I am empathetic to the plight of the world’s poor. If I were born in the bottom 99% of any sub-Saharan African country, I have little doubt I would attempt to swim across the Strait of Gibraltar to reach Europe and use any available means to bring my extended family afterward. But I also recognize two things: first, that suffering exists in the West as well; and second, that imposing mass immigration against the will of the people undermines both the rule of law and the democratic values we claim to uphold. In this paper, I will explore how empathy has been and can be misdirected in ways which are hurtful to migrant-receiving nations.
Charles Dickens’s character Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House is a fitting symbol here. Dickens, who in modern parlance, would be referred to as a social justice warrior, through Jellyby coined the term “telescopic philanthropy”, a sentimental concern for distant causes that blinds her to the suffering directly before her. Mrs. Jellyby is so obsessed with her grand mission to civilize Africa that she neglects her own filthy, chaotic household. Letters and pamphlets for her Borrioboola-Gha project spill across every surface of her home. Her children are dirty and neglected. Dickens uses her to satirize moral vanity disguised as compassion, a kind of empathy that is performative and disconnected from responsibility.
Like Mrs. Jellyby, modern empathy politics prioritizes symbolic humanitarianism over the effects felt by the average citizen. Under-resourced schools absorb sudden enrollment spikes, low-income regions shoulder the burden of social integration, public services strain under increased demand and a sense of shared community breaks down. The loudest advocates of these policies often remain insulated from these effects. Their role is largely rhetorical, publicly promoting compassion, dignity, and inclusion, while privately enjoying the social rewards of their signalled virtue.
Germany’s migration policy during the 2010s offers a telling parallel. One friend shared an instance with me where many of his German friends who supported high levels of immigration refused to send their children to schools with large migrant populations. Their choices betray a revealed preference. Like Mrs. Jellyby, those friends either reserve their empathy for those who are abstract and distant, or they value the social benefits of appearing compassionate more than the actual consequences of their positions (or both). The abstract and distant are ideals untainted by human flaws. They are easy to love. The flaws of your friends, family, neighbors and countrymen are obvious; nonetheless, it is the essential challenge of the human experience to love those who are flawed.
A similar problem lies in the instinct toward self-blame prevalent in Western political discourse. While the colonial and neo-imperial legacy of the West is at best mixed and at worst outright harmful, the notion that sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, and Syria are poor solely due to Western exploitation is, at best, greatly overstated and, at worst, ahistorical. Their poverty is not primarily a result of this relationship, but instead reflective of the typical human experience—one historically marked by war, tyranny, and famine. Historically speaking most of humanity lived lives which were nasty, brutish, and short and the fact that we live in a time and in places where that is not so is an aberration and a blessing. While each of us should feel a moral obligation to do good, and perhaps to repair the inherent sinfulness of the human condition, the perspective that we owe a collective debt to particular geographic regions of the world, is misplaced.
This dissonance had geopolitical consequences. In a previous class our instructor stated that Brexit would never have happened without Germany’s migration policy. I share this view. The Brexit campaign did not need complex slogans. Three words - “One million Syrians” was enough. These words, usually appended with “and they will come here” by Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson at Wetherspoonses across the UK, captured voters’ fears more effectively than any manifesto.
This paper is not an attack on empathy. It is a warning about how empathy can be manipulated. Empathy should be celebrated, not denigrated. It is a virtue. When I look to liberal colleagues I do not see baddies. I see people who care. That said, political coalitions are often composed of Bootleggers and Baptists—a term from public choice theory coined by economist Bruce Yandle. The phrase originates from the Prohibition era, when moral crusaders (the Baptists) campaigned to outlaw alcohol in the name of public virtue, while illegal liquor dealers (the Bootleggers) quietly supported the same laws because they eliminated legal competition. Though their motives were different, both groups aligned in pushing the same policy. In immigration debates, empathy often plays the Baptist’s role: the language of compassion, dignity, and inclusion rallies public support and shapes the moral framing. Behind that framing, however, the Bootleggers, businesses seeking cheap labor and political parties eyeing demographic advantage, pursue more self-serving goals. The result is that empathy, though often genuine, can become moral cover for policies which benefit the few, undermine democracy and rule of law and are harmful to the society at large.
We should also recognize that empathy does not exist in a vacuum, it is shaped by the moral ether of a society. This ether is inherited from past generations and molded by the prevailing power structure. What a culture deems “empathetic” reflects its dominant moral consensus, not a universal truth. Consider Vienna as an example: an empathetic moderate living in Vienna across the early twentieth century might have supported three very different regimes over the course of a couple decades: the Habsburg monarchy, the Nazis, and later the socialists. In each case, the individual’s empathy would have aligned with whatever ideology held moral authority at the time. Empathy without ideology can therefore be subject to the whims of the power structure rather than stand on its own. All-in-all, there are far darker moral ethers in world (and European) history than the liberal order of modern Europe, where perhaps too much empathy is extended toward migrant communities and not enough to native Europeans. But acknowledging that relative goodness should not prevent us from imagining other, better orders.