PART IV: Rights of Migrants, and Rights of Political Communities: Cultural Minority Rights for Immigrants

Abstract

This paper argues that cultural minorities enjoy a basic right to recognition and rejects the idea that migrants implicitly renounce their cultural claims when they leave their countries of origin, when they enter the receiving society, or when they may return. Need for cultural recognition arises from the “ethnicization” of immigrant minorities. A catalog of minority rights provides a reference list for assessing the particular cultural rights of immigrant minorities. They can generally claim rights which recognize a multicultural transformation of receiving societies (equality, liberty, protection from individual discrimination, and public resources for cultural reproduction). However, most immigrants cannot reasonably claim rights derived from historic discrimination, or from collective autonomy within a federation of potentially separate polities.