Cosmopolitan Justice and Immigration

Abstract

The pressures of globalization have resulted in shrinking distances and increased contact among people, rendering state boundaries and jurisdiction insufficient to deal with claims of justice exclusively. This challenge requires that we move beyond the limits of statism in political theorizing and acquire a cosmopolitan approach. In this article, from a discourse theoretic perspective, I consider what cosmopolitan justice would entail for policy and law-making concerning immigration. It is argued that: (1) from a moral point of view we cannot consider the problem of migration solely from the perspective of the people of affluent countries and have to take into account the perspective of the refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants; (2) the growing interdependency of global economies gives rise to a moral obligation to assist the immigrants with special duties devolving upon the First World as the result of the history of colonization; and (3) the immigration law ought to be integrated into higher, or constitutional, law-making. In doing so, the discourse theoretic approach decouples national sovereignty (territorial integrity) and democratic polity, overcoming the problem of prioritization of geography over claims of membership.