Review Symposium

• Author: Joseph Carens,Arash Abizadeh,Rainer Bauböck,David Miller
• Published date: 01 June 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591715580072
• Date: 01 June 2015
• Subject Matter: Review Symposium

Political Theory

2015, Vol. 43(3) 380 –411

© 2015 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591715580072

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Review Symposium

Review Symposium: The

Ethics of Immigration by

Joseph Carens

The Rights of Migrants and the Protection of Fundamental Human Interests: On

Carens’s The Ethics of Immigration

Arash Abizadeh, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

In the first part of his magnum opus, Joseph Carens takes for granted the

conventional view that states are morally entitled to exercise considerable

discretionary control over admissions, but argues that, even so, widely

accepted liberal democratic norms set important moral restrictions on such

discretion. His primary task is to justify a series of policy prescriptions about

the legal status and rights of resident migrants and the criteria for excluding

and selecting migrants. In the book’s second part, which comprises a restate-

ment of his well-known “open borders” argument, Carens rejects the conven-

tional view, and argues for a general human right to freedom of interstate

movement grounded in the values of autonomy, equality of opportunity, and

substantive equality.

I here want to focus on the relation between the book’s two parts.1 Carens

claims that although their arguments are “compatible,” they are “separable,”

and indeed are “almost entirely independent” of each other (12). He claims

that accepting his policy prescriptions has no implications for whether one

should accept his later argument for a general human right to free movement.

He is especially keen to deny that “all of the claims of the earlier chapters

ultimately rest upon my open borders argument,” such that his arguments

there function as some kind of Trojan’s Horse for open borders (10).

Carens is mistaken about this. The first part of the book is a Trojan’s

Horse, not exactly because the claims there rely on the open-borders argu-

ment, but because they rely on an implicit normative foundation that also

grounds the open-borders argument.

*******

The lion’s share of Carens’s policy prescriptions rests on his social-mem-

bership argument. The argument appeals to a conception of what social mem-

bership is, a factual claim about how it normally arises, and a normative

580072PTXXXX10.1177/0090591715580072Political Theory

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Review Symposium 381

claim about its moral consequences. Being a “social member” consists in

having a dense network of social ties—“a dense network of relationships and

associations” and “identities”—that are intimately “connected” to the polity

and its residents (164). Residence and time serve as a useful proxy for social

membership, because what normally causes one to become a social member

is residing for an extended period of time in the polity’s territory. Finally,

according to the social-membership norm, facts about social membership—

the fact that a child can be expected to become a social member or the fact

that an adult is a social member—are what primarily ground the moral claim

to the legal status and rights of citizenship (160).

Carens proceeds systematically to apply this norm to various questions

about the rights of migrants, arguing, for example, that since immigrants

residing in the state eventually become social members, they should be almost

unconditionally granted citizenship after several years of residence. Carens

takes this to apply not just to authorized, but also to unauthorized, migrants; he

also takes it to rule out making citizenship conditional on lacking anti-liberal

or anti-democratic beliefs, renouncing other citizenships, good character, hav-

ing sufficient funds, or passing tests of civic competence. The moral claim of

long-term residents to citizenship is grounded in what Carens calls a member-

ship-specific human right, which is the kind of moral right that all human

beings possess against the state of which they are a member, as opposed to a

general human right, which all human beings possess against all states.

Carens’s point is that the kind of membership that grounds a membership-

specific human right to citizenship in a particular state is social membership

(and not, say, some kind of legally recognized form of membership).

It therefore looks as if social membership is a foundational normative con-

cept here. Carens accordingly insists that his appeal to social membership

(and to membership-specific human rights) distinguishes his account from

“cosmopolitan” views that fail to “distinguish between members and strang-

ers” (109, 160–61).

The question is, however, what grounds the social-membership norm itself

(and membership-specific human rights). Why would the fact that one is a

social member in Carens’s sense ground a moral claim to citizenship? The

answer is implicit to what Carens says. The social ties that constitute social

membership compose some of human beings’ most fundamental interests, and

they generate a moral claim to membership-specific rights against a particular

state because those fundamental interests are, in virtue of what Carens calls

the “social location” of those ties, especially vulnerable to the exercise of

power by that state. Yet this answer presupposes a more foundational moral

norm, a norm to the effect that, for all persons, a state has a moral duty to avoid

harming and, indeed, to protect their fundamental interests when these are

382 Political Theory 43(3)

especially vulnerable to its exercise of power. A norm like this general-human-

rights norm is presumably what generates membership-specific human rights

when the interests at stake are especially vulnerable (in virtue of their social

location) only to the state of which a person is a member, and generates gen-

eral human rights when the interests at stake are especially vulnerable to the

state’s exercise of power regardless of social membership.2 Applying this

general-human-rights norm to citizenship, we get Carens’s conclusion: for

any persons, if their fundamental interests are, in virtue of their social loca-

tion, especially vulnerable to a state’s regulation of citizenship and the legal

rights associated with it, then that state has a duty to grant those persons

citizenship.

What this shows is that talk of social membership and membership-spe-

cific human rights potentially obscures the nature of Carens’s argument. The

premise behind Carens’s social-membership norm is a general-human-rights

norm according to which the vulnerability of any persons’ (not just mem-

bers’) fundamental interests to a state’s exercise of power grounds a moral

claim against that state. Social membership is not a precondition for having

the relevant vulnerable interests that trigger the general-human-rights norm:

social membership is an instance of (socially located) fundamental interests

that give rise to membership-specific moral claims thanks to a general-

human-rights norm. You are a social member with moral claims against a

state in virtue of being a person with socially located interests that are espe-

cially vulnerable to its exercise of power. Carens’s argument in the book’s

first part is fundamentally cosmopolitan.

We see this more clearly in turning to Carens’s treatment of the immigrant

“recluse” who apparently fails to satisfy the conditions of social membership,

that is, “who really does not establish relationships with other people in the

society” over time. Carens asserts that the recluse would still have a moral

claim to citizenship because “in the end, simply living in a state over time is

sufficient . . . to ground claims to legal rights and ultimately to citizenship”

(168). Why? Presumably because even without social ties—even without

being a social member—the recluse has other fundamental interests that have

become tied to remaining a resident and are vulnerable in a way that morally

demands the protections accorded to citizens.3 It is true that Carens insists

that even a recluse is a social member, but this is a stretch and, I take it,

merely a symptom of his desire to resist the argument I am making about

what grounds the social-membership norm. But he cannot resist that argu-

ment: to say that a recluse is a social member is to lose sight of social ties, and

to collapse social membership into the fact of having fundamental interests

vulnerable to a particular society.4

Carens presumably would want to resist my argument because to concede

it explicitly is to make clear that the foundational norm that animates the