The debate about justice in immigration seems somehow stagnated given that it seems justice requires both further exclusion and more porous borders. In the face of this, I propose to take a step back and to realize that the general problem of borders—to determine what kind of borders liberal democracies ought to have—gives rise to two particular problems: first, to justify exclusive control over the administration of borders (the problem of legitimacy of borders) and, second, to specify how this control (...) ought to be exercised (the problem of justice of borders). The literature has explored the second but ignored the first. Therefore, I propose a different approach to the ethics of immigration by focusing on concerns of legitimacy in a three-step framework: first, identifying the kind of authority or power that immigration controls exercise; second, redefining borders as international and domestic institutions that issue that kind of power; and finally, considering supranational institutions that redistribute the right to exclude among legitimate borders. (shrink)

Christopher Wellman has argued that legitimate states enjoy a right to freedom of association that necessarily includes a right to exclude immigrants. This paper shows that Wellman’s argument for this conclusion is unsound since it is based on a construction of collective rights that is inapplicable to the rights of a state.

El presente artículo comienza reconstruyendo las razones por las cuales las teorías modernas se concentran en la ciudadanía como una garantía muy importante de legitimidad -arguyendo que la ciudadanía está intrínsecamente ligada a una forma republicana de orden político. La segunda parte del artículo muestra que, bajo las actuales condiciones de la globalización, la ciudadanía crea o mantiene un orden transnacional multinivel que impide que otras personas y políticas puedan realizar una ciudadanía (completa), y que incluso contribuyen a violaciones directas (...) de exigencias legítimas por parte de no-ciudadanos. La tercera parte discute críticamente las propuestas de Archibugi, Owen y Baubóck acerca de cómo repensar la ciudadanía transnacional o formas equivalentes de participación y control. En la parte final, el artículo aboga por una conexión entre la concepción de la ciudadanía constelación y una forma específica de democracia transnacional. Tal conexión permitiría a la ciudadanía seguir siendo el factor clave para la legitimidad. This article starts by reconstructing the reasons for the modern focus on citi-zenship as a major guarantee for legitimacy - arguing that citizenship is intricately linked to a republican form of political order. In its second part this paper shows that under the current conditions of globalization citizenships creates or maintains a transnational multi-level order which prevents other persons and polities from realizing (full) citizenship, and even contributes to direct violations of legitimate claims of non-citizens. The third part of the article critically discusses proposals by Archibugi, Owen and Baubóck, how to rethink transnational citizenship or equivalent forms of participation and control. And in its final part it advocates linking the conception of constellational citizenship to a specific form of trans-national democracy. With such a link citizenship could continue to be the key factor for legitimacy. (shrink)

This study is devoted to the ways and means to justify a ‘more’ cosmopolitan realization of certain policy implications, in the case of immigration. The raison d’être of this study is the idea that the contemporary debate over open borders suffers from indeterminate discussions on whether liberal states are entitled to restrict immigration. On the other hand, most of the liberal cosmopolitan accounts neglect the detrimental consequences of their open borders argument – which take it as a means to compensate (...) people in need –, such as brain drain and the effects of brain drain on the opportunity sets of members of sending countries. Therefore I offer a moral cosmopolitan account of immigration which takes the interests of would-be immigrants, the residents in receiving, along with the residents in sending countries in respect to their opportunity sets because of the way arbitrary border control represents the inequality of opportunity. I do not provide a well-formed immigration policy here, yet I believe the account provided here is more feasible in considering phenomena such as brain drain. (shrink)

Este ensayo analiza la relación dialéctica entre los conceptos de democracia y de ciudadanía a la luz de los debates actuales, en los que se combinan una transformación de la tradición filosófica y una evaluación de las situaciones en que se cuestiona la distinción jurídica entre el «ciudadano» y el «nacional». A partir de consideraciones sobre las tensiones semánticas de las categorías griegas y latinas (politeia, demokratia, isonomía, ius civitatis), se analizan las aporías de la democracia, entendida como modelo o (...) ideología, que filósofos como Jacques Rancière y Hannah Arendt nos permiten superar mediante la definición de la democracia como un proceso de insurrección permanente «anti-oligárquico» en lugar de un régimen estable. No es la propagación de la democracia, por lo tanto, lo que constituye el objeto primordial de la teoría política, sino la democratización de la democracia, de sí misma, especialmente en la forma de eliminación de la exclusión interna. Esta teoría se ilustra y se perfecciona aún más al referirse a los debates sobre la discriminación de clase y raza, las luchas violentas en busca del reconocimiento que afectan a las instituciones republicanas, las formas de ciudadanía nómadas o diaspóricas, y la relación entre derechos sociales y políticos. (shrink)

1. Among the most striking features of the political arrangements on this planet is its division into sovereign states.1 To be sure, in recent times, globalization has woven together the fates of communities and individuals in distant parts of the world in complex ways. It is partly for this reason that now hardly anyone champions a notion of sovereignty that would entirely discount a state’s liability the effects that its actions would have on foreign nationals. Still, state sovereignty persists as (...) a political fact. The number of states has increased enormously due to upheavals of the 20th century, and there is nothing in principle morally wrong with the existence of states - or so we will assume.2 What must be explored, then, are the limits of normatively plausible sovereignty. How bad does a government have to be for outsiders to be allowed to interfere? What responsibilities does a country incur because of its contribution to global warming? What obligations arise through trading? In this paper, we explore another pertinent question: to what extent is a country allowed to influence who lives on its territory by regulating immigration? The angle from which we approach this question continues to be neglected even now that questions of global justice are receiving much attention. Immigration amounts to a change in political relationships as immigrants alter their standing within one community and acquire a status elsewhere. Yet it also amounts to an alteration in physical relationship, since they acquire a relationship to a territory, making a life for themselves with the resources offered by a part of the earth.3 We base our exploration of.. (shrink)

Cet article est la traduction française de l’introduction du livre d’Ayelet Shachar, «The Puzzle of Birthright Citizenship», avec la permission de l’éditeur, tirée de The Birthright Lottery : Citizenship and Global Inequality, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp.1-18. © 2009 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Traduction de Martin Provencher.This paper is the French translation of Ayelet Shachar’s introduction, «The Puzzle of Birthright Citizenship», digitally reproduced by permission of the publisher from The Birthright Lottery : Citizenship and Global Inequality, Cambridge, (...) Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp.1-18. © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Translation by Martin Provencher. (shrink)

Despite being fundamental to democracy, the normative concept of the people, i.e. the demos, is highly unclear. This article clarifies the legitimacy of the demos’ boundaries by structuring the debate into three strains of justification: first, normative membership principles; second, its democratic functionality and the necessity of cohesion for this essential function; and third, a procedural understanding of the demos. It will be shown that normative principles can only justify its expansion towards the ideal of an unbounded demos. On the (...) other hand, the democratic function of the demos can be understood as a criterion for its restriction. This, however, is only possible on the basis of an existing polity and not for the initial constitution of the demos. Consequently, a legitimate demos has to take both inclusionary and exclusionary tendencies into account. These tendencies need to be weighed against each other in the democratic process, which leads to a fundamentally procedural understanding of the legitimacy of the demos. (shrink)

In the wake of a steady flow of child migrants attempting to cross borders and states’ efforts to restrict immigration, various public controversies have arisen about the rights of asylum-seeking children. The ‘moral gap’ between the outcome of democratically enacted laws and the aim of controlling immigration, on the one hand, and public calls to protect the universal rights of asylum seeking children, on the other, have created a political challenge for Western democracies. This thesis sets out to examine two (...) particular settings in which norms about the rights of asylum-seeking children and immigration control have been established and contested over the years: the Swedish Migration Court of Appeal and Sweden’s largest morning paper, Dagens Nyheter. It combines empirically oriented analysis with theoretical enquiry, and it brings the issue of the rights of asylumseeking children into dialogue with the contemporary political-philosophical debate about membership, rights and borders. (shrink)

I will first offer a general understanding of the flavor of libertarianism I will be using as the foundation for my argument for open borders. Then, I will summarize the argument put forth by Joseph Carens in “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” which consummates the importance of open border policy in maintaining the efficacy of property rights. After, I will supplement an additional argument to Carens’s in order to strengthen it. In this section, I will interpret Robert (...) Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia such that it informs the importance of the enforcement of a right of free movement and I will furthermore detail how border restrictions directly violate that right. In the final section of this paper, I will address criticisms made both by libertarian and liberal thinkers against the enforcement of a right of free movement. One of the liberal criticisms, in particular, will serve as a jumping-off point for a conversation highlighting the ways in which libertarian arguments for open borders differ from liberal arguments for open borders. These differences, I contend, illuminate how disparate these philosophical traditions are, especially in the manner that they conceive of rights. (shrink)