important to one particular ideological demographic, which we can call ethnonationalists. Ethnonationalists are people who believe in the—innate or cultural, it makes little difference—superiority of a privileged folk-group, or ethnos, which is said to enjoy the right to legitimate domination over a particular nation-state.
Now, the problem that ethnonationalists face in a globalized world of economically, culturally, and physically interdependent, interconnected societies is that their own favorite ethnos is constantly at risk of being overrun, dislocated, weakened or polluted (as the anthropologist Mary Douglas would say) by the disturbing, contaminating presence of some undesirable Other.
And so the ethnonationalist’s work of policing the bounds is a Sisyphean labor, going on endlessly and demanding the constant mobilization of state, political, cultural, and cognitive apparatuses to defend against intrusion—whether at the outer limit (in the form of “protecting our borders”) or in some more intermediate form (by “protecting our culture,” or “our ways of life”, or “our jobs,” or “our welfare state,” or “our neighborhoods,” or “our women”—it is remarkable how quickly ethnonationalists draw near the sexual taboo of “miscegenation”).
But when ethnonationalists speak of the fullness of their country, they are not expressing a belief about the physical parameters of the country: After all, most countries are full…of nothing—that is, “empty” natural, underdeveloped or underconcentrated spaces. Instead, these ethnonationalists are projecting a sense that symbolic space is precisely being “overrun” by a disturbing presence.
Philosophers of an ontological bent sometimes pose the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”. Ethnonationalists give this probing existential question a twist of their own: “Why should we accept that there be ‘something rather than nothing,’ that is, why should we accept the intrusion of a foreign Other into a ‘crowded’ symbolic space that we, in more honest moments, must readily admit is layered atop what really amounts to plentiful physical space?”. Contra the ethnonationalists, the fear of overcrowding, of being crowded out, is not a sensation that has its basis in physical or geographic realities but is a symbolically freighted fear, anxiety or outright delusion, carried forth by the apprehension that one’s favored ethnos might be displaced, or just slightly diminished, even if this in real terms would only represent a very moderate dilution of their power or privilege.
The Distension of the Symbolic
So where does this xenophobic “feeling of fullness” come from? Whence this ethnonationalist bloat spreading across the West this past decade?
The correlation between a country’s physical fullness and an overarching sense of “societal fullness” is weak if not nonexistent. On the contrary, there are societies that are highly dense and yet seem capable of being run along quite cosmopolitan lines. Singapore comes to mind, with its more than 8,000 people per square kilometer and concomitantly vibrant multicultural welter of peoples (which is not to discount its authoritarian governance system).
And then, on the other hand, you have countries like Iceland, with an average of 4 people per square kilometer, and which has in the past been known to pursue a quite restrictive immigration policy: in 2017, at the height of the “Syrian immigrant crisis,” Iceland was reported to have “accepted fewer than 600 refugees” since 1956. Just as Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel famously announced, “Wir schaffen das!” (We can do this!), allowing nearly a million Syrian refugees in under the banner of a cosmopolitan Willkommenskultur (“Welcoming culture”), Iceland only granted 16 Syrians asylum in 2016.
Or take Australia: it has an average of 3 inhabitants per square kilometer, even less than that of Iceland. Much of that area uninhabitable, of course, at least without significant technological and infrastructure investments. But even so, by any stretch of the imagination, Australia is a nearly completely empty country—and yet it practices some of the most hardline immigration politics in the southern hemisphere. Think only of the Christmas Island internment camp, or the semi-pornographic television series, Border Security: Australia’s Front Line, that glorifies a tough-on-immigrants stance in a frenzied (ethnonationalistic) spectacle of sovereignty.
So the paradox is: You can be an almost totally physically empty country, like Iceland and Australia, and be highly restrictive on immigration—or you can be a very or moderately densely populated country, like Singapore or Germany, and (at least at times) practice a relatively liberal immigration policy. Of course, the two are likely to be somewhat correlated: The chances are, the welcoming countries will be more densely populated precisely because they practice a more liberal attitude towards foreigners. Still, the point remains: Iceland was “too full” to accept more than 16 Syrian asylum seekers in 2016, and yet in actual, objective terms, Iceland is one of the emptiest countries in the world. Australia is “too full” to accept “boat refugees” and therefore “had to” intern them—under horrific conditions—on Christmas Island for years on end and to great international censure.
To Purge and Protect
Ethnonationalist bloat, to repeat, has nothing to do with physical space. It has everything to do with symbolic space, which must, in the ethnonationalist imaginary, be purified and purged at regular intervals and kept clear of dangerous infiltration by foreign elements. Anxious ethnonationalists are always prepared to declare themselves full, as if having imbibed on too much cosmopolitanism or engorged themselves on diversity: they wish nothing more than to enjoy the emptiness of their real physical spaces, a pristine mirror replicating the purity of an (imaginary) symbolic space unsullied by intruders.
Of course, this stance is fake: Many ethnonationalists are all too ready to enjoy the fruits of the global order. They may eat Chinese food, watch Egyptian movies and South Korean TV shows, head “south” on their holidays, buy imported consumer goods from Thailand and Bangladesh, or hire foreign-born or ethnic-minority laborers to work in and around their homes (as the Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond shows in his book, Poverty, America, middle-class professionals in the U.S. are reluctant to upset the country’s class/race order in part because they benefit from the low-cost service provision it enables)
If ethnonationalists are less willing to admit people from these countries in as their equivalent neighbors, in the fully theological sense of that word, we should not accept, even for a moment, the narratives of fullness that abound. Instead, it is the ethnonationalist imaginary that is full—filled with dangers and threats, which are often pure inventions of minds distended with undigested figments.
When an ethnonationalist declares their country to be full, they are projecting symbolic space onto physical space. It is up to us to disentangle the two and show what can still be accomplished—through the combined efforts of people of good will—in the real, material world.
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First published on Substack.