Under which conditions, if any, is it morally permissible for states to grant non-citizen residents (‘denizens’) different political, socio-economic, and cultural rights than citizens? What, if anything, could justify legal rights-differentiations along the lines of citizenship? This special issue scrutinizes these politically increasingly salient questions from a wide range of perspectives, drawing on recent literature in the ethics of migration, citizenship, multiculturalism, and refuge, as well as on normative theories of law, territory, and settler colonialism. In this introduction to the (...) volume, I sketch a conceptual map of the emerging debate on justice for denizens, making explicit some underlying theoretical assumptions common to each of the three key domains of legal rights-differentiations (political, socio-economic, and cultural rights). I distinguish the question of what is owed to denizens as a matter of justice, from that of what justice permits and requires in respect to denizens generally. And I outline four models, implicit in the literature, for theorizing the moral rights different types of denizens have and lack – to help determine which forms of unequal treatment wrong them. I conclude by providing brief summaries of the seven contributing articles, pinpointing them on my conceptual map. (shrink)

This paper offers a metaethical analysis of so-called political moralism’s metaethical assumptions and proposes shifting away from them. It does so by taking migration ethics’ methodology as a case study of the field. First, the paper shows political moralism’s commitment to moral monism and moral overridingness. Second, it explains how such commitments are likely to lead to the formulation of toy theories - and, hence, moral regress. Third, it proposes the recognition of prudential normativity and normative pluralism as a way (...) to avoid the toy theory problem. And, fourth, it deals with two objections to this proposal. (shrink)

Low-skilled migrants in wealthy receiving states are routinely subordinated across a range of social contexts. There is a rich philosophical literature on the inferiorizing effects of “crimmigration”—that is, the growing criminalization of unauthorized migrants and the state’s use of uniquely harsh law enforcement methods against them. Yet there is less interest in the existing racialized division of migrant labor. Low-skilled Latino/a/x migrants disproportionately perform “dirty” and “difficult” work that citizens do not wish to perform. Theoretically, this division of labor is (...) compatible with a more permissive immigration system that legally admitted far larger numbers of low-skilled migrants to continue “doing the dirty work.” Indeed, many have assumed the desirability of such a system. Against this, I argue that “crimmigration” and the racialized division of migrant labor cannot be conceptually disentangled. Rather, they are mutually constitutive in reproducing background conditions that constrain the social equality of low-skilled migrants, as well as others perceived to be such. “Crimmigration” has not only excluded migrants, but enabled states to include them on socially unequal terms: as an instrumental and fungible source of cheap labor. Drawing on Alasia Nuti’s valuable observation that “banal” historical mechanisms like stereotypes and social scripts can play a crucial role in maintaining present-day injustice, I show that stereotypes of migrants as workers in low-skilled occupations, as well as the expectation that they continue to take on those jobs, also profoundly undermine immigration justice. (shrink)

Many of the most influential theorists of linguistic justice make arguments on the basis of comparisons between language and religion. They claim either that (1) language, by contrast with religion, cannot be separated from the state or that (2) unequal official linguistic recognition, just like unequal official religious recognition, is morally problematic. This article argues that careful attention to debates about liberalism and the place of religion in public life invites us to question the two above-mentioned liberal assumptions about religion (...) underlying many arguments concerning linguistic justice based on (dis)analogies between language and religion. The hope is that such critical scrutiny is likely to shed some light on normative questions of linguistic justice, more precisely on questions about the legitimacy of granting more recognition to certain languages, usually those of national native groups (as opposed to groups resulting from more or less recent immigration). (shrink)

Political judgments usually combine a normative principle or intuition with an appreciation of empirical facts regarding the achievability of different options and their potential consequences. The interesting question dividing partisans of political idealism and realism is whether these kinds of considerations should be integrated into the normative principles themselves or considered apart. At first sight, if a theorist is concerned with guiding political judgments, non-ideal or realist theorizing can seem more attractive. In this article, however, I argue that ideal theorizing (...) might be considered valuable even by theorists moved by a pragmatic concern because it is less exposed to conservatism. I nonetheless contend that the aim to guide action in the world as it is should not be abandoned. Therefore, I outline a four-step method for proceeding from abstract moral principles to concrete political judgments and apply it to a test case. (shrink)