The right to move within states is a basic human right, acknowledged by multiple international human rights documents including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For Joseph Carens, what is puzzling, and ultimately unjustified, is that the right to move internationally is not similarly recognized as a basic human right – in his view, it ought to be recognized as such. According to Carens, the right to move domestically (or internally – I use these terms interchangeably to mean movement within the borders of a state) and internationally protect the same interest: “the vital interest that is at stake here is…freedom itself. You have a vital interest in being free, and being free to move where you want is an important aspect of being free” (p. 249). Carens defends this view from attack by those who think that there are important distinctions between internal and international freedom of movement. In this brief comment, I outline the argument as Carens describes it, and then I join the ranks of those who nevertheless want to justify distinguishing between the internal and international rights to movement. I suggest that Carens gives short shrift to two important ways in which the distinction can and, in my view, should be justified, and then argue that we ought to understand the right to move internally as a membership-specific human right, according to a slightly modified account of what such a right entails.
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In The Reactionary Mind, I briefly argued that much of the energy behind the Christian Right came not from its opposition to abortion or school prayer but its defense of segregation. Based on early research by historians Joseph Crespino and Matthew Lassiter, I wrote:
Evangelical Christians were ideal recruits to the [conservative] cause, deftly playing the victim card as a way of rejuvenating the power of whites. “It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet,” declared a Texas televangelist in 1980.
But it wasn’t religion that made evangelicals queer; it was religion combined with racism. One of the main catalysts of the Christian right was the defense of Southern private schools that were created in response to desegregation. By 1970, 400,000 white children were attending these “segregation academies.” States like Mississippi gave students tuition grants, and until the Nixon administration overturned the practice, the IRS gave donors to these schools tax exemptions.
According to New Right and direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie, the attack on these public subsidies by civil rights activists and the courts “was the spark that ignited the religious right’s involvement in real politics.” [click to continue…]
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There is a wonderful passage in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, in which Barnes expresses his anger at a dismissive critic of Flaubert:
All in all, it seems a magisterial negligence towards a writer who must, one way and another, have paid a lot of her gas bills. Quite simply, it makes me furious. Now do you understand why I hate critics?
I have had this passage in mind while I have been reading Joseph Carens’s book. I have written several articles about Carens’s view of immigration, and much of it has been critical. I take it that Barnes’s point is that we must express a certain sort of respect towards those we make the subject of our critical attentions, given how much we would be at sea without them. This seems exactly right, given how much I owe Carens; I would never have started thinking seriously about immigration had he not thought so seriously, and so well, about it first. One way or another, Carens has paid a lot of my gas bills, and done a lot more besides; he has been more gracious, both in print and in person, than he has ever needed to be. His book summarizes and extends his thinking about immigration, and I have come to respect that view and its creator enormously. It is not my view, but it is the very best the field has produced, and I hope I have not treated it with negligence.
In what follows, I am going to ignore much of the dispute I have had with Carens over the moral permissibility of exclusion, and focus on a topic found primarily within the first half of the book: the idea of social membership, and what rights can be adequately grounded in that idea. My arguments here are going to be similar to those made by Ryan Pevnick in his own post, although I hope I will make them in a slightly different way.
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