Abstract
In this paper I will hold that it is desirable to ensure people be included within the borders and the political community both, but I will point out the potential incompatibility of the two. In an open-borders society, members of a polity would not be exclusively individuals who expect to stay in a country for a long time but also people who temporarily work and live there. Among this latter group would be individuals who would continuously migrate—call them hypermigrants. While I agree that hypermigrants cannot be fully included in the decision making, excluding them is problematic because it justifies a hierarchical society. The case of hypermigrants points to the tension between treating people as equals by including them in a democratic system whose members do not simply support their own interests but strive for the common good and by including them in an open-borders society that acknowledges their life plans as of equal worth. To overcome these problems I will claim that it is possible to justify an account of a fluid demos that provides different levels of political inclusion and addresses the challenges of a hypermigration polity. In this account, citizenship and full political inclusion are granted to permanent members only but hypermigrants are partially included. This perspective recognises every member of the polity as equal and ensures that she has control over the relevant political decisions without undermining the idea that citizenship requires a sense of belonging to the political community and concern for its long-term interests.
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Notes
It is undeniable that implementing this framework would require us to consider the impact of open borders on the stability of a system and its sustainability in the long run. Considering this would very likely require us to reduce the openness of borders without denying that, in principle, individuals in a polity that treats them as free and equal should be able to freely move from one country to another.
While it is true that ‘life plan’ is a contested concept (Larmore 1999) it is difficult for inclusivist democrats to challenge it. A society may justify open borders because the preferences of migrants to move from one country to another should be fully respected in order to consider them as free and equal. Such a society needs to distinguish between those preferences that have to be taken into account as expressions of the full agency of free and equal individuals and those superficial preferences that can be discarded without conveying any form of disrespect. Long-term and deliberate preferences that constitute a life plan fall into the former category because they entail ascribing agency to individuals.
The case of the European Union shows that more ‘porous’ borders encourage more temporary and repeated forms of migration.
In this analysis I will consider the case of hypermigrants instead of temporary migrants for the following reasons. First, temporary migration is currently occurring in our countries and it would be difficult to distinguish between the ideal case I am considering, in which migrants are free to move from one country to another, from the real cases in which temporary migrants are subjected to domination and suffer deep injustices. Second, since hypermigrants represent one of the two extremes of a continuum between stability and temporariness they allow me to examine whether people who do not have the legitimate expectation to live in a country for long should be excluded from decision making. Third, hypermigrants, unlike temporary migrants who can properly exercise their political rights in these countries, are not stable members of any polity. If they were completely excluded from decision making they would be more exposed to political authority than temporary migrants.
If hypermigrants were considered members of a demos ‘the very preconditions of citizenship as an institution’ (Bauböck 2011, p. 685) would be undermined. To corroborate this point it might be useful to consider a polity in which hypermigrants are the majority. Politically including them would transform a democracy from a society whose members should be concerned with the interests of the political community to a polity in which everyone would support their specific and short-term interests and preferences.
This is not clearly a problem for those accounts that do not aim at granting a more-than-minimal idea of democracy or a society in which borders are fairly open. A perspective that ensures freedom of movement but develops an idea of democracy according to which citizens do not need to be committed to the long-term interests of the political community will include hypermigrants. An account that grants a republican idea of democracy, according to which citizens should be willing to participate in political life, will be ready to limit the inclusion of migrants if failing to do so undermines the cohesion of the polity.
Equality is a status that conveys an antihierarchical society.
Citizenship should be effective. Any member of the polity, at least in principle, should have fair access to political resources that allow her to properly exercise her political rights.
This requirement ideally would entail making the political sphere insensitive to social and economic differences or, at least, to limit their impact so that all members of the polity independently of their economic and social status can be treated as equals. Even ideally this requirement does not entail that economic and social inequalities are not admissible within a democratic polity. It simply states they should not have an influence on the political arena.
Citizenship is a status that needs to be acknowledged of any member of the polity to recognise her as equal and ensure that she can choose what the polity in which she lives should promote.
This feature highlights a difference between hypermigrants and disadvantaged citizens. Both these groups lack the resources to effectively participate in decision making, but while disadvantaged citizens can be empowered by distributive policies, the difficulties of hypermigrants depend upon the structure of the political system.
This claim might be challenged by pointing out that the category of hypermigrants includes very different people, from particularly marginalised workers to CEOs or university professors and by claiming that the lack of political connections and stable social relationships depends upon economic and social disadvantages rather than being hypermigrants. I admit that hypermigration is a multifaceted category, but for the purpose of this paper it is sufficient to claim that other things being equal hypermigrants have less stable social connections and less time to invest in political activities than permanent members of the polity. Marginalised hypermigrants have less political resources than marginalised permanent members, while advantaged hypermigrants have less political resources compared to those permanent members who have the same economic and social status.
If a more complex idea of political agency were adopted, then exercising political agency would be particularly burdensome since individuals would need to be included in any decision in which their interests are at stake—and many policies affect their interests.
Owen claims this view holds that ‘all whose legitimate interests can be reasonably foreseen to be actually affected by a choice between any of the range of plausible options open to the polity should have their legitimate interests impartially taken into account in the decision-making process’ (Owen 2012, p. 141).
Though hypermigrants only temporarily live and work in a certain country, develop social and economic relationships, and are subjected to the rules of these countries. Even if it is true that hypermigrants are free to live in their hosting countries this option is not, like in the case of tourists, without any economic, social, and personal costs because hypermigrants, at least temporarily, develop their lives within their hosting society.
This does not simply mean that specific decisions (e.g. regarding infrastructure, environmental regulations, or cultural programmes) do not affect hypermigrants but also that the values conveyed by the overall set of political choices have a limited impact on them. To follow Rawls (1993), the kind of person hypermigrants want to be as well as the kind of person they are is not defined by the decisions of their hosting country.
A possibility would be Mill’s multiple-voting system combined with a threshold of 5–10 years, after which everyone is ensured maximum influence. An alternative might be to have different thresholds for local, regional, and national elections. Permanent members of the polity would be included in each of these elections, temporary members of the polity just in some of them. As a consequence, they would be treated as equals within a single election but would have less political influence overall.
It is worth noting that these issues are debated in political decision-making processes broadly conceived (e.g. Parliament, parliamentary committees, and meetings between government and representatives of workers, employers, and civil society), and they are also influenced by intermediate decision-making processes (e.g. committees, or meetings between trade unions and representatives of employers).
As clearly pointed out by Uetricht (2014) teachers’ trade unions in Chicago challenged the unfairness of the cartel school system. Along the same lines, ‘Fight for $15’ demanded a minimum salary by claiming that this would reduce the vulnerability of fast-food workers.
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank, for their insightful comments, Emanuela Ceva, Francesco Chiesa, Federica Liveriero and Valeria Ottonelli, as well as two anonymous referees.
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Biale, E. A Fluid Demos for a Hypermigration Polity. Res Publica 25, 101–117 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-017-9381-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-017-9381-2