Conservative arguments for restrictive citizenship/nationality?

I don’t like to frame them as liberal or conservative, because these words are anchored in a political tradition that has had meaning in English history but not necessarily in other countries and your reference to Nozick suggests that you are least open to consider arguments not directly relevant to the English case, but surely the standard arguments run somewhat like this.

Citizenship is not a formal right or a legal entitlement (so it’s a b) argument through and through), it is a part (or perhaps a consequence) of a much larger set of shared cultural, linguistic and ethnic traits. Some of these traits are extremely hard to acquire absent direct transmission by someone who already possesses them. In fact, acquisition of some of them may even be impossible, in first approximation. Symmetrically, it is nigh impossible not to have received the alien version of these traits, and dual possession of these traits is impossible. Consequently, not only do (for instance) a child of immigrants not have the required traits, she also has the wrong one, and it is as impossible to acquire those you haven’t received by direct transmission than to abandon those you have indeed received. Of course, in practice the decision to attribute citizenship to someone will follow legal guidelines, but these guidelines carry no special force outside of the framework above and their actual meaning lies in how closely simulate the actual transmission of the essential traits (I would feel slightly stupid to quote material to you, and you could go to the Torah or Luther for classical expression to a certain extent, but if the Declaration of Independence is the prototypical expression of the liberal conception, surely Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation is the prototypical expression of the one above).

In my opinion, there is little use in reasoning with this conception: like the doctrine of Divine predestination, or the self-evident truths of the US Declaration of independence, or the belief in the fundamental brotherhood of men, it is a position grounded in anthropological values, and as such lies outside of the realm of opinions that can be swayed by arguments.

(Indeed, something like the above would be my main comment on your Do states have the right to exclude immigrants?: it describes and argues for a legal, liberal framework of immigration, and with exceptional clarity if I may say so, but the practice of excluding or integrating populations is fundamentally anthropological and so not really amenable to philosophical or legal arguments grounded in a particular intellectual tradition; if there is a link between the two, it is more in the reverse direction – the philosophical and legal tradition piggy-backs on the actual practice of actual populations. I feel slightly bad as this is too terse and too negative a comment on your book, which deserves much more.)

Given the way the sausage factory works, I doubt that there are many actual policies which have a coherent defence.

That said, I’d imagine that most plausible argument that could be offered for restricting citizenship is that there is no prima-facie entitlement to citizenship. If we conceive of citizenship as conferring the capacity to exercise political power (hence indirectly, coercion backed by the violence of the state) over others, then, on certain Hobbesian grounds*, you could argue that there is no general prima facie entitlement to citizenship.

To be clear, it is harder to argue that competent consenting adults are not prima facie entitled to move into our out of a territory as they please, work for, with or hire whomever they please and stay in whichever place is willing to accept their rent money etc.

So, even if you could argue for restricted citizenship, I don’t know how you could argue for restrictions on the right to reside, work, go to school etc in a given country.

*On these same grounds you could also argue that there is no general prima facie entitlement to own hand guns. So, I’m not sure how willing anyone on the right is to make such an argument.

It’s always seemed to me that the argument was jus sanguinis – that the conservative argument was for ethnostates. We might think this is morally unacceptable, but that seems not to be a universal opinion.

the argument you imagine seems reminiscent of Charles Maurras

Well, yes, but Fichte or Tocqueville, in his lesser known work on Switzerland, came there first and are far more interesting thinkers, I find.

though not obviously applicable to the French without a heavy dose of amnesia!

Do I have to spell out that I was only presenting the argument, and that I don’t subscribe to it? I hope not. In contemporary political French political thought, this reasoning is obviously confined to the margin of the far-right, for the reasons you allude to but elsewhere, it might be common. It corresponds roughly to the theory and practice of the Japanese, Swiss and Israeli code of nationality for instance, and at least in Japan, it is also a common if not dominant way of thinking about human identity (anecdotally, for me, it meant that I had three weeks to get a visa for my newborn before he was facing deportation from Japan; normally a formality but one that gets slightly harder to fulfill when your child is born prematurely, as he was).

Pete It’s always seemed to me that the argument was jus sanguinis – that the conservative argument was for ethnostates Chris sure. But conservatives are typically unwilling to come out and say so

I think that is unfair, philosophically speaking (keeping in mind that I don’t find philosophy primarily relevant to the question of integration and exclusion of populations, but that applies whatever the philosophical position being defended).

“This, then, is a people in the higher meaning of the word, when viewed from the standpoint of a spiritual world: the totality of men continuing to live in society with each other and continually creating themselves naturally and spiritually out of themselves, a totality that arises together out of the divine under a certain special law of divine development” (Fichte)

This goes beyond an ethnic definition of the state, and while it is easy to deride it as fraught with spurious philosophical pre-suppositions, the exact same can be said of “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. Human beings are autonomous individuals, and are the by-product of social transmission. Believing that nationality is tied more to the second aspect than to the first is neither incoherent nor requires an ethnic definition of transmission (on the other hand, one could imagine a situation in which nationality would be divorced from legal rights, I think Denmark functions in this way in terms of political rights: IIRC you might be or not be Dane, but whether you vote depends entirely on whether you reside in Denmark).

“you’d presume that since this is the legal position, a position that the state and its lawyers are willing to fight for, someone is willing to argue why these exclusions are normatively justified, to provide some arguments which would rebut the kind of “liberal inclusivist” view favoured by the left/liberal side. But all I find online is angry comment . . .”

I wonder why anyone would expect to find recourse to normative arguments in the sorts of places I assume you’re alluding to. Some number of conservative Twitter users, etc., are presumably committed to the impossibility of their, personally, being permitted to pronounce on what the law ought to be. Their goal may be to persuade people that it’s not okay to break the law (though they seem to find it difficult not to butt into discussions of whether it might be okay to change the law, and try to shut those down, as well—treating them like they’re interested in such a discussion only allows them to hijack it).

For them, the question might be solely whether they should tell other people to obey the law, or whether they should express charity towards their personal need not to obey it.

You made the kernel of an argument in your very last post. “The thought is that people need to be committed to the idea of an inclusive national community if they are going to be motivated to make sacrifices on behalf of others in the form of economic transfers: they won’t stump up for people who are too unlike themselves. But by fighting a culture-war against immigration and the “liberal elite” in order to secure Brexit, those Blue Labour types have succeeded in destroying the illusion of an inclusive national community. They have produced two hostile camps, ranged against one another, who will be unwilling to make the payments those very leftists think are necessary.”

The idea is that people in a nation need to be sufficiently similar in some way in order to be counted on to work together in the relatively hard job of hanging together as a nation instead of just a bunch of small families or clans. The question is about which things count as “sufficiently similar”.

To be clear, I believe that almost anyone in the DREAMERs position of having been moved into a new country very young in life, is probably ‘sufficiently similar’ enough to get citizenship, but I can see the argument that people raised in sufficiently different cultures might not be. (This of course raises the problem of “which cultures are sufficiently different” which I don’t trust the government to get right, so coming from a libertarian influenced position I tend to go for maximal citizenship of where you are, but that is a different argument).

There is a related issue of political economy. When your polity is doing well, your threat sensitivity to “people different than us” is often lower, which at least gestures toward an explanation of why the same people who voted for Reagan under his extremely immigrant friendly concepts are freaking out now

I can see all sorts of arguments, both good and bad, for following ius soli or ius sanguinis. But given that everyone seems to feel the injustice of revoking the citizenship of someone entitled under one or the other rubric, what basic principles are actually involved? Why is it justifiable (if it is) to revoke the citizenship of a naturalized citizen for trivial paperwork errors a half-century old?

The Nuremburg Laws rendered Jews not only voteless but stateless and subject to expulsion. This is widely (but I fear, not universally) accepted as a gross violation of human rights (see the current plight of the Rohingya).

Justice and rights are notoriously non-self-defining.

But I take seriously the pedagogical need to put arguments on both sides in political philosophy.

Perhaps it’s naïve of me to ask, but why?

I imagine this is entirely unhelpful in terms of your question, but I’m struck by how far a lot of these attitudes resemble those of Classical Greek city states, which kept citizenship more or less exclusive and restrictive, while being happy to recognise the contributions of a class of resident aliens without offering then any hope of gaining citizenship except in exceptionally rare circumstances. The point being that there is no serious attempt at a philosophical justification for this, but it’s simply accepted as something that states are entitled to do.

[sorry, off-topic CB]

With all of these things you can find arguments, it’s just a quesiton of how ugly you’re willing to consider. That’s why I sort of find your question confusing- of course there are arguments it’s just that they proceed radically from radically different (and in my view, inferior) moral conceptions to ours. It feels like the hidden presupposition in your quesiton is that these arguments must be of a sort that people like you and me would find ‘reasonable’ or ‘fair’. Many of these people are basically tribalists about moral obligation, of course their reasons will appear alien to us.

For me all of this raises an interesting ethical-methodological issue in political philosophy. If we believe, on reasonable grounds, that the real arguments driving a real point of view are ‘ugly’ arguments, should we continue grappling with ‘cleaned’ versions of these arguments, or in doing so are we implicitly engaging in a form of apologia, doing the work of making cruel views seem halfway just?

With that said, these seem to me to be the main lines of ugly arguments driving opposition to dreamers in practice:

A) Suppose you concieve of the state as only having moral obligations to citizens. A pretty horrific view in my opinion, but nonetheless, seemingly quite a common view. In such a case the state should only admit new citizens if doing so is in the self-interest of its citizens, it can never be ‘morally’ obligated to exend citizenship.

B) You allude to one of the less ugly arguments in this area (still pretty ugly)- punish the children to deter the parents. I personally think this is a bit of a smoke veil- I often see conservatives advocating punishment to alter behaviour in circumstances where we have good reason to think behaviour is inelastic. At first I thought they were simply wrong in their presuppositions about how incentives effect behaviour, now days I wonder if they don’t just use the idea of deterrence to justify forms of cruel treatment that they simply want to do anyway. If you simply don’t like someone you’ll ‘reluctantly’ punish them quite easily!

C) Probably the most coherent defence is to combine a bit of A&B- states have only extremely limited moral obligations to non-citizens, and refusing to extend citizenship to children has at least some deterrent effect on parents.

D) From there we move to uglier arguments like cultural supremacism, and from there a short jump to the even uglier racial supremacism. We don’t want *their* types around here, and since they’re ‘illegal’ we have the perfect excuse!

E) Related to the above, an argument that’s made on occasion “They come from bad families that break laws, so they’ll probably break laws themselves”.

I think that the “Fichte” argument could be restated in this way, IMHO closer to conservative tought:

There is a society that is organic in nature and preexists laws and governments.

This society is naturally divided in communities that also are organic and logically preexist laws (those communities might be seen as ethnic groups although not many conservatives would say it explicitly).

These communities have a right of self government, from which laws and governments descend, and therefore have the right to exclude outsiders if they wish so, because the community is the locus of rights, not the individual.

On the other hand the view that immigrants should be locked out only for good reasons assume that is the individual (in this case the immigrant) that is the locus of rights.

This sounds weird because there is a preconception that the righties are for ethical individualism and the lefties for comunitarian ideologies, but in many ways I think that lefties have a much more individualistic view than righties, although it’s an individualism for the abstract individual not for a specific person.

@J-D because seeing good arguments for and against a proposition helps students to develop.

Thank you. I appreciate the response, and it makes sense to me, so now I fear I may be pertinacious as well as naïve. But I really am just working this out now.

There are some propositions which really do have good arguments on both sides; but there are also some propositions which really don’t. So if you’re having difficulty finding good arguments on both sides of a proposition, isn’t it possible that the reason is because there aren’t any? In that case, if you want to give students the developmental experience of being exposed to good arguments on both sides of a proposition, it would seem to follow that you would have to drop the idea of using the proposition in question for that purpose and to use a different one instead. Or is there something I’m still missing here?

The answer to the question in the opening post is (b). For all countries I know that restrict immigration, unauthorized entry is illegal no matter what the age of the immigrant, and crossing onto the country’s soil does not automatically entitle an immigrant to citizenship. (There have been policies such as the U.S. “wet foot, dry foot,” but they have been exceptions to the general framework of immigration law.)

You say that comments that people are illegal beg the question of what the law should be. The current law may not be to your liking, but in countries with representative government, it has been made after public and legislative debate in which points such as yours have had a chance to be aired. The law reflects deliberation by multiple minds about what constitutes legality and illegality. Moreover, the law can be changed if there is sufficiently strong sentiment to do so. If anyone is begging the question, it seems to be you, by implying that the premises of a lone unelected blogger trump the deliberations of the legislature.

You might try the Web site of the Center for Immigration Studies to see if they have made arguments in the case of the United States along the lines that you are seeking.

@24 I can’t see how Fichte’s view, as presented here, gives Chris what he’s looking for

That’s probably because this quote was not an answer to the original query of Chris, but to the observation made @11 that the argument ultimately rested on the desirability of an ethnic definition of the state (which might be the case in practice, but need not be so in theory). The most complete version of Fichte’s argument – what Chris is looking for – is probably in the fourth address, while the quote is from the eighth, as surely you knew.

@Neville Morley I imagine this is entirely unhelpful in terms of your question, but I’m struck by how far a lot of these attitudes resemble those of Classical Greek city states, which kept citizenship more or less exclusive and restrictive, while being happy to recognise the contributions of a class of resident aliens without offering then any hope of gaining citizenship except in exceptionally rare circumstances. The point being that there is no serious attempt at a philosophical justification for this, but it’s simply accepted as something that states are entitled to do.

Far from being unhelpful, I think this is an interesting illustration of the pre-philosophical nature of the question (but I would dispute your last statement that this is something states do, this is something populations do).

Chris,

Yes, but given that said conservatives believe that the native-born children of citizens do have such an entitlement, then that’s not a move that’s open to them.

Conservatives seem to subscribe to something like the following principle:

Status Quo-ism: Longstanding social practices generate a prima facie moral entitlement to the distribution of goods generated by said practices.

So, even if there is no practice independent moral entitlement to citizenship, current longstanding practice is to give it native born children so that practice generates a specific moral entitlement for native borns but not people who come over when they are infants. Status Quo-ism explains how conservatives in each era are initially resistant to expanding citizenship, then grumble about it when it is expanded and later accept it.

I don’t know that Status Quo-ism is true or even very plausible, but some story about legitimate expectations and the their role in allowing us to plan our lives around them might make it half-way plausible.

“the issue of access to national citizenship, an issue where the libertarians and the liberal left are broadly in agreement.”

This is doubtful, given the track record of “libertarians” (that is, propertarians as “pro-capitalist libertarian” is a contradiction in terms) in favouring dictatorship:

“if one starts a private town […] persons who chose to move there or later remain there would have no right to a say in how the town was run.” (Anarchy, State and Utopia [Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1974], 270)

And least we forget, Nozick also favoured voluntary slavery (371) — nor should we forget von Mises supporting fascism in the 1920s and 1930s (see Propertarianism and Fascism).

This is consistent with their general perspective, namely that property trumps liberty — they do not argue, like genuine libertarians, that workers should run their workplaces. No, Nozick’s position rules — the owners rule, so no liberty for the proles…

I would think it would go without saying that the idea that a state should be based on an organic community with the kind of shared worldview suggested is deplorable. As Sebastian and LFC said, the modern state tends to have a more inclusive view of citizenship. I’m sure it’s possible to find “thinkers” defending this idea online, in the seedier corners of the Net, but not likely among the respectable sort of conservative.

Sebastian’s idea that a certain kind of shared worldview is necessary to engage in “a common project” strikes me as also wrongheaded. Even if a nation-state has a “project,” most projects involve bringing together people with different worldviews in coordinated action. He seems to suggest the common worldview somehow eliminates the need for deliberate coordination, I think. I think I’ve seen that attempted (on a much smaller scale than a nation-state). I’ve never seen it work. (Flaming out in a spectacular display probably doesn’t count as “working.”) Even if it did, it would be inappropriate as the basis of a state.

Bianca Steele, for the most part I was just the messenger. The post about need for common worldview was Chris’s. He’s the one who suggested that we can’t expect coordination. But it’s definitely one of those “how far the abstraction goes” kind of problems. Your formulation just bumps it back a stage. Even if the commitment is “just” to work hard to live together in peace, that isn’t a commitment everyone shares. If enough people don’t share it, you don’t have much of a nation.

I’ll also note that a bunch of the Russian interventions were deliberately about attacking the idea of a common project. They showed racial animus on both sides of the divide, not just on one side. They sowed some of the identity/gender attacks that became framed as Bernie Bros. Perhaps they are on to something in thinking that the death of the common project is the way to destroy us.

Sebastian: “Even if the commitment is “just” to work hard to live together in peace, that isn’t a commitment everyone shares. If enough people don’t share it, you don’t have much of a nation.”

I don’t know you well enough to know whether by “work hard to live together in peace” you mean live as a single community, work hard to understand other community members immediately and/or to be understood, and consequently have a dim view of lasting dissent or conflict, however well that conflict or pluralism might be managed or privatized. Something like that is suggested by Philip Gorski’s “American Covenant,” which somehow fails to answer whether the expanding circle of membership is to be drawn narrowly at the start (that is, in the 21st century) to include only conservative heterosexual white male Protestants among those who already “belong”, and which in any case seems to me to present a religious ideal, not a political one.

If “it isn’t like my religion” is going to be a knockdown argument against any conceivable political or social arrangement, we aren’t going to get very far.

@Z #41: yes, ‘state’ was loose anachronism – but I’m not sure ‘populations’ is necessarily much better, insofar as it implies *all* members of a particular group (mostly descent-based) rather than just those with full citizenship rights, including role in law-making.

@Z #48: lots of focus in Ancient Greece on exclusion of and self-definition against ‘the other’, yes, but while it’s presented as a natural distinction it clearly isn’t, not least because different poleis had different rules and criteria for membership, and most obviously Pericles pushed through a law to *change* the rules, making them much more restrictive by insisting on the need for both parents to be citizens.

Some aspects of Australia’s migration policies gain attention (indefinite detention, boat “turn-backs” etc); sometimes seemingly inflected/reflected in hardline responses to migrants in the northern half of the planet.

I wonder, for teaching/thinking purposes whether the trajectory of Australia-New Zealand migration policies might be useful? Shared history (Gallipoli, ANZAC; potential of joining together). Relatively “young (historically) views of citizenship. Potentially, increasingly divergent approaches to inclusive/exclusive migration over time. But, ‘family’, supposedly. Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement being an open door expression of that. But, also a back door, too. Apparently.

Perhaps. Don’t know. The post 2001 population of NZers in Australia (as near as dammit metics) and their children (including those born in Australia) might provide food for thought? Particularly, the until recently, almost non-existent paths to citizenship.

But, readily available texts that articulate the basis of such approaches to ‘family’? Not so easily found (and both sides of Australian politics played their bit roles in the current situation. NZ politicians having their own agendas, too). My, admittedly amateur, impression is of post-hoc rationalisations of shitty attitudes.

Here’s some starter reading, if of interest.

And. Yep. I’ve skin in the game, having lived in Australia as a NZer for over 16 years. Most switched-on Australians I’ve spoken to have little or no idea of government policies, and impacts thereof, about/on the sizeable population of temporary migrants in their midst. Except, of course, where scandal erupts (e.g. crimes, abuses and rorting).

Chris I know you dismissed my question above but I don’t think your dismissal is adequate. In fact I realized in reflection that I am a loving counterpoint to this issue: I took Australian citizenship at 23, though never born in Australia and my parents never took citizenship. I suppose this might have been impossible before the age of majority, but the completely mainstream nature of what I did suggests that if I could not make the choice before age 18 it would be a simple matter of my ability to legally consent. I think similar principles apply in japan, where a person born to foreign parents in japan has dual citizenship until they turn 20, when they have to choose one (Japan does not otherwise have dual citizensh). So I guess I want to ask again, where is this “dreamers” type issue actually an issue and in other states how much of the denial of citizenship rights to minors is based on their legal status as children rather than foreigners? You have admonished us against arguing the us case but if the us is the main country where this is an issue then …?

I would also ask you to reconsider your dismissal of the uk case. I have at least one friend who took uk citizenship after a few years there as an adult, I guess due to a grandfather or something. I really think the issues you are outlining in the uk may be about financial inequality not national exclusion. This may de facto effect citizens of some states more than others, but I think it’s a different issue that conservatives would defend on different grounds.

I think the broader issue raised by Sebastian about whether you can avoid this problem while defining states by whom they exclude is an interesting one. But it’s peobab trivially defensible on practical grounds since every conservative thinks their country is the best in the world and if you dropped border controls 7 billion people would live their (see eg dipper who thinks that everyone in the world is desperate to experience cloudy skies and soggy chips).

I have a half formed idea that the problem with jus sanguinis has to do with the exclusively-geographical nature of modern sovereignty. Giving your non-citizen residents extraterritoriality is as valid a solution as giving them citizenship: the nation state was supposed to fix the dual loyalty problem by aligning geography and culture, but that could never really work.

@Neville Morley. Thanks for you illuminating comments, as always.

but I’m not sure ‘populations’ is necessarily much better, insofar as it implies *all* members of a particular group (mostly descent-based) rather than just those with full citizenship rights, including role in law-making.

If I understand you correctly, I think I indeed want to refer to all members of a particular group on a particular territory. I understand it can appear paradoxical if not outright monstrous to impute, say, the White Supremacy of the American South to the population as a whole (rather than to the White masters) but what I want to convey is that the totality of the population is required for the anthropological system to make sense, so that, to continue the example, a poor Southern White of 1850 (or 1950) could enter in certain anthropological relations with a rich Southern White (those for instance allowing them both to think of as fellow citizens, equal and free) because of the presence on their territory of oppressed Others.

lots of focus in Ancient Greece on exclusion of and self-definition against ‘the other’, yes, but while it’s presented as a natural distinction it clearly isn’t, not least because different poleis had different rules and criteria for membership, and most obviously Pericles pushed through a law to *change* the rules, making them much more restrictive by insisting on the need for both parents to be citizens.

Of course, I don’t believe that these distinctions are natural (either in the sense that it would be anywhere else but in human minds, or in the weaker sense that it is part of the natural social behavior of humans, as for instance infant-mother mutual gazing is). Adam Ferguson’s thesis is weaker: that establishing such exclusionary distinctions is (naturally!) a powerful psychological prop to establish a community of political equals. The specific form of the exclusionary distinctions being established will of course vary through times, places and cultures, and the relative strength they carry will of course vary, but it is possible (says Adam Ferguson) that they play a specific and important role in ensuring the cohesion of communities of politically equal agents; look at Catalan or Scottish separatism for contemporary examples. This means that if we want to eliminate arbitrary distinctions in our own poleis yet preserve them as community of politically equal humans, as I think we should, then we should also give a lot of thought to what equally strong psychological helps could replace exclusion.

Chris @ 64:

Our issue is the denial of political membership to people who were born on the territory or arrived as children and have then been socialized on the territory. What could be a principled rationale for that? Citing the practice of this state or that doesn’t answer the question.

Citizenship is granted automatically to those who are children of existing citizens, and not to those who are not. Children of citizens are automatically presumed to be part of the multi-generational endeavour of constructing and maintaining the national community. Children of those who are not (as non-citizens) part of that community do not get the same presumption. I don’t think a conservative would see much reason to go beyond this – it’s your job to prove why such a person ought to be granted these rights.

The conservative’s job here is mostly to argue that ius soli is a bad idea, and leave it at that. Conservatives are generally afraid of automatic grants of anything to anyone because they believe that conniving schemers will exploit such automation. Often these fears are outlandish – “welfare queens”, for example. A conservative would cite some thought experiment of illegal immigrants who sneak into the country in order to give birth and claim citizenship for their child, and would (correctly) observe that this violates the spirit of a law designed to allow the children of immigrants to become citizens. Once the law has been shown to be compromised in this way, they will argue for its abolition or restriction on a kind of precautionary principle. This undermines ius soli in the conservative mind without needing to confront the individual cases of innocent children affected.

The question of control and cheating does seem like a reasonably clean dividing line here: one cannot easily cheat a citizenship test, or a requirement to have great wealth or talent, nor can one easily fake the existence of parents who are already citizens. In the case of tests there is an objective and difficult standard to reach, in the case of wealth and talent there can be investigations that eliminate fraud, and one’s parentage is similarly difficult to lie about. Citizenship granted to anyone born on the territory allows for a theoretically unbounded number of people to have children on the territory and for their children to become citizens without possibility of review by any authority. I think that this is what motivates conservative objections, and not much else.

I realise that this was anticipated in the OP, where it was described as the “incentives argument”. There are two responses: firstly, that my point is less about incentives than it is about legitimacy of the source of citizenship; secondly, conservatives may also be more likely to see this as a multi-generational question, rather than an individual one, where the separation between the motives of the parents and the rights of the child is not as clearly made as it is in left-liberal thought. I appreciate that none of this helps, but I think the reason this thread hasn’t found a good answer might be because there isn’t one.

I don’t know if it’s relevant, but it’s interesting that (possibly under Neville Morley’s influence) we’ve shifted from defending access to citizenship as a right to work or receive public benefits (free elementary education, and so on) to access as a right to help make the laws. It would be entirely possible to grant almost all of what many immigrants want without the latter. The problems mostly arise for the next generation, who are raised with the new country’s expectations without having all its rights. (And for immigrants from places where they already had those expectations, who didn’t all along intend to send money back and probably leave once they had a nest egg.)

Chris if the uk regime is allowing some people through then it cannot be the case that it meets the criteria of your original post. In this case conservatives in the uk don’t have to defend dreamer-like laws because they don’t exist (since some dreamer-type people qualify)(I am using dreamer as a shorthand for the children you have identified in the op). Tories will defend this policy in explicitly racist terms – saying they prefer a racist migration policy and so what? – or by the disingenuous shuffle they always do when presented with the racist consequences of institutional practices. But they don’t have to defend the blanket exclusion of all children raised in the uk since by your own admission some are getting through.

So again I wonder how many countries have the policy in a strict form (rather than a racist form) and why for example the us does but none of the other anglophone countries do. I think the argument above about America’s genocidal past gives the big clue, and I think Switzerland doesn’t have a great history either. Were germany’s policies set by ghq in 1945 or are they a throwback to the imperial era?

(Another classic conservative argument is “it has always been done this way”, which could explain the German approach if their citizenship policies derive from an ancient order)

I don’t know the literature, sorry, I’m not in academia.

But I can think of one argument against citizenship by birth/acculturation: that the moral responsibility for this unfortunate situation lies on the parents rather than the state. That is to say, if you decide to emigrate in the knowledge that your children cannot become citizens of the state they will practically and emotionally identify with, you must accept that outcome – assuming your decision to emigrate was voluntary and not compelled. Maybe you were tossing up between relative poverty in your country of origin on one hand, and cultural dislocation and political disempowerment for both you and your offspring on the other, and chose the latter.

I don’t think this proves that such laws are sensible or logical, but there is an emotional appeal to it. If I voluntarily move to a country with stupid laws, I won’t get much sympathy from the public when I complain about the consequences of those laws on my life. I think those with a vaguely authoritarian mindset might find that argument compelling. “Japan didn’t screw your kid over, you did by moving to Japan and deciding to raise your kid there knowing the score.”

@64-5 Chris Bertram “simply presuppose the legitimacy of a policy that denies citizenship…simply question-begging”. Actually I thought it was a pretty good analogy,
since I haven’ t seen exact discussions of the original point, and there seem to be such large differences between how nations justify these matters eg denationalisation and construction of alien citizens as necessary to the common good. So to try and patch up the argument,

1. ius soli previously had practical statecraft reasons, which are no longer relevant to conservative patriots, who pride themselves on being tough minded when required.

2. For conservatives, the family is the basis of society, so it is natural for citizenship to flow via parental citizenship. Minors should follow their parents wherever they go, so as to maintain the integrity of the family, even if this might lead to economic or social disadvantage [though not of course risk to life].

3. “birthright membership [is] morally defensible and indeed functionally required for the formation of stable political communities with a potential for comprehensive self-government”

4. An unbridled ius domicilii will lead to a loss of “peoplehood” or “community”. [eg Renshon’s testimony to US House Committee on Dual Citizenship, Birthright Citizenship, and the Meaning of Sovereignty, 2005]

therefore:

ius sanguinis is a necessarily imperfect but overall best primary rule for citizenship, and the naturalisation path for immigrants should be “a privilege not a right”

So, children of parents who have only a revocable citizenship should not necessarily be entitled to an full citizenship themselves, provided their parentage entitles them to full citizenship elsewhere.

Subsequently, I did find that that “John C. Eastman, a leading advocate for exempting children of illegal aliens from birthright citizenship has argued that a reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment became urgent [i]n the wake of 9/11 .” He puts his arguments in his written submission also to the Hearing on Dual Citizenship, Birthright Citizenship, and the Meaning of Sovereignty, where he argues the “Won Kim Ark” decision was wrong, in that “Elk v. Wilkins” had already decided that Indians born in
the US owed immediate allegiance to one of the Indian tribes (“an alien though dependent power”) in the same way as children born on US soil of subjects of any foreign government.

Chris Consider a law that not only deprived felons of their civil rights but also their children

Putting aside my own preferences (which are in favor of the extension of all political and social rights to all permanent residents, as you know), I don’t think this is a persuasive analogy. The law you describe would deprive children of all political rights. The law, as it exists in many countries and in especially drastic forms in a few, indeed deprives children of the political rights of the country they live in, but only under the presumption that they have retained the full political rights of the country their parents are from. When this presumption is false, the policy is generally much more lenient, and even Japan grants its nationality to children born or found in Japan of stateless or unknown parents.

The justification advanced is frequently the usual one: no one can be a meaningful member of two fundamentally distinct polities.

As an aside, I would point out that it is easy to believe that formally inclusionary policies are Good and formally exclusionary policies are Bad, but the actual effect of the immigrant population and its children is, I believe, more complicated than that. For instance, the designation of foreigners (and their children) as irremediably alien is surely terrible, and it leads to human tragedies no question about that, but it can also promote a form of tolerance and acceptation of differences (say, cultural ones) that comparable societies with more inclusionary policies sometimes lack. Anecdotally, every echelon of the Japanese administration was perfectly fine with me (a permanent resident) having a baby there while Canada viewed even the temporary residence of my pregnant wife with extreme suspicion (what if she gave birth and decided to stay forever?), and I don’t have to think for a minute to decide where a Moroccan graduate student will be better treated: in Switzerland or in France.

@79
”and I don’t have to think for a minute to decide where a Moroccan graduate student will be better treated: in Switzerland or in France”.

just curious – where does somebody -(who lives in France?) think such a student would be better treated? –
As we once followed -(with a hidden camera) – a student who could have been ”a Moroccan graduate student” – through Switzerland – Germany France and Italy – and about his ”treatment”:
Better in Switzerland than in Italy and France and Germany.

How you weight responsibility might depend on your perception of what exactly laws are – as being either moral/immoral, or simply a fact of life.

If you think the former, then responsibility will lie both with the parents and with the state for enacting immoral laws.

If the latter, then the responsibility lies totally with the parents. The analogy you might use then could be something more like prenatal drinking — a decision made by the parents whose consequences no one else bears responsibility for, because it doesn’t make sense to blame the biological facts of child development.

I can’t imagine being an immigration official and deciding to reject citizenship to a five-year-old whose whole life has been in this country; at the same time, we are very often obliged to consider the consequences of laws we disagree with and adapt our behaviour accordingly. I’m confused.

MisterMr @72

At some point we may just be using communitarian differently. Or we may be understanding socialism differently.

I understand communitarianism as the claim that we have pro tanto enforceable duties of solidarity with some proper subset of persons smaller than the entire human race

So, right wing versions of communitarianism claim that there are enforceable duties of solidarity towards people in your church, nation, family, clan, caste, race etc.

The left wing version of this changes the target to all members of the working class. Somewhat more identity rather class based versions may claim that we have duties of solidarity towards all underprivileged and subaltern peoples. (e.g. towards people on the LGBTQ spectrum, historically disadvantaged ethnic groups, the differently abled etc)

There’s a question about socialism as well. Is solidarity something that socialists are only committed to as a means of achieving certain individualist goals? If so, does this really matter when they are still committed to solidarity?

Socialism, it seems to me is not just the claim that everybody ought to have a whole chunk of cash and that the chunk of cash should be equally distributed. Because a capitalist society with a large social safety net funded by high marginal tax rates is still fundamentally a capitalist society. It’s still got free markets and private property in the means of production. Socialism, it seems to me, makes more substantive claims about man and his place in the world.

On a socialist picture, does it make sense to reduce the interest of the working class as a whole to the interest of each member of the working class? If it does, perhaps socialism is individualist. If not, then socialism is communitarian.

@Murali 85

“At some point we may just be using communitarian differently. Or we may be understanding socialism differently.”

Perhaps both. Furthermore, I’m not the archduke of language who can define the meaning of the word “socialist” or “left”, so is you or others have a different opinion about what socialism is or ought to be, I’m not going to say that my acception of the terms is the only correct one. However I’ll try to explain the terms more clearly and restate my opinion in a slightly different way:

1) Communitarianism:
If we take religions as an example, there are two sides of a religion: on the one hand, a religion is a set of belief and moral principle, so that it is a personal, private thing; on the other, a religion is generally a group of people who share the same principle but also most often the same rituals, and thus creates an in-group and an out-group.

The “personal set of beliefs” is an individualist kind of things, the “group of peoples” is a communitarian kind of thing in my view.

A funny example is this: in Italy, the Lega party (that is strongly anti immigrant) generally is pissed off by the idea that muslims should be allowed to buils mosques in Italy or that the cross should not be displayed in public schools, but when the pope or this or that cardinal say that true christians should welcome foreigners and help the immigrans that are at sea in the mediterranean, the Lega says that the pope/cardinal should mind his own business and not stick to politics (this happened).
If we see religion as a set of beliefs and morals, the Lega behaviour doesn’t make sense, but if we think in terms of religion as a marker of a community it does.

In this terms, both the left and the right might be individualist or communitarian, depending on whether we are speaking of a set of principles or of the allegiance to a certain group of peoples (or even to a political tribe).

2) Socialism:
While there are various definitions and beliefs about the term, I think that the basic conception is still this:
The world where we live is a very hierarchical world, because workers have to obey employers to have a job that lets them put food on the table.
They have to obey employers (capitalists) because capitalists own the mean of productions or in general because workers have no other options (hence, theories about the reserve army of the unemployed etc.).
Capitalists then are in a position to claim profits, with which they extend the ownership of the means of production.
The purpose of socialism is to make the world non-hierarchical, that might take various means depending on various political movements:
– eliminate private property of means of production;
– put workers in a situation where they can say “no” to employers (e.g. through social safety nets);
– and many others.

For example, if someone created a free market system where it is impossible for anyone to own more than an average share of the means of production I would count it as socialism, even if this would still be based on private ownership.

The level of “extremism” in being a leftie/socialist IMHO depends both in how much one wants to change things as they are and on how sudden one wants the change to be, but is unrelated to wether one does have a more individualist or communitarian (in my acception of the term) approach to socialism.

3) Righties are more communitarian:
While one can have a more communitarian or idividualist approach to any ideology, one can have also a communitarian view of the world without references to ideologies, but just about groups based on vicinity, cultural affinity etc.

My contention is that the economical right (people who want low taxes for example) used this sort of communitarian identification to go agains various leftish (included moderate leftish) projects, in order to have an appeal.
Thus present day righties (in our societies) show this apparent paradox: on paper, capitalism, free markets etc. are all about individualism, so righties tend to see themselves as the individualists VS the communitarian lefties; but in pratice most communitarian (in the sense I used the term) approaches come from the right.
For example you might have a right leaning guy in the USA who has a huge national flag at home and thinks that leftish politics are unamerican and brags about american values of individualism, but in reality this guy is mostly acting this way because he is a communitarian, he is buing individualism (on paper) because this is a marker of him being part of a community, like the Lega with the cross in my example above.

On the other hand “pure” socialism is a conception about rights so in itself is an individualistic conception; there might be groups that have a “communitarian” link to socialism because they want to be parto of a particular community but in our society they are few, because there isn’t really a socialist community, at most political tribalism, but still it is a weak community for most.

—

Re-reading this, I see that I’m using “communitarian” in a sense very close to Atlemeyer’s RWA, so probably I was influenced by this.