Suchergebnisse

Review: Daniele Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008.

AbstractA key question in the theory of migration and in public debates on immigration policies is when migration can be said to be voluntary and when, conversely, it should be seen as nonvoluntary. In a previous article, we tried to answer this crucial question by providing a list of conditions we view as sufficient for migration to be considered nonvoluntary. According to our account, one condition that makes migration nonvoluntary is when people migrate because they lack acceptable alternatives to doing so. In this article, we take the opportunity to further explore and clarify this crucial condition. More specifically, we focus on two main sets of questions. First, we ask whether migration is always voluntary when it serves goals that are voluntarily chosen, and whether those who decide to migrate voluntarily but only have the option of choosing among a limited set of dangerous, harmful, or illegal means for doing so, can be said to be forced to choose those means. Second, we ask whether what counts as "nonacceptable" alternatives should also include cases in which people could have their needs and fundamental rights met, but at the cost of betraying their moral principles or conceptions of the good.

In this paper we critically evaluate the role that the notion of voluntariness plays in the normative theory of migration. We argue that the notion is currently underdefined and works to undermine migrants' claims to see their migratory projects properly recognized. We argue that it is nevertheless important to be able to define when migration can be said to be voluntary if we are to theorize appropriate normative and policy responses to migrants' claims. We propose therefore a series of sufficient and necessary conditions to the definition of voluntary migration. We use the case of temporary migration to illustrate our argument.

We argue that temporary migration projects, entailing as they do a life effectively split between two polities, create a dislocation of social and political spaces, and consequently of the social bases of self-respect, making it possible and rational for a person to trade her status as an equal member of the receiving polity for a chance to advance her aims int he pursuit of happiness. By separating equal status and the pursuit of happiness in a way that is inconceivable according to the conventional understanding of citizenship and migrant integration, temporary migration gives rise to a dilemmatic choice between these two fundamental dimensions of liberal egalitarian justice. Adapted from the source document.