Abstract
The universalistic logic of justice and human rights clashes with the particularistic logic of national sovereignty. This contraposition is thrown into sharp relief in the analysis of migration politics. This article provides an argumentation in favor of a flexibilization of the access to citizenship and of the conditions for border crossings as an appropriate institutional framework for the recognition of human rights and the implementation of distributive justice on a global scale. This thesis is developed in four stages by: offering some reasons for overcoming the state-centered focus of the Rawlsian theory of justice (1); describing poverty and the migrations that derive from it as a question of justice (2); analyzing the obstacles that state boundaries present at the moment of implementing a global conception of justice (3); and, finally, arguing in favor of a redefinition of the notion of citizenship that constitutes the normative horizon of migration policy (4).
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Notes
- 1.
The point of departure for this claim, which (Pogge 2002: Chap. 5) qualifies as explanatory nationalism, is an insufficiently proven supposition: “The Law of Peoples assumes that every society has in its population a sufficient array of human capabilities […] to realize just institutions” (Rawls 2001: 119).
- 2.
To question that global poverty results exclusively from endogenous causes does not mean to deny that these can come to have a specific weight. We could in this way argue, for example, that the non-enjoyment of rights of political participation impedes our being able to draw attention to determinate needs and our being able to reclaim adequate means (cf. Sen 2005).
- 3.
Amongst the multitude of facts, one of the most eloquent is perhaps this one: the 225 richest people on the planet dispose of the same resources as 47% of the poorest. Other equally alarming facts: 2.5 billion people live with less than 2 euros a day and every day 850 million people go hungry (Human Development Report 2005—PNUD).
- 4.
(Carens 1987) rightly argues that neither the libertarianism of Nozick nor the egalitarian liberalism of Rawls furnishes moral reasons to restrict the right of foreigners to enter or take up residence in a country and, at the same time, proceeds as if it had done so. The defense of boundaries very frequently shields collectivist conceptions of politics: “The moral relevance of boundaries […] has always been the argument of those who have tried to put a stop to the validity of human rights by adducing the need to safeguard national particularities and collective identity, to which they attribute the same moral status as individual autonomy” (Garzón 1997: 23). Amongst the most well known defenders of a closing (albeit partial and conditioned) of boundaries and, above all, of an impeding of foreigners access to citizenship, can be found Walzer (1983: Chap. 2). In contrast to authors like Sartori, the case of Walzer is highly disquieting because he justifies his attitude with supposed criteria of justice. His position is indebted to a profoundly mistaken presupposition: an identification of the political community with the ethical—or ethnic-cultural—community (cf. Benhabib 2004: Chap. 3).
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Velasco, J.C. (2013). Beyond the Borders. Migration Policies, Justice and Citizenship from a Global Perspective. In: Merle, JC. (eds) Spheres of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5998-5_23
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