ABSTRACT This introduction to the book symposium on Chandran Kukathas’s Immigration and Freedom situates the book within contemporary debates on immigration and political freedom. It outlines Kukathas’s central argument that immigration controls do not merely affect immigrants but impose surveillance and policing on citizens, eroding the spirit of a free society. The introduction also provides an overview of the four commentaries and summarises Kukathas’s reply.

ABSTRACT A claimed epistemic condition on legitimate authority appears in numerous academic debates. Yet the condition admits multiple specifications and is asked to serve numerous roles in each debate. Work in the democratic legitimacy and authority allocation debates in which the condition is most often invoked rarely intersects. This article argues that a plausible account of the epistemic condition should generalize across both debates. It then offers desiderata for any account that can so generalize and a substantive proposal that can meet the desiderata. On the proposed account, the epistemic condition is a threshold condition on which legitimate authorities must be suitably competent in the sense of reliably reaching correct decisions better than individuals would on their own. Epistemic considerations also provide guidance above the threshold. Yet they remain non-dispositive for most authority questions. These results minimally demonstrate that attending to authority allocation questions provides additional support for existing views from the democratic legitimacy debate defending a threshold condition and hybrid accounts of legitimate authority on which epistemic and non-epistemic conditions apply. However, they also challenge common assumptions in the democratic legitimacy debate and provide support for an approach many in that debate quickly dismiss.

ABSTRACT This commentary on Immigration and Freedom explores its relationship to border abolitionist perspectives and expresses puzzlement concerning the state as the site of the ideal of a free society.

ABSTRACT In this paper, I provide an argument in favor of flexible partisanship in response to concerns about the shortcomings of contemporary partisanship. I develop a taxonomy of four democratic tasks for partisanship based on existing accounts of its democratic value and argue that these tasks stand in tension under contemporary circumstances. I then distinguish between two forms of flexibility, policy and identity flexibility, and argue that the two can be complementary and reenforcing in some cases. I use this account of partisan flexibility to raise concerns about some of the standards proposed by preexisting accounts of partisanship, which I argue are overly constraining in their prescriptions of specific forms of comprehensiveness and integrity, and distinguish flexibility from related notions of deliberative and collusive partisanship. I then demonstrate how the concept of flexible partisanship can provide useful action guidance in response to current partisan dysfunction with both institutional and interpersonal means of enacting flexible partisanship.

ABSTRACT In his recent book Immigration and Freedom, Chandran Kukathas offers a powerful defense of the open society, which he characterizes in terms of two dimensions of freedom – freedom of immigration and freedom of integration. However, we question whether these two dimensions of freedom are always compatible. In contrast to Kukathas, we suggest that societies without limits on immigration and no pressures of integration may be less free than societies that find the right balance between the freedom of immigration and the freedom of integration. If our analysis is correct, then the ideal of the open society may not actually support open borders.

ABSTRACT This reply to critics of Immigration and Freedom takes up the question of whether it offers a defence of open borders, whether state regulation of immigration is necessary to preserve freedom and stability, whether collective self-determination is possible, and what is the nature of an open society.

ABSTRACT In this commentary, I explore what Chandran Kukathas means by freedom in his book Immigration and Freedom. His understanding of freedom has three dimensions, freedom as liberty rights, freedom as conditions for being free, and freedom as a social ethos. I argue that freedom in the context of this book has a collective nature, which is inconsistent with Kukathas’s objection to the self-determination argument for the state’s right to exclude.

ABSTRACT In Immigration and Freedom, Chandran Kukathas provides sophisticated and empirically informed arguments that it is impermissible and inadvisable to forcibly restrict immigration. In this essay, I focus on Kukathas’s chapter on the state, arguing that he is unduly skeptical of a legitimate state’s right to political self-determination. Even if I am correct, though, Kukathas may be right to warn us that the grave costs of attempting to limit immigration are not worth the putative benefits. In the end, what makes Immigration and Freedom distinctive and distinctively valuable is Kukathas’s core claim that the real threat to freedom comes from attempting to control immigration.

ABSTRACT This paper explores the relationship between economic precarity and freedom of expression. As the influential liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill observed, financial insecurity can have a stifling effect on expression, as it pressures people of modest means to remain muted in order to avoid social punishments such as firing and ostracism that can undermine their ability to meet their basic material needs. In light of the fact that fears of economic hardship can generate self-censorship, it is argued that universal basic income (UBI) policies ought to be viewed as potent mechanisms for bolstering freedom of expression and stimulating productive public discourse. Such policies are equipped to establish a baseline of material wellbeing that can shield individuals and groups from financial turmoil in the event that they publicly express views that are controversial or strongly disfavoured. Moreover, by reducing the stress associated with economic precarity, guaranteed income policies may deescalate social tensions and create greater opportunity for people to participate in constructive communication with interlocutors whose worldviews are different from their own. This case for UBI is developed further by noting that such policies can benefit public discourse by challenging the dominance that economic elites often exert over the media marketplace and the conversations facilitated therein. Guaranteed income policies can help prevent worthwhile perspectives from being crowded out of the media marketplace by large firms that are owned and directed by highly affluent individuals who may be disconnected from the interests of large swaths of society.

ABSTRACT In a plural democracy, the question of whether the police should use technology for the purposes of investigating crime and detecting offenders is one that does not permit a simple answer. In this paper, we argue that where technology can secure a degree of freedom for citizens by protecting them from crime, not only should the police use it but that there is a duty to do so. However, with the adoption of technology, the police acquire power, which if not adequately controlled, will pose a threat to citizens’ freedom. We use republican political theory to explain the source of this duty, the nature of the threat, and how the state can discharge the duty while minimising the risk that in doing so it also undermines citizens’ freedom.