How to Justify the Competence to Control Immigration

This paper is a contribution to the political and legal theory on immigration. It proposes a revised justification of a political community’s competence to control immigration which draws upon both Pevnick’s account of “associative ownership” and Blake’s account of the responsibility to guarantee fundamental rights. I outline an argument structured around the concept of “jurisdiction” as delimiting a political and legal area. The internal and external dimensions of this jurisdiction are cumulative parts of the justification proposed. In the internal dimension, I argue that we should shift the focus from a general justification to a set of situation-specific justifications. The concept of “costs” allows for specifying the link between members’ claim upon their common resources and the different sub-competences to control immigration (access to territory, to labour market, to welfare mechanisms, to political membership). In the external dimension, I claim that exclusion effects resulting from the exercise of the competence to control immigration should be considered to trigger responsibility of the political community. Drawing upon Ypi’s Kantian theory of territorial claim, these effects are reconstructed as triggering three types of duties. Overall, the paper outlines a provisional and conditional account of the competence to control immigration. The internal and external dimensions of jurisdiction give meaning to the ambition to combine the competence claimed by a liberal political community and its broadly cosmopolitan commitments

Immigration · Political science · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Psychology · Social Psychology