Immigration

By Jon Eden Khan

In Western liberal democracies, as labour shortages, aging demographics, refugee crises, and spiralling climate change fuel waves of immigration, the right and left are at war over this topic.

At their best, the left is fighting for inclusion, diversity, cross-cultural integration, compassion, and the end of racism and systemic injustice. In the shadows there is a posture of moral superiority, prejudice against the very people they judge as guilty of discrimination, and a lack of tolerance and inclusivity for the experience and challenges of people who think differently to them.

At their best, the right is fighting for healthy borders, cultural coherence, as well as healthy ethnic and national identity. In the shadows there is racism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, selfishness, unacknowledged privilege, disregard for the struggles of other nations and cultures, cruelty, and a closed heart.

Going Beyond the Polarisation

In Singularity, we perceive that neither side has the answer independently. The shadows of both must be acknowledged, and the best of both is needed for us to begin to find a healthy and whole approach to immigration.

We begin from an insight that has appeared repeatedly across humanity’s wisdom traditions and contemplative lineages: that beneath the immense diversity of human cultures, identities, and forms of life, there is a sacred unity that binds us all into a single, shared human reality.

This recognition has been articulated in many spiritual and philosophical languages, and rediscovered through sustained practices of contemplation, reflection, and ethical inquiry. While expressed differently across cultures, it consistently points toward a fundamental unity that grounds dignity, mutual responsibility, and care for the whole.

Singularity does not treat this insight as a belief that must be shared, but as a civilisational orientation with practical implications. When taken seriously, it invites governance systems that recognise humanity as one interdependent family, while still honouring the real and meaningful differences between peoples, cultures, and communities.  

Coherence, Opening, Integration, Synthesis

In terms of immigration, Singularity takes the position that we need leaders who can rightly honour both the unity and diversity sides of life — the one and the many.

Not just in words that are spoken on top of actions that maintain old lines of division and separation between East and West, North and South. But as a fully active stand that participates in the indivisible One at the heart of the celebrated Many on ever deeper levels. 

Additionally, we also perceive that each ethnic, cultural, and national group needs to maintain a healthy internal sense of its own lineage, traditions, and history, and that this will provide the best foundation to receive an external influx of humans from other cultural, ethnic, and national backgrounds.

Once such an influx has happened, as in the case of immigration, there will often need to be a process of integration and consolidation that can establish a new coherence and eventual synthesis. This would be through education, language, housing, and civic orientation processes, some of which already exist in certain nations today. Important here is that integration is supported by the state and is not simply an expectation of the culture.

The new coherence and synthesis that is possible on the other side of integration will need to include the greater ethnic and cultural diversity now present, but in a way that balances healthy preservation of the traditions, values, lineage, and cultural norms of each group, and with greater interconnection between them.

The arriving immigrants will need to learn about and integrate the cultural context, norms, and values they are entering into, whilst also preserving their own. And the original population must be able to receive the wave of immigrants, and become acclimatised to their culture, traditions, lineage and history, without it being existential for their own culture and way of life. Nations have a right to stable borders, physically and emotionally, just like they also have a role to play in the global arena when it comes to care for human beings experiencing crisis.

Over time, a natural integration can happen that establishes a new synthesis while preserving what matters most from both populations.

The Failures of Immigration

Mostly, it hasn’t gone this way. Major challenges such as climate migration, the demographics of aging populations, refugee crises, and labour shortages have been drivers for mass immigration without the above-named processes having enough space. And the fact that we have been entering an increasingly global era where the issues of humanity at large are so present now for so many has significant contributed to the tensions around immigration today.

Humanity is yet to truly own the truth that we are and have always been one. Ancient lines of division have persisted for so long that for most, they are normal. The legacies of invasion, colonisation, racism, domination, and inequality pervade the history of migration on the planet.

Often there has been no understanding that navigating immigration healthily requires clear leadership that can articulate the truth of the one diverse humanity; the cyclic opening and closing of borders, as part of a deliberate, democratically stewarded process, which allows all the populations in question the time and space to integrate with each other without losing themselves; government programs to support that process; and all this in a way that is also responsive to times of crisis where there is a need to offer asylum to refugees who are fleeing danger in their home country.

Instead, immigration processes have been haphazard, often veering between large-scale admittance without adequate programs to preserve cultural coherence on one side, and violent rejection and dehumanisation of immigrants on the other.

Of course there are examples of the in-between, and yet the rise in popularity of nationalist leaders today can be seen as a direct response to the liberal globalisation project having fundamentally failed to balance and steward the processes and principles discussed in this article.

A Different Way

In Singularity we’d argue that the answer isn’t an oscillation from globalisation to nationalism, although this does point to an instinctual attempt in the collective, overlaid with a multitude of shadows and additional variables, to integrate what the liberal globalisation project has been unable to.

The challenge for humanity today is, how do we collectively accept that no ‘side’ - the political right or left - is going to win this battle, because neither has the whole answer?

 And rather, how do we together step into a healthy engagement with this process that integrates an uncompromising recognition that humanity is one, with an honoured diversity that includes all national, ethnic, and cultural groups, and the stewarding of immigration in a way that allows for cycles of opening, integration, and synthesis? And all while remaining responsive to the wider contexts of planetary crisis in which ecological, economic, social, and geopolitical issues are producing huge waves of immigration.

These are some of the most fundamental questions facing political leaders today. Humanity is increasingly interdependent and interconnected. As the pressure of the global crisis builds, cultures and ethnic groups are desperate for stability and safety. Stewarding these tensions requires new leadership that can balance cohesion, inclusivity, diversity and our essential unity.