Liberal democracies benefit greatly from immigration, both economically and culturally. But they also unquestionably have the right to control their own borders. A democratic political system is based on a contract between government and citizen in which both have obligations. Such a contract makes no sense without delimitation of citizenship and exercise of the franchise.

All people have a basic human right to citizenship, something that, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, cannot be arbitrarily taken away from them. But that does not mean they have the right to citizenship in any particular country. International law does not, moreover, challenge the right of states to control their borders, or to set criteria for citizenship.

Liberal democracies benefit greatly from immigration, both economically and culturally.

The situation in the United States is somewhat different. The country has been very inconsistent in the enforcement of its immigration laws over the years. This enforcement is not impossible but is a matter of political will. While levels of deportations began rising under the Obama administration, the often arbitrary nature of these actions does not make for a sustainable long-term policy.

Enforcement does not require a border wall; a huge proportion of undocumented aliens have entered the country legally but have remained on expired visas. Rather, the rules could be better enforced through a system of employer sanctions, which requires a national identification system that will tell employers who is legitimately in the country. This has not happened because too many employers benefit from the cheap labour that immigrants provide and do not want to act as enforcement agents.

It has also not come about because of a uniquely American opposition to a national ID system, based on a suspicion of government shared by left and right alike. As a result, the United States now hosts a population of some 11 to 12 million undocumented aliens. The vast majority of these people have been in the country for years and are doing useful work, raising families, and otherwise behaving as law-abiding citizens.

Identity politics is rooted in a world in which the poor and marginalised are invisible to their peers. Resentment over lost status starts with real economic distress, and one way of muting the resentment is to mitigate concerns over jobs, incomes and security. Particularly in the United States, much of the left stopped thinking several decades ago about ambitious social policies that might help remedy the underlying conditions of the poor. It was easier to talk about respect and dignity than to come up with potentially costly plans that would concretely reduce inequality.

For much of the twentieth century, politics in liberal democracies revolved around broad economic policy issues. The progressive left wanted to protect ordinary people from the vagaries of the market, and to use the power of the state to more fairly distribute resources. The right for its part wanted to protect the free enterprise system and the ability of everyone to participate in market exchange. Communist, socialist, social democratic, liberal and conservative parties all arrayed themselves on a spectrum from left to right that could be measured by the desired degree of state intervention, and commitment alternatively to equality or to individual freedom.

There were important identity groups as well, including parties whose agendas were nationalist, religious or regional in scope. But the stability of democratic politics in the period from the end of World War II up to the present revolved around dominant centre-left and centre-right parties that largely agreed on the legitimacy of a democratic welfare state.

This consensus now represents an old establishment that is being hotly contested by new parties firmly rooted in identity issues. This constitutes a big challenge for the future of democratic politics. While fights over economic policy produced sharp polarisation early in the twentieth century, democracies found that opposing economic visions could often split the difference and compromise.

New Imagined Dystopias

And its anonymity removed existing restraints on civility. Not only did it support society’s willingness to see itself in identity terms; it promoted new identities through online communities, as countless subreddits have done.

Fears about the future are often best expressed through fiction, particularly science fiction that tries to imagine future worlds based on new kinds of technology. In the first half of the twentieth century, many of these forward-looking fears centred around big, centralised, bureaucratic tyrannies that snuffed out individuality and privacy. George Orwell’s 1984 foresaw Big Brother controlling individuals through the telescreen, while Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World saw the state using biotechnology to stratify and control society.

But the nature of imagined dystopias began to change in the later decades of the century, when environmental collapse and out-of-control viruses took centre stage. However, one particular strand spoke to the anxieties raised by identity politics. Cyberpunk authors such as Bruce Sterling, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson saw a future dominated not by centralised dictatorships but by uncontrolled social fragmentation that was facilitated by a new emerging technology called the internet.

Our present world is simultaneously moving towards the opposing dystopias of hypercentralisation and endless fragmentation. China, for instance, is building a massive dictatorship in which the government collects data on the daily transactions of every one of its citizens and uses big-data techniques and a social credit system to control its population. On the other hand, different parts of the world are seeing the breakdown of centralised institutions, the emergence of failed states, polarisation and a growing lack of consensus over common ends. Social media and the internet have facilitated the emergence of self-contained communities, walled off not by physical barriers but by belief in shared identity.

The nice thing about dystopian fiction is that it almost never comes true. That we can imagine how current trends will play themselves out in an ever more exaggerated fashion serves as a useful warning: 1984 became a potent symbol of a totalitarian future we wanted to avoid and helped inoculate us from it.

Our present world is simultaneously moving towards the opposing dystopias of hypercentralisation and endless fragmentation.

We can imagine better places to be in, which take account of our societies’ increasing diversity, yet present a vision for how that diversity will still serve common ends and support rather than undermine liberal democracy. Identity is the theme that underlies many political phenomena today, from new populist nationalist movements, to Islamist fighters, to the controversies taking place on university campuses.

We will not escape from thinking about ourselves and our society in identity terms. But we need to remember that the identities dwelling deep inside us are neither fixed nor necessarily given to us by our accidents of birth. Identity can be used to divide, but it can and has also been used to integrate. That in the end will be the remedy for the populist politics of the present.