8. Regulatory Pluralism and the Interests of Migrants

Abstract

Among the important and challenging observations Thomas Christiano makes in “Democracy, Migration and International Institutions” is his claim that the interests and judgments of potential and actual migrants must be taken into account in the regulation of migration. After briefly justifying this premise, this chapter takes off from this cosmopolitan objective to explore whether and how different institutional arrangements available to regulate the movement of people might be capable of incorporating migrants’ points of view. Its primary objective is to explore whether it makes sense to equate the international with the cosmopolitan in this setting, or whether the institutional dynamics of the nation-state, at least in its democratic form, will better serve the individual migrant’s objectives. If we set our goal as designing a system that reasonably takes account of potential and actual migrants’ interests, should regulatory energy and advocacy efforts be directed toward multilateralism, bilateralism, or old-fashioned domestic regulation?