This review essay examines recent work in political theory on the ethics of immigration admissions. It considers arguments put forward by Michael Walzer, Peter Meilaender and David Miller, among others, for state control of borders. Such arguments tend to appeal to the value of political communities and/or the exclusion rights of democratic associations, and I argue that neither of these are successful. Turning to work by Joseph Carens, Phillip Cole, Michael Dummett and others who advocate open or much more open borders, the article considers various arguments that would support this stance, including appeals to freedom of movement, utilitarianism and social justice. I argue that rights to immigration need embedding in global principles of resource redistribution. In the conclusion I sketch a cosmopolitan approach to immigration by which impartial criteria such as population density and gross domestic product would determine how many migrants states have a duty to admit.
This article investigates what moral principles should inform states' decisions to grant resident migrants the rights of full citizenship. Some work on this question has focused on the beliefs and attitudes it is thought desirable for migrants to have. This article takes a different approach. Beginning from the assumption that a high rate of naturalisation is desirable, the article investigates four arguments in its favour. The contribution argument says that residents merit citizenship by virtue of their productive contribution to their new society. The coercion argument says it is wrong to impose on resident migrants laws they had no say in making. The membership argument says that migrants merit citizenship because they are already members of society. The respect argument says that long‐term alienage is a failure of respect. I argue that the respect account escapes the difficulties of the other arguments, and best matches our intuitions about naturalisation. Further, the respect which states and citizens owe migrants, if manifest in the right political climate, is likely to lead to migrants respecting their new society too, and hence having the right kinds of attitude towards it.
This paper examines what objections we might have to moderate religious establishment as found in a number of contemporary liberal democracies. This form of establishment respects citizen’s rights and liberties, so it is not immediately clear what if anything is troubling about it. One view is that moderate establishment is alienating for non-believers but I suggest this is either untrue or rests on contestable premises. Another view is that moderate establishment communicates an unacceptable message to those outside the faith. However, I argue that there is no clear expressive harm involved. In the final section of the paper, I defend an ideal of public reason which is exclusivist, since citizens must abjure from controversial religious premises in public political debate, but also (contrary to common assumptions about public reason) applies to the sorts of non-coercive measures moderate establishment often involves. I argue that under such a public reason framework, moderate establishment measures are often illegitimate, though not invariably so.
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