Metropolis and Migration: What Immigration Reception in New York and Tehran Tell Us About Democracy and Authoritarianism

Why democracy's future depends on striking the right balance between domestic cohesion, rule of law and global justice for migrants.

Jun 30, 2022

In May 2022 at the UN in New York City, a group of international organizations representing local governments and civic groups from around the world launched an initiative to help cities address the challenges posed by growing migrant populations. I will write about the meeting in a future post. For now, as neither NYC nor Tehran were highlighted in their initial report, in this article I will look briefly at both cities, focusing on the way the problems of migration shapes and is shaped by the contrasting political systems in the US and in Iran. One dimension that merits discussion is the controversial issue of illegal migration; I examine this issue because it is a source of polarization in both countries and in both cities.

Immigrants are a slightly larger proportion of NYC’s population (36%) than of Tehran’s (30%), and Tehran’s immigrant population is less heterogenous than NYC’s—consisting largely of Afghans—but in both cities the immigrant population is substantial enough to have attracted significant policy interest. Both cities are in countries where illegal immigration is a source of controversy. How each of these cities is dealing with immigrants – and crucially those without legal residency permits – tells us something important about the differences as well as overlaps in how they are governed and experienced by their residents. Part of that difference stems from the different political systems prevailing in each country, so it is worth asking how democracy and authoritarianism shape the treatment of immigrants in New York and Tehran.

(There is a recent but expanding literature explaining why autocratic regimes may be more accommodating to migrants than democratic countries. One reason is that the public in many democracies are consistently anti-immigrant and forces the state to respond; by contrast, autocratic regimes are not constrained by public opinion and can benefit from the low-cost labor of migrants without having to incur a political price.)

Terminology Troubles

Before I proceed, a note on terminology. In the US whether to call people who lack legal permission from the state to enter and reside in the country “illegal aliens” or “undocumented migrants” has become part of the culture wars. But my position is that there are good liberal democratic reasons not to abandon the use of the adjective “illegal.” In the context of the US, insisting on using "undocumented person" rather than "illegal alien," makes, as David Rieff observed already in 1991, the “contravention of the immigration law sound like some trivial problem of paperwork rather than, for better or worse, a breach of the laws of the United States.” In the absence of culture wars about their status, Iranian officials generally use the term illegal or unauthorized (gheir-e ghanuni, gheir-e mojaz) to refer to immigrants who lack a residency permit, the so called “blue card” or Amayesh card. Accordingly I use all these terms as appropriate so as not to lose the centrality of rule of law, which is crucial to any understanding of the distinctions between democracy and authoritarianism. Thus I will say that according to the UN, in Tehran about two thirds of immigrants are gheir-e ghanuni, gheir-e mojaz, whereas about 60% of foreign-born New Yorkers are naturalized citizens and 40% are non-citizens. Among the latter 17% are present illegally. (See footnote 1 for more discussion of this.) However as a general rule, I will use the term “unauthorized migrants” unless one or the other expressions seem more apt.

Benefits and Rights for Migrants in the two Cities

In Iran Afghans have no political rights, nor, so far, has their presence become an issue in local politics. By contrast, Latino immigrants, who comprise the largest portion of NYC’s highly heterogenous immigrant population, have achieved some political influence in local government and politics in New York over the last few decades. (China is second to the Dominican Republic in sending countries, but the combined total of Dominicans, Mexicans, and Ecuadorans means there are more than twice as many Latinos as Asians.) In one of the classic ways in which ethnic minorities become integrated into American society, neighborhood residential concentration has helped Latinos achieve elected office.

Both cities offer quite extensive government benefits to immigrant populations. NYC is of course hospitable to legal immigrants. But it has also taken a proactive position in providing benefits for migrants residing illegally in the city and state. These include extending legal protections shielding them from federal immigration enforcement action, providing local government IDs, offering workers’ compensation to those who are not legally employed, health care subsidies, and free K-12 public education to minors regardless of immigration status.

In line with many other so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions that limit – or obstruct, depending on your political persuasion – state and local officials from cooperating with the enforcement of immigration laws by the federal government, NY State has passed several laws making it difficult for immigration officials from enforcing immigration law within the city. A majority of courts have generally upheld these laws as being in compliance with federal law on the grounds that the attempt by the federal government to curtail them (as the Trump administration attempted to do) unlawfully interferes with state and local authority. (Because this outcome hinges on the interpretation of federal statutes, such as 8 U.S.C. § 1373, regarding the proper limits of federal authority vis-à-vis the states, future challenges are possible.)

New York State also allows people in the country illegally to obtain driver’s licenses and other forms of local government IDs. (Thus “undocumented” people have government documentation, and many have forged documents as well.) In 2021 the state allocated over $2 billion for undocumented aliens who lost income due to the COVID-19 pandemic and were not eligible for federal relief.

The Backlash to Sanctuary Cities is Widespread and Bipartisan

In reading the New York Times’ coverage of the issue, I was surprised by the large number of the usually progressive readers who responded with outrage in the comments. For example:

I am a lifelong Democrat and progressive. When I read this, my jaw dropped in utter disbelief. While I support undocumented workers, I am a taxpayer and a revenue generator for NYC. As an owner of two businesses in NYC, who has worked tirelessly and sacrificed greatly throughout this pandemic to keep all of my employees and pay rent to my landlord, I am horrified and disgusted that our government is choosing to support undocumented immigrants before citizens, small businesses, entrepreneurs and local mom and pop stores.

The fact that a Democrat who likely did not vote for Trump in 2016 echoed the type of sentiments that played a large part in getting Trump elected is striking. (And it is not confined to the US. For example, negative reactions to the UK’s approach to immigrants drove Brexit.) Although immigration faded as an issue in the face of the pandemic in the 2020 election, it is already resurfacing in upcoming national and local elections.

Tehran’s Authoritarian Embrace of Migrants

Tehran’s picture is different from New York’s and yet in some ways the same. Iran has a national health insurance program, and Amayesh card holders have access. All Afghan migrants under the age of eighteen can attend public school. This is all in keeping with Iran’s Supreme Leader’s 2015 declaration that Islam has no borders and that all Muslims are our brothers and sisters who should not be looked upon as an “other.” (While this applied to the whole country, a plurality of Afghan immigrants in Iran live in Tehran.) Afghan passport holders and refugee card holders have access to work and livelihood opportunities, although they are unable to own their own businesses.

In Iran much as in NYC laws restricting the hiring of unauthorized migrants are poorly enforced. According to Iran’s Ministry of Labor, of the 1.5 million Afghans working in the country only 300,000 have work permits; in NYC about 375,000 workers’ employers are breaking the law by employing them. While Iranian worker’s associations have complained about unfair competition, studies have found that for the construction sector building trades where Afghans predominate, they earn wages on par with Iranian citizens. A majority are single males, and their flexibility in working hours and location may be giving them an edge in the job market. As well, much as it does in the United States, lacking documentation and being deportable may make workers more vulnerable to exploitation. Migrants play an important role in both local economies, which likely drives poor enforcement of laws.

In Iran, Afghan workers account for around 10 percent of the active labor force. The construction, agriculture, and sanitation industries in major urban centers, particularly Tehran, are highly dependent on them. Their contribution to increasing the productivity of the local economy is generally positive and significant.

In New York undocumented people alone make up about 10 percent of the city’s workforce, many of them in the lowest paid occupations. In 2006 when he was still mayor, businessman Michael Bloomberg explained that NYC’s “economy would be a shell of itself had [undocumented aliens not come to the United States], and it would collapse if they were deported.” In the statement Bloomberg acknowledged that these workers had “broke[n] the law by illegally crossing our borders” as had the employers who employed them.

While there is evidence (albeit mixed) for the net positive economic impact of migrants in the US, Bloomberg’s claim about NYC’s economy being dependent on the undocumented portion of migrants lacks good supporting evidence as far as I am aware. But immigration restrictionists characterize such sentiments as reflecting the insouciance of “globalists” whose attachments and vulnerabilities differ significantly from working-class households. In addition to greater economic precarity, working-class people tend to exhibit greater emotional attachment to the distinctiveness of a national homeland than international businessmen. Republicans have readily exploited the anxiety that mismanagement and even chaos at the nation’s borders has created and will do so in upcoming elections.

Backlash in Tehran

Despite the parallels, nativist rejection of immigrants is far stronger in Tehran than NYC. Notwithstanding the outrage in the Times’ comments section about the city’s support of undocumented immigrants, it is difficult to imagine a NYC government official calling for the expulsion of Afghan undocumented refugees, as a Deputy Mayor of Tehran did recently following the surge of migrants crossing the border after the chaotic US withdrawal from Kabul in August 2021. A poll conducted by Tehran municipality reported quite high levels of anti-Afghan sentiments, even racist ones, among Tehran residents. Almost half reported wanting Afghans to be banned from the city completely, a majority of the remainder agreed with requiring Afghans to live in designated neighborhoods, and almost 30 percent opposed inter-marriage with Afghans because of threat of the “contamination of the Iranian race [nejad].” While I was shocked by these findings, friends in Tehran I asked were not.

New York City and the Americanization of Immigrants

Apart from the long history of immigration to NYC, New Yorkers may be more accepting because the diversity of NY’s immigrant population makes it more difficult to stereotype the group; many Germans’ increasingly skeptical reaction to government’s refugee policy, given the relative homogeneity of their refugee population (especially following the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015), supports this view. Nonetheless, New Yorkers share the broad consensus found in studies of American public opinion for an immigration model we might call a high wall with a big gate (but with serious guards!). Thus public opinion polls find broad “majority support for harsher penalties for criminal migrants who cross the border illegally multiple times” and strong support for tightening asylum procedures, with large majorities favoring a policy to “Immediately return immigrants caught illegally crossing over the border with Mexico, instead of releasing them to live freely inside the U.S. pending a trial.” At the same time, seventy percent of Americans express support for continuing the current level of legal immigration or increasing it. A majority of New Yorkers believe immigration is a “good thing” but a (slim) majority also oppose conducting public school classes in a second language for students who don't speak English. In other words, a substantial number of Americans and NYers believe immigration should be closely tied to a process of integration and (in some minimal sense) Americanization, and thus reject extreme forms of multiculturalism.

Should non-citizen immigrants be allowed to vote in local elections?

Second, last year New York City Council took the unusual step of passing noncitizen suffrage for city level elections for green-card holders and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) beneficiaries (often called “dreamers”), and this is not conceivable in Tehran. (In Europe municipal suffrage is widely accepted.) Although in formal legal terms NYC and Tehran are quite similar in lacking legal autonomy to pass laws independently from higher levels of government (being subordinate to the NY State legislature and the Iranian parliament and central government respectively) because of so-called “Home Rule” powers authorized by NY State, NYC has greater power to pass local rules and lobby the State legislature to support local initiatives. Laws permitting IDs and local voting rights are an example of such local initiative.

Noncitizen suffrage may change politics. As I have written about before, only about 1 million New Yorkers cast votes in the last election, and thus if even 20 percent of the 800,000 noncitizens voted, they could influence the outcome and the direction of politics in the city. Local party activists and city-funded community groups that lean left (and perhaps garnering the support of some business interests) are likely to mobilize these voters.

However the new law may never be implemented; last week (June 27, 2022) a NY State Supreme Court struck down the law as violating the NYS constitution. Because political interests are at stake for the progressives, the proposals for noncitizen suffrage is likely to return as an issue in NYC politics.

No local political rights in Tehran

Iran’s system of elections has no group like New York Democrats who might benefit and who thus would push for the law. It is designed to consolidate Islamist authoritarian rule and not make government accountable to the citizenry. Unlike NYC (and Western systems more generally) the Iranian system is not designed to be open to pressures and new constituencies emanating from a civil society characterized by plural organized interest groups and blocs of voters.

The third major distinction between the two cities relates to the country’s model of national identity. Iran’s political system claims to represent a form of ethno-nationalist identity comprising shared religious and linguistic features, namely, primarily, the Persian language and Shia Islam. (In reality, coercion and naked force also plays a large role in keeping the state in power.) This ethnos model of national identity is “thick” in the sense of being founded on ascriptive properties (meaning not chosen) such as race, language, religion, culture, common history. By contrast the American (and many other modern Western) system tends towards the civic model, which relies on citizenship implying the shared commitment and loyalty to the constitutional principles and laws of a liberal democratic republic for unity. In the civic model, individuals create the demos or citizenry of the nation, whereas in the ethnos model, the nation creates the individual. Accordingly, membership in the civic political community can be chosen by immigration, whereas membership in the ethnos is really inherited.

At the same time, there are overlaps and continuities between the two types; after all, for the pure civic model to be effective it must over time congeal into something like a “second nature” of its citizenry, creating a common culture that begins to look like some aspects of the ethnos type, as it is largely passed from generation to generation. At the same time achieving civic democratic solidarity is hardly an easy task. In fact, mounting evidence suggests that the cognitive and moral burdens required of citizens under the ideal demos system – namely being actively engaged and informed, and fact-, future-, and other-regarding – far outstrips the capacities of the majority of flesh and blood citizens who are often apathetic, massively ignorant about the political life, myopic, and easily manipulated by unscrupulous politicians. (For evidence, consider low voter turnout, dwindling membership in political parties, low trust in political institutions; belief in fake news and popular conspiracy theories; NIMBYism, etc.) Despite these shortcomings, no other political system is normatively superior as a way of reconciling freedom and authority in a model of self-rule of the people.

The challenges posed by migration and the mobility of populations must be faced not despite but in tandem with an acknowledgment of these imperfections. Indeed, the difficulties in preserving a minimally engaged democratic citizenry is a central reason for maintaining reasonable restrictions on levels and types of immigration, given that poorly managed immigration policies can undermine social trust and cohesion, which are the prerequisites of legitimate law and even economic redistribution by the government.

The vexed trade-offs between the rule of law, liberalism, and self-determination

In the US a left-right coalition has driven the national expansionist immigration agenda. This coalition brings together three unlikely bedfellows: (1) the Democratic Party, influenced by ideologically driven progressive and leftwing groups, motivated to gain greater political influence by means of cultivating a constituency of new voters as well as animated by a ideological commitment to universal values; (2) labor unions, who did a 180-degree switch around the year 2000 as a way to recruit new members to bolster their dwindling membership; and (3) private sector employers groups, such as the US Chamber of Commerce, who lobby vigorously to ensure low-wage labor remains available for their industries and so that employers can avoid penalties for illegally hiring aliens by blocking legislation for improving workplace verification. This coalition has been remarkably successful in blocking enforcement of current immigration and labor law and has achieved the expansionist and low enforcement immigration system that has culminated in the presence, by some estimates, of around 11-12 million illegal migrants (with some higher estimates of 15-20 million)– a situation that continues to cause much controversy and division in the country.

In Iran, the absence of local politics around immigration means that other factors play a greater role in shaping the local government response to migrants and refugees, including geopolitical calculations, economic self-interest, popular sentiments, and ideological motivations of Islamic solidarity. (Iran’s failure to critique the treatment of Chinese Uighur Muslims by the main customer of its oil suggests the last of these has less power than the others.) In other words, in principle, unlike in the US, Iran is not committed to the trade-off between (a) the need for meeting labor force needs through international migration and (b) sovereignty based on territorial jurisdiction. In practice, it jealously defends its borders. Unlike the US it does not approach the problem of immigrant populations in terms of the difficult trade-off between (a) communal solidarity (including the legitimation of power through majority rule) and (b) rights and freedoms of the individual. Thus the challenges of migrant populations in Iran must be understood within the unique circumstances of the theocratic Islamic Republic often not found elsewhere.

The US faces a different challenge with immigration: it must trade off liberalism (and its cosmopolitan implications such as a commitment to the universalism of human rights) with a minimum degree of national identity, social cohesion, and trust required to make democratic self-rule possible. Liberalism in the latter sense depends on the assumption that legitimate government authority and law is founded on the consent of the governed, a consent which only citizens can furnish. Thus illegal migrants violate the trust embodied in the collective expression of consent and undermine the social contract underpinning liberal democracy. (In the US, this position is most forcefully defended by the Yale scholar of immigration law, Peter Schuck.)

These trade-offs must face the inevitable contradiction between individual liberty and communal purposes among individuals and groups with clashing interests, ideologies, and identities if it is to achieve a system of “ordered liberty.” With regard to immigration, to succeed it must find a balance, in practice and in principle (i.e. the constitutional provisions of the law), between accepting and then integrating migrants, while at the same time maintaining the rule of law. This includes securing or protecting the borders of the country without which a sovereignty based on stable territorial jurisdiction cannot be guaranteed and without which legitimate rule of law cannot be founded.

At the same time, there are reasons to be skeptical of the overly strict enforcement position that assumes states have the unilateral right to exclude migrants who have entered without their consent. As Michael Sullivan argues in Earned Citizenship, in the context of the US “when unauthorized long-term residents provide necessary services to their adopted countries, citizens have a normative obligation to reconsider their collective decision to exclude them. The principle of civic membership as reciprocity stands for the proposition that a person should be able to earn restitution for immigration offenses and a pathway to citizenship by working with citizens to sustain public institutions.” In other words, the US bears some responsibility for failing to control its own borders. What precisely that responsibility entails is open to dispute of course; in contrast to those promoting pathways to citizenship, Peter Skerry for example argues that respecting “the concerns of those Americans who have long demanded that illegals be penalized for breaking the law” implies “legalization for as many undocumented immigrants as possible, but citizenship for none of them. Under this proposal, illegal immigrants who so desired could become "permanent non-citizen residents" with no option of ever naturalizing.” What the precise response should be will have to be determined through the political process.

Thus the central issue in the US, in my view, has to do with the importance of the rule of law, meaning playing fair and by the rules, to the maintenance of a self-governing democratic republic. Illegal immigration (and perhaps noncitizen voting) can cut at the foundations of the American social contract. When the distinction between legality and illegality becomes erased, the foundations of a self-determining liberal political community in which members have rights and obligations recognizable within the law, will be correspondingly weakened. This is because in modern liberal societies, to quote the eminent British political theorist David Miller, “democracy cannot flourish or even perhaps survive unless citizens share a national identity that unites them and creates sufficient trust to allow democratic institutions to function.” Eliding the boundaries between legality and illegality in perhaps the core institution of a liberal polity, that is, citizenship, by erasing the distinctions between citizens, denizens, foreigners, guest workers and so on, is a certain way of undermining the trust and other preconditions on which democracy depends, such as overcoming collective action problems or making deliberative decision making effective, among millions of citizens who are after all strangers and have plenty of reasons not to trust each other. At a time in which democracies are suffering from many shortcomings, it behooves democracy’s defenders to approach migration in as orderly and coherent manner as possible.

These conundrums are currently absent in Iran’s authoritarian regime that does not aspire to face the trade-offs posed by an open yet cohesive society. I am pleased that Afghan refugees in Iran are able to have health care and education. And I am aware that if there was a more “democratic” political system in which a nativist constituency had a say this might result in more xenophobic and racist policies and lead to greater suffering of the Afghans in Iran. But all this means that if Iran sought to be an open society it would face the same conundrums any liberal republic faces in managing the vexing trade-offs that are part of the cost of liberty.

Tales of My Two Cities

Discussion about this post