Citizenship and Justice

Josh Landy
Why do some countries make it so hard to become a citizen?

Ray Briggs
Should your political rights really depend on where you were born?

Josh Landy
Would it be better to live in a world without borders?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from our respective shelters in place via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re thinking about Citizenship and Justice.

Josh Landy
Citizenship and justice, they go together like a horse and carriage—not a good rhyme, but still citizenship is integral to justice. It’s what makes us all equal under the law.

Ray Briggs
Wait, wait, who’s this “us?”

Josh Landy
Well, in the United States, “us” is US citizens. I mean, all US citizens have the right to vote the right, to run for office, the responsibility to serve on a jury.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but what about people who aren’t citizens? Like, what about subjects of Her Majesty, such as yourself? You don’t get to vote or run for office here. How is that fair?

Josh Landy
Well, I mean, as much as I’d love to run for president, right, I’m not super bothered by that. I feel like it’s, you know, it’s about who has a stake in how things go. If someone’s lived in Sweden their whole life, you know, maybe they shouldn’t have the right to vote in Botswana or Canada, or something. Maybe they should stick to the place they know most about and care most about.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but people can know and care all about a country even if they’re not citizens. They can live there, pay taxes, invest in their communities, learn about local politics…

Josh Landy
…and apply to become citizens!

Ray Briggs
Sometimes—in a lot of countries the application process is really hard. And not everybody who tries gets through. And you know, meanwhile, other people just get into the club for free, just based on who their parents were. They don’t even have to care about civics at all.

Josh Landy
Okay, so what’s your solution, then? Citizenship for everybody?

Ray Briggs
Well, yeah, why not? Why should rich democracies be allowed to hoard their resources? Why shouldn’t they share them equally with the rest of the world?

Josh Landy
Hey, I’m all about sharing your toys, especially in theory. But in practice, Ray, I mean, can countries really open their borders to everybody? Liberal democracies would be overwhelmed. Their economies would collapse, their social institutions would collapse.

Ray Briggs
Okay, fine, Josh, maybe maybe that would be true if we opened our borders completely. But our borders don’t have to be as closed as they are now. I just think that everyone who’s affected by a government decision should have a say in that decision.

Josh Landy
Really, everybody? I mean, people who are applying to immigrate? People who’re just thinking about immigration? People who, I don’t know, just want to go on a vacation somewhere?

Ray Briggs
Well, I mean, definitely the people who want to immigrate. And definitely expats like you. Hey, why weren’t you allowed to vote against Brexit anyway?

Josh Landy
Oh, man, why don’t you pour some lemon juice on that paper cut while you’re about it?

Ray Briggs
Sorry, Josh. But look, the point is, everyone should have a say in running the country, shouldn’t they? I mean, it’s a democracy.

Josh Landy
I don’t know. I just feel like at that point, why bother having countries at all?

Ray Briggs
Imagine all the people Josh, sharing all the world!

Josh Landy
I’m just gonna say it Ray,: you’re a dreamer.

Ray Briggs
Okay, maybe it’s utopian to imagine a cosmopolitan democracy with absolutely no borders. But look, can’t we at least make the rules more reasonable? I mean, where do the rules even come from?

Josh Landy
That’s a great question. So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Shereen Adel, to find out more about the history of American citizenship. She files this report.

Shereen Adel
It might surprise you. But when America’s founding fathers wrote the Constitution, they didn’t include anything about what makes someone a US citizen. They generally follow the same rules that their old mother country Great Britain had at the time. That meant if someone was born on the land, then that person became a citizen. But there were exceptions.

Carol Nackenoff
Dred Scott basically held that blacks were not intended to be US citizens.

Shereen Adel
That’s Carol Nackenoff, a political science professor at Swarthmore College. She’s talking about a famous 1857 Supreme Court case, when a black man who was born into slavery sued for his freedom, and lost. The court ruled he couldn’t sue because he wasn’t a citizen, and that basically it was up to each state to decide who was and was not a citizen. It wasn’t until after the Civil War ended—and slavery was abolished almost 10 years after the Dred Scott decision—that the federal government finally spelled out what it means to be a citizen of the United States.

Carol Nackenoff
The first section of the 14th amendment, which was ratified in 1868, says “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

Shereen Adel
From then on, with few exceptions, anyone born in the country, regardless of race, would be viewed as a citizen. But that only covered one route to citizenship. There was also the question of naturalization.

Carol Nackenoff
Settler nations were happy to have immigrants and treat them as citizens. That is, their children would be citizens if they were seen as assimilable or like them.

Shereen Adel
From the beginning, it had generally been pretty easy for white immigrants to apply for citizenship. But then once anyone born in the US was guaranteed citizenship, it wasn’t long before the country passed its first law restricting immigration from certain places.

Carol Nackenoff
It began in 1875 with the passage of the Page Act, that basically treated all Chinese women coming to the United States on their own as prostitutes.

Shereen Adel
After that, the federal government continued to make laws policing who was and was not welcome to start a new life, have kids, and settle in the US.

Carol Nackenoff
From 1921 until 1965, the restrictions were really designed to not only keep America white, but to keep Southern and Eastern European, often agricultural immigrants, out of lower income, lower education, Jews, etc.

Shereen Adel
It had gotten to a point where the US was very carefully controlling how many people from each country could immigrate. Overall, immigration declined. But then in 1965, the government passed a law that protected people seeking visas from discrimination based on race, sex, or nationality. That changed everything. Since then, the US has become increasingly diverse. My own grandparents immigrated from Egypt in 1973. And I have a friend who immigrated and became a citizen recently,

Ali Abdel Mohsen
What I remember most is waiting.

Shereen Adel
That’s Ali Abdel Mohsen, he was a reporter and artist in Egypt before he relocated to the States with his American wife.

Ali Abdel Mohsen
One of the frustrating things about the wait is you can’t make any changes in life that would affect your status or anything written in the application.

Shereen Adel
That means you can’t move apartments or get a new job. But he says, overall, it was easier than he expected it to be.

Ali Abdel Mohsen
They asked very simple questions.

Shereen Adel
He thought they might want to look through old photos and emails for proof that he and his wife were in a real substantial relationship. And once they were in the States, he even thought someone might show up at his door. But none of that happened.

Ali Abdel Mohsen
Ironically, I thought it would take less time but be a lot more difficult and a lot more.

Shereen Adel
It was a total of four years between the time Ali apply for his visa to immigrate and when he went in to pledge allegiance as a new citizen of the United States. In the end, he said he thought his case was actually pretty straightforward.

Ali Abdel Mohsen
Part of it is your personal situation. But I also think a huge part of it is what’s going on in the world at that time.

Shereen Adel
He’s right. Most recently in 2017, President Trump banned travel for people from seven predominantly Muslim countries—even just to visit. The Trump administration has made a lot of changes restricting immigration. And they’ve also made it harder for immigrants to naturalize: wait times have gone up and the fees have nearly doubled in the past 10 years. But the one thing that would be very hard for any administration to change is birthright citizenship. Here’s Professor Nackenoff again.

Carol Nackenoff
It’s not even probable that Congress could change the rule on birthright citizenship. We believe it most likely would require a constitutional amendment.

Shereen Adel
Which means if you’re born here, it would be pretty hard for someone to take that away. As for naturalization, it really depends on who’s in charge. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Shereen Adel.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report, Shereen. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about citizenship and justice.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now, by Arash Abizadeh, Professor of political science at McGill University and author of “Hobbes and The Two Faces of Ethics. Arash, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Arash Abizadeh
Thank you for having me.

Josh Landy
So Arash, citizenship is obviously a philosophically interesting topic, but is there also a personal connection that first got you interested?

Arash Abizadeh
Oh well yes, I mean, my family were immigrants to Canada, so I’ve kind of lived With the immigrant experience, and also something that very much sort of focused my research interests on questions of citizenship and migration was, when I was living in the US just after graduate school, that’s when September 11 happened. And because I was born in Iran, and was not a US citizen, my status in the US suddenly became very difficult and precarious. And I was sort of struck by the way that the modern liberal democratic state has sought to treat individuals under its power in a non arbitrary fashion, except for when it comes to non citizens. And I was struck by the way that the state could basically act in whatever arbitrary way that it wished to in relation to non citizens. And that puts you in a very precarious position, it was very disturbing, as a person to live under those circumstances, even though nothing ever happened to me, that was terrible. But just living under it was, was rather disturbing.

Ray Briggs
So we heard a report earlier from Shereen, about different ways that people can get citizenship. What do you think about the rules for who gets to be a citizen and rich liberal democracy? Do you think they’re fair?

Arash Abizadeh
Well, I think that, you know, we can evaluate the rules in different ways we can evaluate the rules on, you know, by a standard of justice, how fair are they, as you put it, we can evaluate it. I think there’s a different kind of question we can evaluate about, well, who gets to decide what those rules are? And are those procedures through which they are decided legitimate procedures? And I think we can also ask about what kind of effects did these rules have? So it’s a more practical or pragmatic question. Since you know, you mentioned the issue of fairness. I think, by and large, that a lot of the rules that we have in rich, liberal democratic states probably failed to meet a kind of fundamental standard of justice or fairness in the way that they treat people. I think many, many moral and political philosophers agree that a kind of touchstone of fairness is that you treat people as equals. And to treat people as equals, requires that you give them a kind of moral standing in the way that you treat them and not treat them in an arbitrary fashion. So arguably, the kinds of rules that we have governing migration and citizenship, they don’t necessarily treat everybody as equals.

Ray Briggs
And why not? What is was unequal about them?

Unknown Speaker
Well, for one thing, states subject, non citizens to the exercise of their courts of political power, without necessarily taking their interests equally into account as those of citizens. I mean, that’s kind of a, you know, obvious feature of our interstates regime in the world. But it clashes very strongly with fundamental intuitions that I think underpin many people’s conceptions of what it is to have adjust political order. So one thing for example, if you had a if you had a political order, where you used coercive political power, to entrench systematic inequality, material inequalities, that economic inequality amongst people, you might think, Well, that’s an unfair way to use or an unjust way to use the exercise of political power. But it’s actually one of the sort of overwhelming features of our global order that states use their political power to govern their boundaries, their political boundaries, in a way, whose effect is to entrench deep global material inequality, and also to keep vast numbers of people in a state of great impoverishment.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about citizenship and justice with Arash Abizadeh from McGill University.

Ray Briggs
Should we open our borders to everyone or only to the most deserving? And how are we supposed to know who that is?

Josh Landy
Who’s in, who’s out, and who gets to decide—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Manu Chao
Suspicious, being detained, being searched, being arrested—bloody, bloody border.

Josh Landy
Should everyone have the freedom to cross the border line? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about citizenship and justice with Arash Abidazeh from McGill University, author of “Hobbes and The Two Faces of Ethics.”

Josh Landy
With COVID still upon us we’re pre recording this episode, and so we can’t, unfortunately, take your phone calls. But you can always email us at comments at philosophytalk.dorg, or comment on our website, where you can become a subscriber and have access to more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Arash, if we were coming up with a set of rules for who gets to become a citizen and who doesn’t? And we wanted those rules to actually be fair, where would we start?

Arash Abizadeh
Well, one of the things that we should start with is I think we should ask who gets to decide those rules? And ask why is it that those are the people that get to decide? So there’s a kind of important intuition that people have that democracies get to decide their own boundary loss? And because people think, well, you know, it’s a matter of self determination. And so it’s fair if we just get to decide because it’s our country. And that’s kind of fundamental principle of democracy is that we get to decide how we want to live around here, including who gets to live with us. And I actually think that that’s wrong. I think that democracy, the fundamental principle of democracy is that all those people who are subjected to the state’s exercise, of course of power, should have some kind of a right of democratic say, over how that power is being exercised over them. I think that’s the fundamental intuition. That’s why for example, if you have a country that doesn’t allow half of the population over whom it rules, for example, women to have the democratic say, in the political process, that would be undemocratic. It’s not just that it would be unjust or unfair, although it’d be got to but it also just be undemocratic. It’s the reason why apartheid in South Africa was undemocratic. So similarly, here, I think the problem is that if a state unilaterally imposes its border laws on foreigners, it is subjecting those foreigners to the exercise of its course of political power, without granting those foreigners any say in the process. And what ends up happening when you do that. And part of the motivation for democracy is that when one group of people get to decide how they’re going to exercise power over others, without those others being able to participate in the process, then you end up with arbitrary power.

Josh Landy
Okay, so that I understand that argument. But let’s take a concrete case. Let’s take a case like Germany, for example. As it stands, Germany gets to set its own border policies, or at least the EU does. There are a lot more non Germans in the world and are Germans. So if you if everyone got an equal vote, presumably the Germans would be out voted on their own borderless now, now imagine a scenario where, for example, you know, Russia decided to send a few folks over to Germany, or let’s say, Luxembourg, Luxembourg, population 600,000. Yeah, Russia could probably spare 500,000. Citizens, send them over to Luxembourg. It’s a democracy. So pretty soon, the laws in Luxembourg are laws favoring Russian interests. Doesn’t that seem like a bad outcome? See, right, you’re allowing everyone to have a vote, and how things go, everyone votes, hey, you know, everyone should be allowed to come into your country and vote and have the same rights everybody else. Russia moves in a bunch of folks. They, you know, they vote pro Russian policies, pretty soon you got oligarchs, you know, running the show in Luxembourg. That doesn’t sound like a good result.

Arash Abizadeh
No, it’s not, and I wouldn’t be in favor of it. So the reason I would say two things about that. The first thing, one of the fears that people have about opening up borders, or giving others some say over how those borders are regulated, one of the fears that people have, and I think it’s a legitimate fear, in certain ways, is that you’re going to be overrun by foreigners who don’t share your values, who don’t share your interests, and then will impose their way of life on you. So one thing that I would say is first, is that the only circumstances historically, in which a people has been submerged in that way by another people over run through the process of migration, in that way, historically, has been under the conditions of colonialism. So that happened to the indigenous peoples in the Americas, but that was under the conditions of colonialism where you had settler societies who were imposing a political order on a subject people. It has not happen in circumstances where people migrate and then live under the pre existing jurisdictions.

Josh Landy
Okay, so So, here’s an example that sometimes comes to mind for me a little bit of a horror story. It’s not quite what we’re talking about. But I think there’s an analogy here, which is what happened in East Ramapo, New York, where you have a population that’s largely Hasidic and African American. And the Hasidic community, a certain point decided to get involved in politics, they end up taking over the school board, and selling one of the school buildings to themselves to for uses of Shiva, and thereby impoverishing the school district, which was largely serving African American community. Now, I’m not saying that there was any kind of, you know, long standing plan or something like this. But it shows you there can be some sort of unfortunate outcomes, right, where you get a population in a certain area that doesn’t seem to share the kind of other, you know, sort of basic sense of fairness and justice that we like we hope to associate with a democratic polity. So that’s one example. For me that stands out, because it seems as though, you know, having a substantial enough sub population, that doesn’t seem to take the welfare of the larger community entirely into consideration, has had a bad outcome. Could that really never happen?

Arash Abizadeh
Oh, absolutely not. That could happen all the time. And so one thing that I think that people have certainly woken up to, in the last few years is the fact that no political system, including a liberal, democratic one, whatever the set of institutions that you have, is immune from all kinds of bad results is immune from destruction isn’t, you know, no political system is foolproof. So if the standard is the way that you’re articulating it, that nothing bad could happen, then there’s nothing on offer that could meet that standard. But if what we’re looking at is specific kinds of problems, and are there ways of trying to mitigate the risks, then? Yes. So one thing that I would say about these kinds of cases that I think you have in mind, is that I don’t think that democracy is just, you know, let the majority decide for everybody else. Because what that would do is that it would lead to circumstances where those who are in persistent minorities, those who are persistently minorities persistently get out voted, they have a formal right have democratic say, But effectively, in fact, they have no power within the political process. So I think democracy is a lot more complicated than just simple majoritarian NISM. Sometimes you need to have specific institutional measures that are there to protect persistent minorities. And in fact, that’s one of the functions of jurisdictional boundaries. That’s one of the reasons why, even if we’re talking about more open borders or less open borders, it’s still important to see that there still would be borders, there’ll be differentiated jurisdictions. Because one of their functions, for example, in a federal regime like my own, where you have a territorially concentrated, rather persistent minority name, you know, namely French Canadians, one of the functions of federalism Federalist institutions is precisely to ensure that democracy does not collapse into simple majoritarian rule.

Ray Briggs
So I have a question about the relationship between sort of territory and institutions. So earlier, you said of this democratic principle that everybody who’s affected by a government’s coercive power should get some say in how that coercive power is used. So that suggests, first of all, that like everybody living in a territory where the government has jurisdiction should get some say, and I guess it doesn’t say anything about who shouldn’t get a say. But that sort of makes me wonder, why bother caring about citizenship rather than just residency or just having a residency based citizenship? Right, we just radically overhaul the way that we think about citizenship?

Arash Abizadeh
Well, one thing I would say is that I actually am not in favor of the view that everybody is affected by decisions should have a right of democratic say, I think that’s a much too lacks of a standard. What I would say is that all those who are subjected the exercise of political power, you can be affected by decisions, and not be subjected to the coercive exercise of political power. So it’s a more restricted standard that I would focus on. Really what we should think about is, you know, is the exercise of political power subjected me am I subject to the rules and regulations that are being coercively enforced? Is there a standing threat against me by the State if I violate these rules, for example. So those are the you know, you might be incidentally affected by all kinds of decisions that a political community is making? I think that they should take your interests into account, but I don’t think that necessarily means that you should have a right of Democrat Say,

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about citizenship and justice with our Arash Abizadeh from McGill University, we’ve got an email all the way from Tel Aviv in Israel. It’s from a listener called Joe. Joe says, For Jews in the modern period citizenship and the protections that promises have been the great object of desire. But those protections proved illusory for Jews in most western states and the East as well. The idea of Israel is that citizenship in a state in which Jews constitute the monarchy, the majority is the best way to safeguard basic protections and civil rights. Why should I believe that some other arrangement will make me safer and freer. We could ask this about other groups as well, Kurds and Armenians, who without a state of their own, find themselves exposed and vulnerable. So that seems an interesting potential defense of the notion of statehood. What do you think about about that?

Arash Abizadeh
Well, again, as I said earlier, I’m in favor of differentiated jurisdictional boundaries. And let me just be clear, what I mean by that is, you know, for example, between the provinces in Canada or between the various states, within the United States, there are borders, and there’s different political jurisdictions, they happen to be fairly open borders, you can cross them very easily, and you can go and you know, live in the other, but they’re still different jurisdictions. So the question that is being raised here is not whether there should be different statuses of citizenship, but about how open entry into that status should be. And I think that there’s a legitimate concern that people might have when there is a threat of there’s an existential threat. So if so, by and large, I’m in favor of fairly open boundaries, I would say porous boundaries, because I don’t think we’re talking about completely open boundaries, but very fairly porous boundaries. But I do you think that there is a legitimate justification for restrictions on either movement or citizenship when we are confronted with threats to public order and safety? I think that democratic communities, communities in general, do you have a legitimate claim to defend themselves from existential threat? Now, I also think that that existential threat happens to be greatly exaggerated in many instances. So it’s a dangerous. I mean, I think it’s a true point. It’s a true and legitimate concern. But it’s also a dangerous one because it gets misused a lot, I think, in the current in the current era, where now migration has been what is sometimes called securitized people treat the questions of migration, as if it were a security issue in many cases, when in fact, it’s not. But if it really is, then I think it’s a legitimate concern.

Ray Briggs
Something else I saw in Joe’s question was just the question of how to divide up jurisdictions like, I mean, when one example is Israel, like, should there should Israel be a state? I mean, it’s that horses out of the barn by now. But like, should there be a Palestinian state? Should there be a Kurdish state? Should there be an Armenian state? Like how, how? How do you decide who which group gets to have sovereignty?

Arash Abizadeh
Hmm. Well, I think that I mean, these are, these are extremely complex questions. So it’s hard to sort of give, give a short answer to those things. But I think what the issues that you’re raising is, should, for example, religious or ethnic, or national identities be the basis for drawing the boundaries of citizenship. And as a kind of prima facia, kind of a first principle and initial principle of my answer generally, is going to be no, that that’s not a legitimate basis for drawing citizenship boundaries, whether it be race or ethnicity, religion, and so on. But then, you know, you may be confronted with exceptions, if it’s the case that there’s a group of people who are being targeted, or persecuted on the basis of those particular descriptive or other characteristics, then you might have a legitimate case, to make that, you know, at least provisionally, there should be some way of protecting those individuals through the use of state power, and maybe that requires them to organize together. But that, you know, these are these are sort of at a very abstract level, I don’t really have a considered view about the particular cases that you’re that you’re raising, because I think that requires a lot more knowledge about the particular cases that I have.

Ray Briggs
Right. I think the abstract question is also connected to this question of, of how open borders should be because one of the justifications that sometimes cited for closed borders is that immigrants are going to be a threat to our sort of national identity and our national way of life, which makes more sense if our national identity is a thing. If we have we have have a shared sort of national vision? It sounds like you don’t think that’s a very good ideal?

Arash Abizadeh
Well, again, I think you know, there is there is a kernel of truth to that view, which is that again, this shows up in circumstances, as I mentioned earlier of colonialism, under circumstances of colonialism, where you had settler societies who came in and not just physically, you know, committed genocide and wiped out people’s physical existence. But another thing that happened was, is that you had a kind of submersion of their way of life and their cultures in a way that was so rapid, and under conditions of arbitrary domination, by the ruling powers, that it led to a great deal of Anomie and alienation, and a kind of impossibility for the individuals who are experiencing this kind of rapid cultural change, to be able to integrate into any other kind of social order that makes their lives full of full of meaning, and so on. So those are circumstances that I think that you know, restricting, if you like, movement makes sense. But those typically occur under these kinds of asymmetrical relations of domination by one people over another.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about citizenship and justice with Arash Abizadeh, author of “Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics.”

Ray Briggs
Who should control our democracy? Should noncitizens get more of a say? Why are people so scared of immigration?

Josh Landy
Thinking across borders—when Philosophy Talk continues.

U2
She’s the refugee, her mama say one day she’s gonna live in America

Josh Landy
So many refugees in search of a promised land—shouldn’t we treat them all fairly? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, our guest is Arash Abizadeh from McGill University and we’re thinking about citizenship and justice.

Josh Landy
So Arash, I know what goes against your democratic principles. But suppose we made usar for the day, and you got to decide who has which political powers? What’s the first thing you would do to to improve the situation as regards citizenship and justice?

Arash Abizadeh
Well, I think the caveat that you said first is is important that you know, it goes against democratic principles. Let me just say something about that first, which is that I don’t want to be the Tsar. Because I think I think that what’s important is that precisely those people who are subjected to these regimes of border control have some part to play in what those rules are. And I think what you will see if you allow for that, well, if you allow for people to have a greater say over the political institutions that govern their lives, then you’re going to see more fair political rules around migration. But now if you’re asking about the substance of it, I think what I would like to see is that people not be treated in an arbitrary fashion, that, that also migration not be treated as if it were a security issue. First and foremost, it can be as I said before, in particular cases, but in general, it’s not. So when that adjective of illegal, illegal migrants, illegal aliens is used to describe human beings, I think that that is a way of dehumanizing them, it’s a way of treating them as if they were a crime in their very existence.

Josh Landy
Right. I totally agree with you on that. And I think we certainly need to reform our vocabulary. But to get back to the policy part of it, let’s say we extend a say in the process to all those who are affected, obviously, that would start with folks who were currently at a border, for example, applying for asylum or for or for immigration, or import plank or immigration in the home country. But, you know, logically, we could expand this to anyone who might want to immigrate, maybe they’re currently not considering it because the bar is too high. But if they had a say in the matter, they’d set the bar lower. So why Why doesn’t it follow from your view that we should get? Everyone affected a say that, gosh, it would actually be quite a lot of people who would end up getting a say, and then pretty soon people would vote for a low bar of entry to lots of different countries. And then you would have some of the issues that we talked about earlier, we might have a brain drain from some poorer countries, which would be bad for those countries. You might have stressors on some of the you know, the welfare, infrastructure and so on in countries that people are moving to, you might have a you might have language issues, right to have a functioning and vibrant democracy, it’s really important for people to be able to literally speak the same language at a reasonably high level so we can understand each other when we talk about political issues. So So do we really want to say that the way forward is to give everyone a say, who’s affected in some way, by the way that borders are? are drawn and policed?

Arash Abizadeh
Well, good. So let’s leave aside the question of giving people a say, because I think all of the questions that you’re raising are questions really about what would happen if we had more open borders? So forget about who’s making the decision now. And let’s just focus on what would happen if we had more open borders, would all that, you know, these things happen? And I think by and large, the fears that you’re articulating are, by and large, overblown. So just take take take one of them. It’s not the case that a vibrant democracy requires everybody to speak the same language. Because there have been many multilingual contexts in which people have lived together in the same polity, some of which have been democracies. Now, no, democracy has ever been perfect. I mean, the one that I live in is also not a, you know, lingual democracy either. So it’s not the case, it does create its own challenges, because then you need to have possibilities of translation and you need to have institution, you know, you, you have to spend some extra resources in order to make a public sphere, with mutually intelligible dialogue possible. But that’s not an insurmountable barrier. And it has been surmounted in many circumstances. But you know, these are challenges that all kinds of societies are going to face.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I’m, I’m actually wondering still about the thing you said earlier about sort of giving people a stake if they’re subject to coercive state control, which, which still, I think sounds pretty pretty revisionist to me, given that countries have militaries, and those are incredibly coercive. Um, so and I think so part of this is like, isn’t this incredibly revisionary? And the other part is, that’s what should happen? And how do you make it happen, given that such a big part of this is allowing colonized countries a voice to tell their colonizers to stop it? Like, how do you implement that?

Arash Abizadeh
Well, I think that, yeah, I think the invocation of the military is really germane to the issue, because, you know, someone might say, Well, look, what are you saying? Are you saying that, you know, if we were engaged in a war, let’s say, of self defense, that we have to consult those people and give them a democratic space? And so we’re going to subject them to the question about how we conduct our, you know, conduct our military operations? And the answer is no, because I do think that there are, as I said, issues of security and public order, that that may be at stake, where you don’t need a democratic justification of how it is that you’re going to exercise political power. There are sort of emergency situations like that. And so what actually, that highlights is that when you unilaterally impose border laws on foreigners, essentially, it’s analogous to as if you were declaring war on them, which is to say that, you know, this is an emergency situation. And so we can unilaterally decide how we are going to subject you to the course of exercise a political power without giving you any say, and it may be justifiable in emergency situations. But it’s kind of like you’re declaring war.

Josh Landy
Okay, so one way of understanding what you’re saying would be just the fact of setting restrictions at Borders is is like declaring war, in which case, anyone who potentially might want to migrate in an easy way is being discriminated against and therefore should have a say, which would, I think open the door to a very large number of people having a say, and then potential situation I was talking about where Russia would move a bunch of people into Luxembourg. Another way of understanding it would be okay, this way of thinking about it really applies to situate in situations where one country is an oppressor of another country. So a colonizing country or a former colonizing country in relation to a colonized country. That’s the kind of situation where really the colonizing country has a moral obligation to open up its borders, at least more than it is now. Because there’s this power relationship, but there probably going to be a lot of less obvious cases. Right? So we take a pair of countries that may be We’re both colonized or are neither colonized and think about their way of policing borders between the two of them. Who gets to adjudicate? Okay, go for it.

Ray Briggs
Yes. The US refusing to take in Jews through during World War Two, where it wasn’t the US that was sort of oppressing them and making their conditions in Europe, unlivable. But you might think there, there was something really wrong about closing borders.

Arash Abizadeh
Yeah. So what I mean is that, if you are going to claim that you are a democracy, that you are claiming, that when you exercise power over people politically, that they are the ones who have a say, over the process. However, there are circumstances under which you can’t fulfill that democratic promise, because you’re under existential threat. And so it’s a kind of emergency situation. And so what I mean is that in the case, for example, that you’re giving of the Jews who are fleeing Europe, and seeking refuge in the US, the question is, were those Jews? Did they pose an existential threat to us Americans? And if you are refusing them entry under those conditions, you can, morally speaking, what I’m suggesting is that the answer better be yes. And it better be true that they’re an existential threat, if that’s the way you’re treating them. Because if they’re not, and I take that they weren’t, then you haven’t acted in a truly just and democratic way. That was I was just, I was trying to raise a kind of standard by which you can judge these exclusions. And I think that means broad bar is pretty high.

Josh Landy
Yeah, yeah. And that makes excellent sense. In a case like the Holocaust, where it’s clearly an asylum case, right? If these people are turned away, and they have to go back, their lives are in danger. And that seems like it’s one kind of Mario case. But what about a case where it’s just, you know, two neighboring countries, no clear relationship of tyranny, either way, between the two countries, but they have their own fairly vanilla reasons for, you know, for setting some bar to citizenship, they just, they, they want a sense of National Cohesion that encourages some of the citizens to make sacrifices for the less well off citizens, things like that, you know, the usual stuff, right. And hopefully not based on awful things like, you know, ancestral myths and nonsense like that, but just, you know, a belief in the democratic process and stuff like that. And it’s not, you know, people who are applying or not asylum seekers, they’re just, they’re just interested in economically better life. Why shouldn’t one of those two countries say, you know, we want this number of immigrants and not that number?

Arash Abizadeh
Well, I think if the two countries can come to some kind of an agreement with each other, where that’s mutually acceptable to the citizens of the two countries, through a process in which the citizens of both countries are treated as equals, which means that it rules out conditions of domination of one of those countries by the other, which I think is what you were talking about earlier, when you’re talking about the colonial relationship, if they are, in fact, coming to an agreement about how to set their mutual boundaries, where the citizens of both countries are in that process as equals, and they decide that we want these sets of restrictions. I think that’s fine, that there’s there’s no, there’s no, you know, that that that to me is acceptable, if you like, because it’s the outcome of a democratic process that respects the equality of all those who are subjected to that, that regime of border control that subjects, the citizens of both of those politics, what’s important to see is that the regime of border control is not just subjecting one policy, it’s subjecting both of them.

Josh Landy
That is, this is a very nice, happy and very democratic note on which to end, I want to thank you very much for joining us today, Arash.

Arash Abizadeh
Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Arash Abizadeh, Professor of political science at McGill University, and author of “Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
So I’m thinking that I live in the US and we should overhaul the way that we treat non citizens. And we should not be turning away so many people at our southern border or jailing them for attempting to cross the border because it’s wrong. I think Arash is right about that.

Josh Landy
Well, I’m not a citizen. So you know, I probably shouldn’t say anything. All I’ll say is I love our shows idea. More democracy is better. But this conversation can see Use it philosophers corner to online community of thinkers where our motto with apologies to Descartes is Cogito ergo Blogo—I think therefore I blog. And you can become a partner in the community by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org. and we might feature it on the blog. Now, a citizen who pledges allegiance only to speed—it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixrty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Many immigrant veterans here in the US have been denied citizenship and forced to go back to their country of origin countries from all over including India, Costa Rica, the Philippines, Kenya, Mexico cuts closest to the bone whoever a support house in Tijuana has tracked 400 Plus deported veterans since it first opened in 2014. So ironically, being in the military is not like working construction, washing dishes, mowing lawns, making beds, these are jobs Americans just don’t want to do anymore. Still, you would think that fighting for a country would automatically confer citizenships? Oh no, not in America. Was it always less? Well look at ancient Rome, Legionnaires could eventually retire with a generous pension and a piece of land right there in the Roman Empire. suburbs. Of course, America has its own citizen soldiers. It’s what we have traditionally called folks in the National Guard. And recently, we have citizen soldiers that used to be called vigilantes. They’re kind of like right wing mercenaries working on spec. They also hope to become alternatives to police army stadium security. Also that big enormous guy in the nightclub who checks your ID. That job will be outsourced to the citizen soldier if we still have rock and roll. So the second amendment famously says a well regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free state the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. While we do have ragtag groups of delusionary self styled patriots, agitators false beggars verifiers, cue anonymous hidden runners, all roaming around for sure, Boogaloo proud boys yammering about liberty and pointing their weapons at the marble Statehouse floors and Antifa fati does skateboarding up the Capitol steps with a pint of lighter fluid and getting him a person. Even granting that session may belong to bonafide motions. I’m no Supreme Court guy, but I am not seeing the well regulated part of the deal these days, I guess thanks to creeping libertarianism and military fetishizing. The militia is self regulated, just like any other ad hoc capitalist thinking so open firing that citizens have the right biggest right used to be the right to vote. Now the right we take seriously really despite the bus. Still today, I suspect most citizens have watched politicians with mild anxiety if they want it all, then move on to getting mad because they have to wear a mask at Trader Joe’s and in the meantime, ultra conservative citizens among us seem to think that people can’t make the polls they don’t deserve to vote, and then make it hard to make it to the polls. Frankly, many would prefer to call the poor would just go away. They’re a drain in the economy. Plus they complain all the time. I’d like to citizens who have replaced complaining with the airing of grievances. Twitter Trump is the master of this on the left equally kind of. We have the citizen reporters who are inching forward to replace the actual journalists we used to have lying around it’s depressing. Not sure we have tons of people wandering around smartphones that are riot but that has just led to traffic on Twitter feeds not tripping, futures are looming. The big new journal stars Portland’s ending and go we got hit in the head by a milkshake at a rally and then declared war and and Tifa he is beloved by conservatives because it’s a portage from Portland tries his darndest to make it seem like an Tifa is an evil force bent on destroying democracy, which is the Conservatives job pal. Even though the only pictures of Antifa he has shown seem to be skateboarding drug addicts with face tattoos. Lock up your daughters partland Trump he is labeled their enemies as socialists which Okay, but how would that revoke citizenship? I’ve heard Trump he’s cold fascist, but that would not disqualify them as citizens either especially these days. Anyway, ancient Rome as years went on, and guilds started coming off the statues and Roman land a little harder to come by the mighty empire kept raising the retirement age of soldiers. Sure Rome still had land and money. But thank you for your service, not for you. Not like today’s shrinking empire where the very functions for our nation’s constitution include promoting the general welfare, ensuring domestic tranquility, forming a more perfect union. How’s that working out for your citizens? I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University copyright 2020.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from the partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable! The conversation continues on our website, philosophy talk.org, where you to become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Starship Troopers
What’s the moral difference, if any, between a civilian and a citizen? A citizen accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic, defending it with his life. A civilian does not.