Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Can a state restrict immigration in order to protect its culture?
Liav Orgad has posted an interesting new paper, Illiberal Liberalism: Cultural Restrictions on Migration and Access to Citizenship in Europe. Here's the abstract:
This article addresses a simple but important and understudied question: Is culture a legitimate criterion for regulating migration and access to citizenship? While focusing on France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Denmark, I describe how these states embrace illiberal migration policies which violate the same values they seek to protect. I then construct a two-stage set of immigration-regulation principles: In the first stage, immigrants would have to accept some structural liberal-democratic principles as a prerequisite for admission; these principles are not culturally-oriented but constitute a system of rules governing human behavior in liberal democracies. In the second stage, as part of the naturalization process, immigrants would have to recognize and respect some constitutional principles essential for obtaining citizenship of a specific state. I call this concept 'National Constitutionalism'. As the American debate on immigrant integration policy comes at a decisive moment, the European experience has some important lessons for U.S. policymakers.
How does the Church handle this tension? On one hand, the Church emphasizes the importance of culture and warns about the homogenizing dangers of globalization. On the other hand, the Church speaks out in favor of liberal immigration policies. Would the Church ever support restrictions on immigration in order to maintain a distinct culture? Perhaps the Church teaches that keeping people out reflects an overly narrow or defensive view of culture? Or maybe that culture is not coterminous with political boundaries, so immigration policy is a poor proxy for defense of culture? Has the Church already addressed this tension somewhere?
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/03/can-a-state-restrict-immigration-in-order-to-protect-its-culture.html
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I think it is a mistake - a mistake that I have been guilty of many times in the past - to describe the Church as favoring "liberal immigration policies." What the Church speaks in favor of are the creation of social conditions in which individuals and families can flourish. The Church "speaks out in favor of liberal immigration policies" as a means for the politically, socially, and economically marginalized to seek the conditions for flourishing. In reaffirming the right to emigrate (which is distinct from the right to immigrate), JPII (in Laborem Excercens, 23) said, "emigration is in some aspects an evil." He was discussing the social dislocation - the loss of community and culture - for the sending country as well as for the migrant. But, it seems to me that there is a loss (as well as gains) for the receiving country as well. As Rob points out, there is a tension and that tension isn't resolved at the level of abstract principles but at the level of purdential judgment based upon those principles. Transforming Europe from a Christian or post-Christian culture to a Muslim culture is a real transformation, something that members of the EU can take into consideration as a factor in determining immigration policy. How to way that factor against other factors is a different question.