“Hope is the desperate brother of despair” (p. 1), Tom Farer tells us in Migration and Integration, and his book is motivated both by despair over the existential threat facing Western democracies and the hope that decisive action will “preserve liberal democracy in one of the few parts of today’s world where it still flourishes” (p. 7). Farer observes that “the liberal center in Western European politics is eroding at a dangerous pace,” threatened by the extreme right’s electoral gains and growing sympathy for “illiberal democracy.” The source of this erosion is “the center’s failure to deal effectively and openly with the issues associated with the post–World War II settlement in Western Europe of people from the Global South” (p. 5). By obsessing over political correctness, however, the “liberal intelligentsia” indicts “indiscriminately as racist or xenophobic all criticism of migration outcomes, thereby undermining its credibility as definer of respectable opinion” (p. 6).

This ambitious book seeks to foster a frank dialogue about migration in Europe, addressing refugee resettlement and numerous integration issues with case studies (of the Nordic States, the United Kingdom, and France). Engaging multiculturalism debates, Farer seeks to explain native European fears of the loss of a homogeneous society and the discrimination that migrants face. With formidable skill, he presents each of these, at times, irreconcilable viewpoints, showing there are no easy answers and asking the old Leninist question, “so, what should be done?” (pp. 105, 143). Throughout the book, Farer lays the groundwork for his final chapter, which he describes as a “grand strategy for managing migration and integrating migrant families into the economic and social order [that] is most likely to enable the defenders of liberal democracy to defeat the authoritarian right with the least possible compromise of human rights norms” (p. 7). The plan is a policy proposal to a fictional state’s (“Netherfranc”) leader (p. 175). Farer warns that not all of its elements “are consistent with the ethos of human rights” p. (25), but sees illiberal means as necessary for preserving a liberal end.

What is the scope and nature of the threat that migrants pose? Chapter 1, “The Looming Wave,” argues that Global South populations are swelling uncontrollably, testing the limits of European states’ absorption capacity (p. 11). Muslims are projected to grow faster than natives, and Europe already faces challenges integrating migrants (chapters 4-6) from illiberal states bringing illiberal values with them (see pp. 31, 42-3, 52-3). The problem stems from “the psychological relationship between Europe’s secular societies and their Islamic immigrant communities” (p. 14). Muslims thus pose a cultural, moral, and terrorist threat to European societies—even a handful of them can create great damage (pp. 140-141).

Farer uses the term “migrant” for refugees and irregular migrants (p. 8), and (by the end of the book) for all non-white European citizens regardless of whether they are of the “first or fiftieth generation” (p. 185), thus conflating legal distinctions between humanitarian migrants, post-war guest workers, post-colonial subjects, or highly specialized labor. Ultimately, he believes the crisis is rooted in the “native” population’s perceptions and “the political, social, economic, and administrative problems the mass entry of people from distinctive cultures pose to the host nation” (p. 9). With this move, Farer discursively dispossesses minorities of their citizenship, allowing for heightened surveillance of them (pp. 176-179, 182-187), and transforming citizenship from an inalienable right into a revocable privilege contingent upon good behavior (pp. 194-199).

The plan tackles border control, integration, and terrorism, for example, by weeding out undocumented persons with a card system (eventually retina-scans) embedding identity checks across the private and public sectors (pp. 174, 177-8). While “a card-less person could not buy or be given even a banana without placing the provider at risk” unless businesses proved “humanitarian emergency” grounds, the plan also attempts to prevent racial profiling and “‘stop-and-identify’ policing” by limiting police ID checks to “observed serious crime (not, for instance, a traffic stop)” (pp. 177-179). However, there is a logical tension in embedding businesses within the plan’s reach while excluding the police. It would also require all residents to participate, otherwise no one would be able to verify their legal status. If so, then Farer is proposing an intrusive surveillance system that critics might see as resembling the “violently repressive paranoid state” (p. 183) he fears. If not, then the plan seemingly obliges all (white) citizens to police the legal status of non-white Europeans. Citizen conscription in policing minorities also appears evident in the plan’s counter-terrorism efforts, when (modeled on the UK’s “Prevent” program [pp. 109-114]), Farer calls upon frontline service-providers (e.g. teachers, doctors, nurses) to report individuals suspected of being susceptible to radicalization (p. 193).

Another proposal establishes offshore “integration” centers (pp. 180-5). These extra-territorial migrant-reception centers—mini-cities with “schools, shops, factories, and sport fields” (180)—would prepare people for integration in Netherfranc. Farer rejects “the charge that they are neocolonial intrusions reminiscent of the European-controlled concessions” (p. 180) by involving UN. Consular officials would assign points based on language skills, family size, age, asylum criteria, and economic contributions to determine “whether they appear psychologically prepared to respect the laws and practices of our country” (emphasis added, p. 181). Judicial oversight is notably absent in this proposal—by design it increases discretionary executive power by circumventing domestic and European courts (p. 199). The plan also proposes private offshore prisons to indefinitely detain and denaturalize terrorists (and sympathizers) (p. 198). How does an ardent liberal (with an esteemed record as a human rights practitioner) propose this plan? Very reluctantly, with a lucid explanation of the pitfalls. Nevertheless, Farer’s version of “muscular liberalism” (p. 185) as the antidote to totalitarianism contains multiple illiberal elements.

Farer dislikes the term xenophobia because it silences political discussion. I would add that it depoliticizes racism by making it an individual psychological issue. In this book, racism is a pathology of totalitarianism; the “racists” are the fascist ideologues Farer is fighting against (p. 174). What is missing, however, is a consideration of how racism actually functions within liberal states, as a contradiction between the inclusionary liberal theoretical values this book espouses (chapter 3) and the persistence of the exclusionary practices it does not. There is little analysis of how race functioned as a system of governance structuring the value of labor, distribution of power, patterns of violence, and production of knowledge within liberal states for centuries prior to post-war migration into Europe. When Farer applies the term “migrant” to successive generations of Global South populations while arguing that the migrant status of Europeans in the US recedes within two generations (p. 25), he effectively ignores the enduring power of whiteness. Similarly, a plan calling for “psychological” assessments of whether migrants are even capable of integrating into a liberal state (p. 181) is a distinctly liberal strategy of exclusion. Entry is denied based on a perceived lack of capacity for democratic deliberation. Historically, liberals who worked in the service of empire used similar arguments as the basis for denying the capacity for self-government to colonial subjects.

With respect to migration, liberal strategies of exclusion operate by altering inclusion criteria rather than through outright denial. However, if non-white migrants pose a threat to Western liberal democracies, perhaps it is because their presence tests liberalism’s historical assumptions about who is a rational human subject. Unfortunately, Farer’s plan maintains the façade of human rights and due processes while emptying those protections of real meaning, thereby risking a reproduction of the very conditions of electoral authoritarianism it is designed to combat. At the same time, if a key motivation of this book is to spur a debate, then Farer is incredibly successful at doing just that. Not all readers will agree with its findings, but the book unapologetically asks the big questions about immigration and integration that sorely need to be openly addressed in Western liberal democracies today.