Migration and Community

Abstract

There are many aspects of migration that provoke hostile responses to it. These include residency, employment, welfare benefits, and citizenship. Many of these issues are essentially economic: opponents of immigration want to protect some interest of their own that they think will suffer from the competition or demands of new arrivals. Such issues may raise great problems for political theory, but I wish to leave them aside and to focus on another issue. Migration often provokes the deeply negative, exclusionary side of community against those who, in some sense, do not fit with the native population of the receiving community. I will address the exclusion that such a misfit provokes in the light of communitarian thought and potential liberal responses to it. Proponents of communitarianism commonly take community to be good as such despite its often exclusionary values. Suppose that community commonly is good, but that exclusion may be necessary for the maintenance of its value. It follows that we might be able to defend communal exclusions as essentially moral or as serving a moral purpose. This is presumably the argument communitarians would make, but they do not generally address the exclusions that are the dark side of community. I wish instead to consider the ways in which such exclusions may work at the individual level in order to determine to what extent we need not call on values to justify them. If the conflicts are strictly of values, we may not be able to overcome them easily. Often at the core of such conflicts, however, are relatively small-scale interests, not moral values. To recognize this fact draws the sting of many communal conflicts, especially of those involving a few immigrants to a community. Strangely, the communal members might readily suppose that the motivations of the immigrants are primarily to secure their interests in a better world than that which they have left. But communal members may see their own responses to the immigrants as strictly motivated by values. Even a limited unpacking of the issues at stake at the level of the individual suggests that it must often be false to claim that there are serious value conflicts. Interests are often arguably the main obstacle to integrating newcomers into a community. Moreover, the interests at issue are relatively minor but, because they are quotidian and pervasive, they might seem to mount up. Communities are often simply uncomfortable with newcomers. Community members have a natural interest in comfort, ease, and efficiency, all of which are well served by familiarity. These are all simple matters of interest, and newcomers, therefore, entail a conflict of interest and community members might tend to exclude newcomers