The gist of Lea Ypi’s argument is that migration is not a problem until it is made to be one through political discourse. While I agree with much of the prognosis, I will propose several observations and friendly amendments that aim to expand, complicate, and refine the picture.

First, some numbers to put things in perspective. While fears of “loss of control” fuel rising populist discontent with migration, it is the perception of loss of control that is inciting much of this sentiment. If I asked you to estimate the number of migrants worldwide, which answer would you select: (a) 250 million; (b) 500 million; (c) 1 billion; (d) 2 billion; or (e) 2.5 billion? I have posed this question to audiences ranging from seasoned academics to high school students, policymakers, and legislators. The most frequent answer I get is (d), which would amount to nearly 25 percent of the global population—one in four people on the planet. In reality, as of last year, international migrants comprise just 3.7 percent of the global population—just over 300 million people.

Gallup’s global migration data do show that “more people—almost everywhere—want to migrate” than a decade ago. In 2023, 16 percent of surveyed adults expressed a desire to leave their own country permanently if they could. This would translate to over 900 million migrants worldwide, or triple the current figure. As Ypi reminds us, the ability to move across international borders is anything but given in today’s world of tightly regulated borders.

But what exactly do we mean when talking about borders? Walls or barbed wire fences planted firmly on frontier locations immediately come to mind. Today, however, a new trend has emerged: the growth of invisible borders, relying on sophisticated legal techniques to detach migration control functions from a fixed territorial location. The black lines we find in atlases no longer coincide with the agile locus and focus of migration control. Before an individual can even reach the physical border, they must navigate the flexible tentacles of the shifting border: legal portals, digital surveillance tools, and AI-powered risk assessments, monitoring people on the move. What’s more, governments have shifted the border both outward and inward, gaining tremendous capacity to regulate and track individuals before and after they reach their desired destination, applied to everyone, everywhere.

This is the world we live in, to which Ypi seeks to offer a bold alternative. Her vision is impressive in ambition and scope: the canvas is the world rather than the state; social class rather than culture; universal values and international justice rather than ethnonational regulation of membership coupled with civilizational debates about how “to make the West great again.”

The distinction between culture and class is drawn too sharply, however. A rich body of literature traces the intersection of cultural and economic factors in explaining the rise of populist nationalism, democratic backsliding, and growing anti-immigrant sentiment, pushing governments to adopt ever more restrictive policies to address a perceived loss of control. Today, resentment among white working-class men—a key constituency of voters for populist nationalist parties—encompasses elements of both class and culture. These are not competing explanations but mutually reinforcing mechanisms that create conditions for populists to exploit anxieties about migration and a “nostalgic” yearning for a lost golden age, centered upon a mythologized vision of the nation (less racially, ethnically, or religiously diverse, with strict traditional gender roles, rural areas holding sway over corrupt and corrupting cities, and so on). In short, it’s not culture or class but both.

Especially in regions that took the negative brunt of globalization through deindustrialization, job losses have not led to greater class solidarity across borders. Contrary to Ypi’s vision, this downturn has instead translated into increased support for hard-right populist appeals to national “greatness” by candidates who acutely recognized, and provoked, voters’ anxiety about status loss, and the alleged decline of the majority. This was inflamed by fabricated claims about a pending “takeover” by immigrants, all the while embracing traditionally left-leaning pledges to fight for a living wage, bring industry back home, or shorten supply chains. In the United States, this multiplicity of references, scapegoats, and promises is encapsulated in the “Make America Great Again” slogan that blurs and destabilizes traditional distinctions between recognition and redistribution.

Which brings me to the background conditions against which international migration operates—namely, the centrality of the state, or the international system of states. Today’s taken-for-granted assumption that migration control is inherent in sovereignty dates to the late nineteenth century. As pronounced by the U.S. Supreme Court in Nishimura Ekiu v. United States, “it is an accepted maxim of international law that every sovereign nation has the power, inherent in its sovereignty . . . to forbid the entrance of foreigners within its dominions, or to admit them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe.” It is against this background of an established political and legal system, granting states the power to profoundly control, facilitate, hamper, or upset the aspirations of those who wish to, or urgently need, move across borders, that we must assess the current debate about migration. 

The barriers to migration constituted through law, rules, and regulations effectively render the vast majority of the global population immobilized. This near-absolute control over movement is widely accepted as a prerogative of states, indeed dubbed by one scholar the “very ‘state-ness’ of states.” With a surge of nationalist-populist anger and anti-immigrant sentiment rising across the globe, this state-centric viewpoint has been utilized by governments of all stripes—in established democracies and autocratizing countries, in the Global North and Global South, from former imperial powers to postcolonial states—to invest unprecedented amounts of resources, political capital, and institutional capacity to “take back control” over borders and migration.

Even at the costs of breaching basic constitutional and human rights norms, with immense human suffering and violence, declarations about the urgency to “sort out the border management situation to ensure that the porous borders are addressed in a way that protects the sovereignty of our state” take priority, in the words of South Africa’s African National Congress. Indeed, such sentiments have been proclaimed so frequently by public authorities as to have developed their own status as established fact, almost beyond dispute.

So, what can be done? Contemporary exclusionary discourses, and the violence they unleash, force us to reexamine underlying premises. After all, the association between sovereignty and migration control is of surprisingly recent provenance. How legitimate is an international system that cements the birthright lottery by enshrining unequal movement, with unlimited mobility to a select few and sanctioned immobility to the majority? What ethical framework condones a system that essentializes legal categories invented by, and for, the preservation of the state form, as beyond reproach?

Without restraint, states will use their excessive powers not only to control movement but also to silence, penalize, and delegitimize voices and ideas that may ultimately reframe borders and scales of belonging, undercutting their statist core. Ypi offers a moral compass. With looming climate crises and seemingly endless human-made disasters, we have no time to spare not only in imagining alternative forms of political community but putting them into practice.