زبان تخصصي :‌ (‌ مفاهیم تخصصی8)  Citizenship and borders 8

Citizenship and borders

Does the political community have the moral right to decide who can/cannot become a citizen or mustn't we recognize the right to free movement? Much of the philosophical debate has turned around two issues: first, on the nature of our obligations towards people from impoverished countries who seek better lives for themselves and their families; second, on the moral status of political communities and their supposed right to protect their integrity by excluding non members.

Does the political community have the moral right to decide who can/cannot become a citizen or mustn't we recognize the right to free movement? Much of the philosophical debate has turned around two issues: first, on the nature of our obligations towards people from impoverished countries who seek better lives for themselves and their families; second, on the moral status of political communities and their supposed right to protect their integrity by excluding non members.

One way of characterizing our obligation to strangers insists that, absent any relations of cooperation, common humanity is our only bond. It is argued that only a rather weak, imperfect or conditional duty of assistance can be inferred from such a premise. This duty limits the basic right of the political community to distribute membership as it wishes without, in any way, displacing it. Individuals have a duty to assist strangers in urgent need if they can provide assistance without exposing themselves to significant risk or cost. At a collective level, the implications are more considerable as political communities have greater resources and can consider a broader range of benevolent actions at comparably negligible cost. The principle of mutual aid may justify redistribution of membership, territory, wealth and resources to the extent that certain states have more than they can reasonably be said to need (Walzer 1983, 47). In this framework, redistributive policies remain, however, entirely dependent on wealthier countries' understanding of their needs and of the urgency of a stranger's situation. There is no obligation to give equal weight to the interests of non-members.

Institutionally, this position supports what the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees (United Nations 1951) calls the principle of “non refoulement”: signatory states are not to deport refugees and asylum seekers to their countries of origin if this threatens their lives and freedom. It can also support claims in favour of increasing the number of immigrants admitted into richer countries, depending on how the latter evaluate the potential effects on their own interests.

Critics contend that our obligations towards migrants and asylum-seekers go well beyond this and call for a policy of open borders. Two strategies are proposed: the first consists in arguing that freedom of movement is a fundamental human right. One way of doing this is to show that any theory recognizing the equal moral value of individuals and giving them moral primacy over communities cannot justify rejecting aliens' claims to admission and citizenship. As Joseph Carens demonstrated in an early article, this argument applies to the three main strands of contemporary liberal theory: libertarianism (a la Nozick), Rawlsianism and utilitarianism (Carens 1987). If we give the principle of moral equality its full extension, the distinction between citizen and alien is morally arbitrary, justified neither by nature nor achievement. When evaluating border and immigration policies, the equal consideration of the interests of all affected (be they aliens or citizens) is required. Political communities cannot decide whether they can afford to accept refugee claimants or prospective immigrants simply according to their understanding of their own situation, needs and interests. Consideration of consequences (e.g. in terms of public order, the sustainability of welfare policies, the potential effects of a brain drain in developing countries, etc.) is not prohibited; what changes radically is how we are to evaluate them. Institutionally, this would doubtless lead to substantial changes in the immigration and refugee policies of most Western democracies.

The second strategy is indirect. To the extent that states do not satisfy their moral obligations to guarantee the universal human right to security and subsistence through international redistributive policies, they have a moral obligation to admit those wishing to enter. Here the idea of open borders is an instrumental, rather than intrinsic, moral principle: it is a means towards achieving global distributive justice (Bader 1997). The advantage of this line of argument is that it faithfully reflects the main motivation for open borders: the outrage provoked by the huge inequalities between North and South and rich countries' role in perpetuating this situation. This strategy, if successful, would establish specific rights for people from poorer countries towards the North, and not simply a broadly framed right to free movement, to be ‘equally’ enjoyed by individuals of rich and poor countries alike.

To be convincing the argument must show, first, that severe global poverty requires immediate action; second, that it is a matter of justice, not charity. To that effect, it is crucial to show that the extreme poverty of some countries is not simply the result of endogenous factors (e.g. bad governance; corrupt political culture, etc.), but is linked to a global political and economic order that systematically produces an unjust distribution of resources and political power, which rich northern countries, as its main beneficiaries, are in no hurry to reform.The third step in the argument purports to show that justifications of restrictive immigration policies premised on ethico-political claims lose much of their force in the context of profound international inequalities and injustice. The claim is that regulating immigration in order to preserve the integrity of the political community is a legitimate goal only if duties of international distributive justice are satisfied (Tan 2004, 126, referring to Tamir 1992, 161). The argument's upshot is that “[r]ich Northern states have a double moral obligation to seriously fight global poverty and to let more people in” (Bader 1997, 31).

Both supporters and critics of (more) open borders agree that liberal democratic political communities have a moral status and are worth preserving. They disagree over what exactly is worthy of protection and how much weight should be given to securing their integrity (however it is defined) relative to our duties of international justice.

The division of the world into states is arguably justifiable on functional grounds, to the extent that states appear as “first approximations of optimal units for allocating and producing the world's resources” (Coleman and Harding 1995, 38). If we think that states matter simply as local units of efficient production and distribution, then this would be the main consideration when evaluating immigration policies. Public order arguments would still matter, likewise claims pertaining to a society's economic capacity to secure its material reproduction, but not arguments relating to its cultural integrity or way of life. Unless, of course, the capacity of states to act as efficient units of production and distribution is linked to their being distinctive political communities with a particular culture of shared meanings worth preserving.

Over twenty years ago, Michael Walzer defended such a view, based on the idea that “distributive justice presupposes a bounded world within which distribution takes place” (Walzer 1983, 31). Since the goods to be divided, exchanged and shared among individuals have social meanings that are specific to particular communities, it is only within their boundaries that conflict can be resolved and distributive schemes judged either just or unjust. The crucial assumption here is that the “political community is probably the closest we can come to a world of common meanings. Language, history, and culture come together […] to produce a collective consciousness”(Walzer 1983, 28). Politics itself, moreover, as a set of practices and institutions that shape the form and outcome that distributive conflicts take, “establishes its own bonds of commonality”(Walzer 1983, 29). To reject political communities' right to distribute the good of membership is to undermine their capacity to preserve their integrity. It is to condemn them to become nothing more then neighbourhoods, random associations lacking any legally enforceable admissions policies. The probable result of the free movement of individuals would be “casual aggregates” devoid of any internal cohesion and incapable of being a source of patriotic sentiments and solidarity. In a world of neighbourhoods, membership would become meaningless. The upshot of this is that we should recognize the political community's right to regulate admission with a view to securing its cultural, economic and political integrity.

Walzer's position, notably his choice of analogies, has been extensively discussed. His assumption that sovereign states constitute communities of shared meanings appears particularly shaky. Most often, existing states incorporate various political communities that are themselves internally pluralistic: linguistically, culturally and ideologically. In such cases, one would be hard pressed to identify the community whose integrity is at stake. Indeed, few states correspond to the picture Walzer envisages as the appropriate context for distributive justice.

This is not to say that political communities are merely functional units. As Habermas argues, if the communitarian position appears irrelevant in the face of the complexity and internal diversity of modern societies, it reminds us that modern states are a “political form of life” that cannot be “translated without remainder into the abstract form of institutions designed according to general legal principles”. As forms of life, they include “the politicocultural context in which universalistic principles must be implemented, for only a population accustomed to freedom can keep the institutions of freedom alive” (Habermas 1996, 513). Here, Habermas refers yet again to his distinction between the political culture, which develops around universalistic constitutional principles, and the wider, background culture. It is the integrity of the former, not the latter that must be preserved: immigrants should be expected to integrate into the political culture of their new country, which means more than simply embracing abstract liberal-democratic principles. They must “willingly engage” with the particular form that these principles take in a given society, with a specific history. Given that they come from different cultures, newcomers will bring distinct perspectives to the interpretation of the political constitution and may well affect its future development. But to the extent that their contribution can be understood as part of the democratic conversation, rather than as a conversation stopper, one cannot justify stricter limits to immigration on such grounds. What presumably can be argued is that the capacity of the polity to integrate newcomers in the political culture should be considered when setting admissions policies.

Liberal nationalists like Will Kymlicka make a similar argument: they claim that liberal egalitarian aims such as equality of opportunity and solidarity stand a much better chance of being realized in the context of a strong national culture, defined as a “societal culture” involving a “common language and social institutions” (Kymlicka 2001, 259). Everything being equal, maintaining and strengthening such cultures serves a vital interest of individuals and liberal egalitarians should not strive for fully open borders. But does this mean that our interest in a strong national culture outweigh our duty to pursue international justice? From a liberal egalitarian perspective, the answer is clearly no. The right of political communities to protect their integrity stands only under conditions of rough international equality. Under such conditions, limits to immigration would not cause substantial harm, but “would only reserve for the nationals of a country what aliens already have in their own country — namely, the chance to be free and equal citizens within their own national community” (Kymlicka 2001, 271). Under the present situation of radical inequality, however, restrictive policies of immigration allow richer countries to “hoard an unfair share of resources” and cannot be squared with the principle of the moral equality of persons, which requires that “we care equally about the well-being of all individuals, wherever they are born, and however little we interact with them” (Kymlicka 2001, 271).

Kymlicka doesn't say how we should interpret his conclusion as pertains to present policies of immigration: must we demand that the borders of Western democracies be opened until they honour their duties of international justice? Should we rather underscore their dual moral obligations to fight global poverty and allow in more immigrants? (Bader 1997) Or, since global poverty and injustice are the problems, wouldn't it be better to address them directly and see them as our first moral priority (Pogge 1997)? As Kok-Chor Tan remarks, the argument should be understood as supporting “the primacy of international justice, rather than as a claim about how to prioritize public policies and goals”. This primacy implies “that national projects of well-off nations lose their legitimacy if these nations are not also doing their fair share as determined by their duties of justice” (Tan 2004, 129). Whether or not liberals should concentrate on reforming the international system as Thomas Pogge has urged or fight for both greater international distributive justice and more open borders as Veit Bader advises is a matter of strategy. The two prescriptions are by no means incompatible; insisting on the illegitimacy of restrictive immigration policies under current conditions may be a way to put rich countries on the spot and prod them to accept their moral responsibilities towards the world's poor (Goodin 1992, 8).

source : Stanford Ensyclopedia of Philosophy ( INPO )