Listen to the Land: How to Talk about Immigration

Why cultures are so different, and how to bridge the gaps

Eight strangers face each other in a wild place. Maybe they stand on dewy grass and breathe crisp air. Or on thirsty, sun-cracked earth. A young woman hears the lonely cry of a hawk. Far away, an old man gazes through palms at an ocean he’s known since he was a boy. Wherever they are, and whoever they are, they’re here to talk about immigration. But nobody says a word.

This scene is not as it seems, but we’ll get to that. It can’t be, because to have a meaningful conversation about immigration, we have to flip the debate upside down. Until we do, identity politics will dominate Western societies and we will slide further into a regressive, authoritarian world.

Anti-immigration parties are becoming the most dominant forces in politics. Reform UK is on track to win the next election in Britain. Alternative für Deutschland is already the second-largest party in the Bundestag. The National Rally is the favourite to win the French presidency. The Trump administration’s ICE raids are the sharp end of a dangerous new political order.

Anti-immigration politics is ascendant for many reasons. The most significant is that immigration is out of control in Europe and the US, a position so obvious that moderate parties like Labour in the UK or the CDU in Germany have tightened their policies to stave off political irrelevance. In an already fractured society, the additional pressure on schools, hospitals, and the property market is both a real issue and a convenient scapegoat.

But the immigration debate isn’t just about economics. It’s about belonging, identity and meaning. Far-right parties are willing to say what has been unsayable for decades: “White culture and Western values matter, and we want to defend them.”

The message is so powerful that established parties are now scrambling to replicate it. Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, made waves when she was elected by saying that “not all cultures are equally valid” when it comes to immigration. To the technocratic remnants of the old political order, statements like this are ‘populist’. To a growing number of voters, they sound perfectly reasonable.

In many ways they are, but not without context, and context is hard to find in liberal democracies that oscillate endlessly between confused relativism and simplistic absolutism.

Finding a meaningful context for the immigration debate isn’t difficult. We just have to dodge ICE raids and autocratic scapegoating, ignore progressive platitudes about the benefits of multiculturalism, and reject corporate propaganda that sees human beings as capital to move around a balance sheet.

Half of the eight come from different cultural backgrounds, and half do not. They exchange awkward glances as a Speaker steps forward. She tells them that this isn’t the kind of conversation they might be used to. This one begins and ends in silence.

The context we need to have a real conversation about immigration arises when instead of asking which people belong where, we ask: “What transcends culture?”

The land.

Not ‘the land’ as an idea. The actual land you’re on as you read this. The geography. The soil. The water table. Jagged mountains and wave-broken rocks and humid jungle. The smell of fresh-cut turf on Santa Ana winds. Beneath the din of politics, rhetoric, rage and projection, the land is what matters most.

Discovering the Land

To understand why the land has to be at the centre of any immigration debate, we have to understand why it is that cultures are so different. Anthropologists and sociologists have many theories to explain this, but there is broad agreement that the geographies and ecologies our ancestors evolved in are fundamental to who we are today. The land creates constraints and incentives, and humans evolve cultures to adapt. But the story doesn’t end there. Culture keeps evolving. It interacts with technology, religion, economics and other cultures to make us who we are.

The research tells a story very different to the one adopted by fascists through the twentieth century and today. Their story says that race and genetics are the most important factors in our cultural differences. This story has been disproven both biologically and sociologically, and possibly why the shift in focus for far-right groups, certainly in the UK, is centred mainly around the threat of Islam as antithetical to Western liberal values, rather than a focus on innate racial difference. A strange kind of progress, or business as usual in a different guise.

The land creates differences between people in the same ethnic group that are often more significant than those between ethnic groups. As economist Thomas Sowell explains in Migrations and Cultures, even seemingly small geographical differences affect cultural evolution. For example, coastal people across the world tend to be more socially advanced than people with the same ethnicity and language further inland, because they have access to more ideas and technologies from other cultures.

Ethnically similar people inland can be more different to one another than to their coastal cousins. For example, Sowell points out that it is common for mountain ranges to have very different levels of rainfall on one side to another. The western slopes of the Apennines in Italy get around 2,000 millimeters of rain, for example, while the eastern slopes can get just 300–500 millimeters.

The difference in rainfall means difference in the gradient of the mountain, arable soil, what plants and animals can be farmed. “This has had important military implications,” Sowell explains. “Where the people on one side have found it easier to climb the gentler slope and then descend upon the other side to invade their neighbors.” This, in turn, leads to different hierarchies and social structures.

In a fascinating study from 2014, an international team of sociologists argue that differences in individualism and collectivism between East and West might be explained by the differences inherent in growing rice and wheat. To reduce the amount of variables between East and West, they studied differences between people from Northern and Southern China whose ancestors farmed wheat and rice respectively.

It is far more labour intensive to farm rice than wheat, in part because people have to create shared irrigation systems. Building and maintaining these systems requires close coordination. This in time relies on stable ties between people, with everyone agreeing on social norms to maintain these bonds.

In contrast, wheat can be grown mainly from natural rainfall. It is much less labor‑intensive, which means households can operate more autonomously.

The researchers found that modern respondents with cultural ancestry tied to these different crops, but who had never stepped foot on a farm, still exhibited cultural attitudes adapted to the crops. As the authors of the study put it, “You do not need to farm rice to inherit rice culture’. This ties in with other research which suggests that more interdependent livelihoods like farming and fishing are associated with more holistic/context‑sensitive cognition, while less interdependent livelihoods like herding are associated with analytic or object‑focused cognition.

Wheat is also a much more dramatic crop. Imagine how awkward this shot would be if he were wading through a rice paddy.

This isn’t to say that culture is only determined by the land. Once we adapt who we are to where we are, our cultures keep changing. As Harvard evolutionary psychologist Joe Henrich argues in The Secret of our Success, culture adapts and changes through a feedback loop. We interact with one another, exchanging cultural ideas and technologies, and the most adaptive results are selected for by our collective intelligence. This in turn changes our genetic and biological evolution, which then changes culture again.

Much of this happens when cultures interact with other cultures, which is why immigration has been a major force of innovation and positive change throughout human history. However, it isn’t just immigration itself that leads to collective evolution. What matters is that the right kinds of skills and ideas immigrate into a culture, a topic I will cover more fully in the next piece in this series.

The Missing Context

While culture has its own life and logic, the land lies at its heart. Identity and belonging matter, but they are abstract and dynamic while the land is always there. What is ‘Britishness’? What is ‘justice’? It depends who you ask, and in what era. These notions change over time. That’s why, if they aren’t rooted in something real, tangible and universal, they become incomprehensible.

That is why reactionary right-wing politics is as morally and intellectually void as critical social justice theory. It relies on abstract and empirically dubious claims to provide the fuel for a regressive politics of grievance and right-wing wokeism.

Demagogues throughout history have manipulated grievances by appealing to identity. They have drawn on national myths, revenge fantasies, and ancient grievances, talking about ‘our land’ without ever listening to it.

The land is the cure for regressive fantasy. Regardless of whether we live on a land we were born on, or immigrated, we are still tangibly shaped by the sun and soil. It is in our past, our present, and our future. It doesn’t care about our politics.

The land is where the immigration debate begins and ends, because without a unifying ‘third position’ that contextualises all of our different cultures. If some cultures are better than others, but we have no standard aside from abstract values created by one culture to determine this, we’re already stuck. A proponent of female genital mutilation can argue that their cultural belief is as valid as feminism, for example. To avoid this, we need a concrete principle we can measure against.

Some cultures are better than others because, like the land, they do not dominate or subjugate based on ideology or religious dogma. Some cultures respect life and growth and freedom more than others. Some cultures use the land’s resources better than others, understanding they are limited and must be approached reciprocally. Not because they are inherently superior, but because the adaptations that created their values are out of step with the land they are on.

Context allows for communication. Without it, we get stuck in a relativistic mess where one extreme argues we should have no national borders, while the other wants to wall the borders or place guns around the coasts.

Communication

The people gathered in this wild place are listening again, but not to the sounds of nature. Now there is a Speaker, who is recounting the history of the land. The glaciers that shaped it. The movement of people through generations. Which crops thrive here, and which don’t. The keystone species required for its health, and the complex history of war and famine and love and hope that shaped the minds of the people here.

At its heart, the increasingly dangerous tone of the immigration debate in the West is a communication issue. It is also a resource issue and an economic issue, but these can be viewed as one interconnected process, because they are aspects of what German sociologist Jürgen Habermas refers to as a ‘legitimation crisis’.

A legitimation crisis is a decline in the public’s confidence in institutions, leadership, or the administrative functions of a state or organization. When we no longer see the system we live in as reasonable or acceptable, the state’s ability to function and meet the needs of its people or members is threatened.

Nothing says ‘protect the borders’ like a Franciscan Friar fighting zombies with a crucifix while a giant imprisons the Big Ben. Powerful stuff.

Immigration policies dictated by the demands of global corporations and banks at the expense of local populations are a major factor in our ongoing legitimation crisis. An increasing number of people don’t trust that the elites have their interests at heart, or the competence to protect them. In response, counter-elites like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen are ascendant, while progressives are floundering.

However, reactionary solutions won’t be any more effective than technocratic coldness. As Habermas points out, these crises are ultimately rooted in breakdown in our shared ‘lifeworld’, our culturally-rooted, and usually informally agreed-upon, norms and values. For Habermas, the forces of economics and politics are distinct from our day to day lived experience within a culture (our lifeworld), but often intrude on it and create cognitive dissonance. When that happens, for example when Angela Merkel invited over a million Syrian refugees into Germany, government policies act against the cultural norms and values. In Sweden the situation is more extreme, with almost a quarter of the population having been born overseas.

These rapid cultural changes are an example of the lifeworld being colonised by the demands of the state and corporations. Until recently, resistance to this was framed by governments and media in Europe (two examples of what Habermas calls ‘steering functions’ that direct society) as racist and regressive. Instead, the people were fed with technocratic jargon about the benefits of multiculturalism and its economic and moral necessity. Free and open debate was stifled, and unable to explore these issues openly, eventually the most regressive and racist voices in society became ascendent.

The failures around immigration in Europe and the US represent a colossal failure by not just the state, but the worldview it espoused. This unacknowledged and unresolved betrayal is rocket fuel for demagogues, but history has shown that their answers only lead to further division and less freedom for everyone.

If we want to move forward culturally, we need to ‘decolonise our lifeworld’ from inept and regressive economic and political policies on all sides of the political spectrum. As Habermas argues, a problem rooted in cultural communication can only be solved by reinvigorating how we connect and communicate. We have to reclaim culture as a place where decisions are made through open discussion and mutual understanding.

We can’t do that on social media, traditional media or the political sphere. So how do we bring people together for a new kind of dialogue in multicultural societies? What does it mean in countries with a colonial history? How do we reconcile that human beings are both transient and stationary, traditionalist and progressive?

We center the debate on something real, something that all of us rely on: the land. I have been thinking of how to do that for weeks, and while working on this piece I had a semi-lucid dream I had recently. In it, I saw a version of the vignette I opened this piece with.

A process to help people find a new way to talk about these issues, and one that can be practiced anywhere in the world. It works as a practice, and would also work as a reality TV show format in countries wrestling with these issues. Facilitators around the world can easily adopt and adapt it. I’m sharing it below with the hope that people might pick it up and develop it.

Listen to the Land

Nine people gather in a wild place. They are a mix of ages, social class and origin. Eight of them are Listeners. One is the Speaker, who acts as a guide and facilitator.

The Speaker and four Listeners have an ancestral connection to the land going back at least four generations. In countries with an indigenous population no longer in the majority, at least two of these four have indigenous ancestry.

Another two Listeners are second or third generation immigrants. One Listener is a recent economic migrant. The last Listener fits none of these criteria, or so many of them that they can’t place themselves.

They would probably never meet each other outside of this circle. What unites them, aside from their humanity, is that they are all willing to have hard conversations about immigration. To explore belonging and place with an open mind. They hold different political and social views, from far right to far left, moderate to unconventional.

They can gather anywhere in the country they live in, as long as it is wild. Far from the city, which has its own identity and gravity. In those countries where no truly wild places exist, then a place where wildness is trying to return.

To keep things simple, I will act as Speaker for this example, even though I don’t meet my own criteria for the land I’ve chosen: the English countryside. That’s just how it is with the movement of people: it doesn’t play by strict rules.

What is my relationship to this land? Half German and half Irish, but my genetic ancestry is spread across this island too. I’ve lived in England for fifteen years. Its inhabitants used to have an Empire that occupied one of my countries for 700 years. But the other side of my ancestry, then known as the Saxons, invaded this island 1500 years ago after the Romans left. It’s complicated.

This awesome map was absolutely worth giving my DNA to a private company.

Our gathering happens on a country estate in England, on land that was deforested hundreds of years ago, then turned into farmland, and is now being rewilded. Beavers are back, shaping the landscape and crafting new waterways, increasing the insect life and turning this land back into the savannah it used to be. Ancient breeds of cattle graze over grasslands stretched between copses of oak and ash.

The Listeners arrive alone, all at different times. They are greeted at a farm house, where they hand in their phones. Stripping themselves of the otherworld of the internet, with its demons and angels and empty promises. They are given a pair of wellington boots and protection from the elements and led outside. A guide brings them across the land. They move in silence, eventually reaching a forest clearing. Here they stand and wait for the others to arrive.

Once the eight Listeners have gathered, the Speaker arrives. If I were Speaker, I would begin by inviting the Listeners to look around the circle. Who is here? What is the first thing that comes to mind when you look at each person? I might remind them that they don’t actually know anything about each other. Not yet.

They don’t know what anyone’s political beliefs are, or how long they’ve lived in this country. Perhaps they assume the white people trace their ancestry back many generations, and the Black and Asian Listeners are newer to the land, but these are all assumptions. When it comes to culture, nothing is simple, and nothing is certain.

They eye one another curiously, their minds making connections, psyches projecting and weaving. I would then explain that for the first ten minutes, we are all going to stand in complete silence and listen to the land. To come to our senses. Observe the sky, the trees, the grass. The land, I would remind them, doesn’t care about their notions on immigration or identity or colonialism. There are no victims or persecutors in nature. There is no ‘yes buts’ or ‘have you read’ or ‘you owe me’.

What does the land say? They’ll only know if they listen.

And so they do. They listen to the land and absorb its sights and smells, its offerings and warnings. For some of the city dwellers, it’s uncomfortable. Watch Emily’s fingers twitch at her pocket before she remembers she handed her phone in. Others glance awkwardly at one another, minds racing with unspoken thoughts.

What is this nonsense? … This is … What did I sign up for?

But silence has a way of speaking louder than fear. It permeates the circle. Once I’d felt the silence had gone on long enough, I’d speak and invite the Listeners to share one by one in order of age, oldest to youngest, what they observed. I’d invite the Listeners to listen to the others with as much attention as they did the land. Without interrupting, or offering opinions; just listening curiously.

Emily: Not sure if anyone else heard that - tweek tweek tweek? Made me think of my grandmother’s home growing up. It was peaceful.

Abdul: Bro, it’s quiet here. I don’t like it, it feels weird. Like heavy somehow. I’m used to sirens.

James: I could hear this rustling, like really far away. Felt like it’s something my ancestors would have heard. Makes me want to get a bow and arrow or something, go hunting.

After the sharing, it is time to tell the story of the land. The Speaker, having researched the geography, history and myths of the land, shares what they have found. Combining both local lore with more general history of the land and culture, they paint a detailed picture.

It’s said that when the Saxons came here, a young Merlin came across these fields on his way to Snowdonia… for eight generations in the 1700s, this was the site of a cotton mill. Not far from here, canals took flax to London and Liverpool, and sometimes from there across the ocean… During the second world war there was a hospital here… Today, after EU subsidies made farming prohibitively expensive, the owners decided to rewild the land…

This used to be a Chipotle until the beavers ruined it.

If I were the Speaker, I’d now ask the Listeners to share what that history brought up for them. How did it make them feel? How does it relate to their story?

Next, the Speaker talks about the land’s resources.

In the country as a whole, there are about 17.2 million acres of agricultural land, and about one third of that is arable. The soil in this area has a high peat content, so potatoes and carrots tend to grow well here. A few hours’ drive north it starts to become loamier, and a wider range of crops are grown. We’ve seen a forty percent decline in insect density in this area in the last two decades. The cost of farming has increased, and some say this form of centralised agriculture is unsustainable. It may be that we all need to start growing food, and re-learning the skills to do so…

As Speaker, I would now ask: what is the land like where you are from?

Amrita: I grew up in Bangladesh in the 1970’s but we moved when I was ten. What I remember and what I notice when I go back is how flat and green it is.

Emily: It’s basically like this. But actually I’ve never really been on a farm before, I hadn’t thought about what grows and what doesn’t…

Diji: It’s much warmer where I grew up. When you talked about potatoes I was thinking about yams. I was thinking about how similar and how different they are.

And now, having established ourselves here and placed the land as the center of our conversation, we move on to culture. The Speaker explains how the land shaped the people, how new people coming to this place shaped the land. What was the interaction between culture, economics, religion and technology? What effect is immigration having on the land today? Above all, what do we all owe the land?

This kind of gathering can happen on the bayous, or the beaches, or in the mountains. But it isn’t quite over. For the last part, we will sit together. From a farmhouse in the countryside, or from a trailer set on the dusty earth, or from a rickety old boat pulled up on the beach, the Listeners take some chairs and set them in a circle.

Now we can sit together. A bit closer to knowing one another as complex people whose ancestors travelled far and wide or laid down roots for generations. People make eye contact. A small smile here and there.

And then the Speaker prepares to facilitate the discussion around the question we’ve all come to ask.

Who belongs on this land?

Beyond the Land

For a multicultural society to function, the people have to be accountable to the land in some way. They have to share a stake in its health and history, its future and its potential. In the disconnected realm of the city and the internet, where these links are often broken, the conversation inevitably gets stuck on identity and belonging.

These matter, but they are shallow if they aren’t rooted in the land. It’s what we all belong to, regardless of who we are or where we came from. We can’t expect to find solutions in abstract notions of ‘Britishness’ or ‘Frenchness’ when we sold those concepts decades ago in exchange for Uber, DoorDash, fast-fashion and iPhones. The concepts are too diffuse, and were in any case always going to change and evolve as we tried to grasp them, because that’s how culture works.

In a similar way, traditionalist appeals to religious identity or ‘Western liberal values’ are both useful and too centred on shifting abstractions and imagined pasts to act as solid ground. To do the seemingly impossible and honour indigenous white identity in countries like the UK while also defusing it of its narrow tribalism, everyone has to be in service to something greater. Something that doesn’t have opinions about who belongs where, but nevertheless feeds and clothes everyone.

The ‘Listen to the Land’ process I’ve shared here is in its early phases, but I plan on testing it out in 2026 here in the UK. If anyone wants to do the same somewhere else, let me know and if there’s enough energy we’ll have a call around it and see what we can all cook up together. We’ll be workshopping this process in our next Founding Member session on Wednesday 5 November.

Most people aren’t facilitators or in a position to host something like this, so I’m also sharing the fundamentals behind this, as it includes many of the elements we need for a new conversation around immigration. These elements are worth highlighting, as you might find a way to apply them to a different domain.

Within reason, obviously. If you’re big into rock painting maybe sit this one out.

Firstly, the process introduces a third position into the debate (the land), which has a strong empirical basis, and can help people contextualise their own experience and depersonalise the issues. Research has shown that creating ‘distance from the self’ in this way promotes intellectual humility and openness to other perspectives.

Secondly, the process removes people from their day-to-day experience and can act as a ‘pattern interrupt’ in a debate that is increasingly volatile. Research has shown that awe in response to nature increases prosociality, generosity and ethical decision-making while reducing self-focus. Added to this, as the famous Robbers Cave experiment in the 1950s demonstrated, introducing novel contexts and shared goals into rivalrous groups can reduce intergroup hostility.

Thirdly, centering on embodiment and prioritising immediate felt experience over abstract concepts brings people into deeper contact with one another. Embodiment is the foundation of mindfulness, which has been shown to reduce automatic stereotyping. Embodiment practices also train people in the necessary cognitive and emotional regulation techniques to actually have a meaningful conversation, instead of arguing with projections of one another.

Lastly, coming together in this way reconnects us to something we’ve lost in Western culture. Responsibility to something greater than ourselves. None of us can take from the land without giving back. Living somewhere without respecting its history, soul and culture is taking without giving. Deciding that as a native of a land your opinion about who belongs is of a higher order than the land itself is also taking without giving.

To know what to give and what to take, and how to thrive together, we first have to listen to the land.

The next piece in this series will explore immigration through the lens of religion, race and the politics of betrayal. First as a paid member piece before it goes live for everyone. To get early access and unlock many other archive pieces, sign up as a paid member.