Political theorists are much indebted to Joseph Carens for his 1987 article “Aliens and Citizens: the Case for Open Borders”. Written in a period of increased restrictions on migration, Carens’s article was pioneering in two ways: it introduced the migration question to political theory’s agenda and set the terms of the debate from the free movement side. Carens’s recent book, The Ethics of Immigration, is less pioneering. It explicitly aims to engage with the “conventional view of immigration” and to show that it can accommodate some measures which improve citizenship and admission policies. The open borders argument is not abandoned but is left to only one of the twelve chapters. Carens’s main concern, however, is to show that the open borders argument does not conflict with the measures he proposes.
It is possible to have the opposite concern: are the proposed measures a way to advance towards a world of open borders? In other words, is Carens still advocating open borders? My analysis here will be limited to the first measure he proposes in the book, this is that “justice requires that democratic states grant citizenship at birth to the descendants of settled immigrants” (p. 20). Whether justice requires this or not, many “democratic states” already conform to this principle and my argument is not that they should stop. Rather, my worry is that such an argument is not a way to advance towards an open borders world.
To give a brief overview of my position, an analogy may help. Imagine that we live in the United States during the time of racial segregation. Homer Plessy, who is of seven-eighths Caucasian descent and one-eight African descent, has just sat in a “whites-only” car. To do this is legally forbidden. We have two argumentative options. One is to go to the Supreme Court and argue against the Segregation Act. The other is to go to the Congress and argue that the law should be changed so that people like Plessy can travel in whites-only cars: on the grounds that, after all, they are white. We don’t know how convincing our arguments will be and given the political context, we may lose in both cases. But is a change of law a step towards the abolition of racial segregation?
My view is that by advocating some “true criterion” of whiteness we reinforce the power of those who believe that racial distinctions are relevant. In the same way, advocating “true criteria” about who “deserves” to be citizen or cross a border is a means of reinforcing the power of those who close the borders.
In what follows, I analyze on a parallel basis the idea that “justice requires that democratic states grant citizenship at birth to the descendants of settled immigrants”. I argue that by its justification, scope and method of implementation method, this idea moves us away from, rather than get us closer to, an open borders world. But before this, I will briefly present an epistemological problem that social scientists call “methodological nationalism”.
What is methodological nationalism?
“Methodological nationalism” is an assumption which equates “society” with the nation-state. In the 1970s, sociologists were the first to realize that regardless of their theoretical orientation, their work was tarnished by this assumption (Martins, 1974: 276). When they talked about “society”, they had in mind either a particular national object (“French society”) or a more general concept of a society that was necessarily bounded. In both cases, they took for granted a category imposed by political power. They thereby endorsed the view of nation-states that “humanity is naturally divided into a limited number of nations, which organize themselves internally as nation-states and externally set boundaries to distinguish themselves from other nation-states” (Beck & Sznaider, 2010: 383).
The problem with methodological nationalism is not only that it transforms social sciences into a discourse that legitimizes particular political actors (i.e.nation-states). It also biases our descriptions and understanding of social phenomena. For on the one hand, “society has never been the isolated, the ‘internally developing’ system which has normally been implied in social theory” (Giddens, 1973: 265). And one the other hand, society may not even be a system, closed or open, at all. Some sociologists insisted that “we can never find a single bounded society in geographical or social space” and urged that we study societies as “multiple overlapping and intersecting sociospatial networks of power”. If we change the paradigm, we view states as only one of the major types of power networks (Mann, 1986: 1 subseq.).
Since the 1970s, these critiques of the methodologically nationalist assumptions have spread to all the social sciences, except political theory and philosophy. In political theory and philosophy, the three main versions of methodological nationalism are largely unquestioned and indeed often fully endorsed. Political theory and philosophy are: (1) state-centered, often arguing that the state is the natural locus for the realization of justice, democracy, freedom, rights etc.; (2) “groupist” (Brubaker, 2002), assuming that people living within the borders are homogeneous groups, even endowed with collective intentions, projects, cultures, values etc.; and (3) “methodologically territorialist” (Sholte, 2002) analyzing the spatial dimensions of human actions and phenomena according to the divisions imposed by political power.
Carens’s proposal according to which “justice requires that democratic states grant citizenship at birth to the descendants of settled immigrants” is clearly based on methodological nationalist premises. Not only does it assume that what “justice” requires is that the states and their attributes (citizenship) be at the center of the stage, but also that “belonging to the political community” should be assigned from birth.
The argument from social connections
Carens argues that citizenship should be granted on the basis of de facto “belonging” to the “political community”. Such a proposal has been defended, among others, by Hammar (1990) and more recently, by Shachar (2009) who argued in favor of a jus nexi. The idea is that those who de facto reside in a country should be recognized as members of the “political community” and granted citizenship.
The argument’s aim is to extend people’s rights. But methodological nationalism makes the argument vulnerable. Its strategy is to infer from a descriptive premise (de facto social connections) a normative conclusion reframed in national terms (“political community”, “citizenship”).
Both the premise and the inference are questionable. They are all the more questionable in the case of newborns. Carens suggests that when born, a baby “enters a social world” and that “she is connected to people”, while recognizing that this is “most intimately to parents and siblings, and through them to friends and more distant family members” (p. 23). It is however difficult to affirm that newborns have a social life in the sense the adults have one. Newborns cannot make associations or be in conflict with other people; they don’t have friends, cannot help anyone in difficult situations or invite them to dinner. Their “social membership” is at most a form of “belonging” not “membership”. Is it not strange to think that newborns have a social life? By contrast, children have a rich social life and their social connections are important in number and in types. Yet, it is newborns, not children, who are assumed to be members of a political community.
This inference from “social membership” to “political community” appears to be even more bizarre in the case of newborns. Not because newborns cannot vote or pay taxes. Rather, because it is difficult to see how their “social world”, populated with as many parents and siblings as you wish, can be equated with the “political community”. Likewise, although young children have a rich social life, sometimes richer than ours, it is difficult to see how their “social connections” can be translated into “political membership”. Is your child becoming a member of some community because she innocently plays Lego with mine every day? Of course, our children are part of the “Lego community”, but only in a metaphorical sense. We would be surprised if one day, the Lego Group sends us a certificate of membership and some of us would squarely refuse to “belong” to Lego. Yet, we find normal to translate concrete social life into political membership and none of us reject the idea that our babies belong by birth to some nation-state.
In a sense, nation-states have acted just like the Lego Group, as the history of the nation-state testifies. For instance, Mann (1993) showed how in the nation-state building process, states succeeded in “caging” social activities within themselves; Torpey (2000) described how states grasped or “embraced” the population which happened to live on a territory, by censuses, birth registration and an increasing bureaucracy. In his book, The Invention of the Passport, Torpey analyzed the process by which the political power came to monopolize the legitimate means of movement: birth certificates, identity cards and passports became the mobile version of the administrative files through which the states kept their power over people.
One might think that we now live in a world of nation-states and that even if we were to assume that, by some kind of magic, our children’s birth and social connections would transform themselves into political membership, it would still be in children’s best interest to maintain this assumption. Nation-states give children protection, rights and opportunities. Citizenship is what gives our children rights to better schools and playgrounds and protect them from being expelled when they play Lego together. But is citizenship the solution, rather than the problem? If we are concerned by the children’s best interests, can we accept that, by birth, some children have rights that others do not? Is the children’s best interest to be assigned, at birth, to one national category?
Citizenship and sedentarism
Carens argues that descendants of settled immigrants should be granted citizenship at birth automatically. In a world as it is, where rights are granted by nation-states, this principle appears to be a clear extension of rights both in scope (immigrants’ children are given citizenship rights) and in procedure (citizenship is granted without application). Our methodological nationalism prevents us from seeing the blind spot in this principle. I would argue that conceiving of this principle as limited to “settled” immigrants and as an “automatic” grant of citizenship raises some problems.
Methodological nationalism views people as settled by default. Elsewhere, I have called “sedentarism” the assumption that it is normal or preferable to stay rather than to go. Sedentarism is a bias which implicitly dominates the social sciences (they most often explain, analyze and classify mobility, not sedentary conduct) but is overtly defended in political philosophy (dominated by “normative” accounts). In political philosophy, spatial mobility is not an object of conceptual analysis. While sometimes philosophers mention that (internal) free movement is a primary good (Rawls, 1993), a basic right (Shue, 1980) or a central human capability (Nussbaum, 2000; Robeyns, 2003; Kronlid, 2008), almost no book in political theory is dedicated to analyzing what freedom of movement is and what is it good for. International mobility is always distinguished from internal mobility and analyzed as a kind of huge jump from one national container to another, a short and exceptional event in an otherwise sedentary life.
However, if we did not assume that social connections project us, by magic, into a community, we might pay more attention to how social connections are actually created. Spatial movement is a necessary condition for meeting people, and meeting people several times (that is, repeated movement) is a necessary condition for establishing durable social connections. The ability to move depends on wealth, infrastructures, health condition, gender and political power. The most privileged groups spend their lives moving back and forth, coming and going, on longer and shorter distances, for longer and shorter laps of time. Movement is intrinsic to our lives and to economy. To take only one example, in 2012 tourism accounted for 9% of the global GDP; the number of international tourists was more than one billion, whereas internal tourists accounted for 5-6 billions.
So, who are the “settled” immigrants whose children should be eligible for citizenship rights? In the 1793 French Constitutional Act, one year of residence was enough for a foreigner to acquire citizenship (cf. art. 4) and in many states nowadays five years of residence is the legal requirement (but as citizenship cannot be claimed as a right, many long term residents die without acquiring citizenship). How many years are enough to be qualified as “settled”? Should declarative statements count? What if we visit another country and change our minds? It seems to me that the only proof of being “settled” for sure is death. It would be, of course, unjust to grant citizenship only to children of dead immigrants.
The second blind spot is that citizenship should be granted automatically at birth. We should remember, however, that jus soli was invented in France as a coercive tool to enable the state to conscript people of foreign descent (Brubaker, 1992). Nowadays, to methodological nationalists who sees people as settled, automatic citizenship is a good. But in a world where people move and nation-states view themselves as entitled to decide to exclude foreigners from citizenship and other rights, such an automatism creates problems. Numerous states do not recognize dual citizenship or recognize it only for some countries. Sometimes, for children who have been granted citizenship by jus soli in another country a divestiture procedure is available at majority and they can choose a single citizenship. But sometimes, they can simply lose the parent’s citizenship. If people renounce a country’s citizenship, they are sometimes obliged to apply for visa to visit that country, and when accepted, to spend a limited time with their siblings and friends, to renounce inheritance, to be excluded from jobs and ownership rights, sometimes to pay a different price for the market goods. Those rights and rights denials hugely vary from country to country and depend on their agreements. But differential treatment of foreigners and citizens is thought to be a sovereign right of states.
What is the solution? Should people be “settled” and give their allegiance to a single country to have their human rights recognized? Or should countries automatically protect the human rights tout court without calling them citizenship?
To conclude, I would like to come back to my initial example of racial segregation. If we are happy that racial segregation came to an end, we will have difficulty in accepting that Homer Plessy should have been the only person to obtain the right to travel in a whites-only car. Homer Plessy’s appearance was “white” and this is why he was chosen by the activists to defy the segregation law. They didn’t succeed in that, but their intention was not to obtain rights only for those whose appearance was “white”. Analogously, immigrants who became indistinguishable from natives by their social connections should not claim rights only for themselves.
The example of Homer Plessy is useful in showing not only that anyone is entitled to travel in any car, but also that traveling is important for all of us. It is a pity that political philosophers do not use their conceptual abilities to understand mobility and what it is good for. To understand freedom of movement and the consequences of its denial, scholars are obliged to refer to works in economics (e.g. Lant Prichett, Michael Clemens, Bryan Caplan among many others), in social sciences (e.g. John Torpey, Oliver Bakewell, Antoine Pecoud among others) or even in the grey literature (see e.g. UNDP Overcoming Barriers). When states open their borders regionally and international organizations envisage putting migration on the development agenda, political theorists mark themselves out by an obsession with states’ “rights”.
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Speranta Dumitru is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University Paris Descartes and holds the Chair “Social Ethics” at CERLIS, CNRS.”