The Margins of Citizenship

Philip Cook, Jonathan Seglow

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138377226
• eBook ISBN: 9781134907922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Staatsbürgerkunde & Bürgerrechte

Citizenship is a central concept in political philosophy, bridging theory and practice and marking out those who belong and who share a common civic status. The injustices suffered by immigrants, disabled people, the economically inactive and others have been extensively catalogued, but their disadvantages have generally been conceptualised in social and/or economic terms, less commonly in terms of their status as members of the polity and hardly ever together, as a group.

This volume seeks to investigate the partial citizenship which these groups share and in doing so to reflect upon civic marginalisation as a distinct kind of normative wrong. For example, it is not often considered that children, though their lack of civic and political rights are marginal citizens and thus have something in common with other marginalised groups. Each of the book's chapters explores some theoretical or practical aspect of marginal citizenship, and the volume as a whole engages with pressing debates in law and political theory, such as the limits of democratic inclusion, the character of social justice, the integration of migrants, and the enfranchisement of prisoners and children.

This book was published as a special issue of the Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy.

The margins of citizenship: introduction

Philip Cook and Jonathan Seglow

For many, the ideal of citizenship as a complete complement of rights contrasts with the reality of a partial and insecure assemblage of entitlements. Thus we find degrees of distance between full citizens and those at the margins. This special issue examines a range of different experiences of citizenship through the lens of marginality. Whether through an examination of specific cases of marginal citizenship, or through reflection on the concept of marginal citizenship more broadly, the papers in this issue plot a detailed map of marginal citizenship in contemporary societies. The authors describe a complex terrain where political institutions, law and morality often fail to provide a coherent and justified citizenship for groups at a distance from an ideal of citizenship as equal membership.

The question of the morality of marginal citizenship motivates the different papers in a variety of ways. Some of the papers ask how far it is justified to create different kinds of citizenship, or to have differences in the rights and entitlements of citizens and non-citizens? Groups such as immigrants, prisoners, children and people with disabilities very often lack key citizenship rights such as the right to vote or labour rights. Does this constitute unjustified marginalization? Several of the papers that follow argue that entitlements to vote, labour protections and other social entitlements should be distributed more widely amongst those experiencing marginal citizenship. Justifications for arguments against marginalization draw on a range of sources, whether the good of membership, avoiding status inequalities, fundamental human rights or the demands of reciprocity. This serves to highlight the diversity of objections to marginal citizenship.

All the papers ask, in a variety of ways, whether citizenship is the appropriate moral category through which to address unjustified marginali-zation, or indeed injustice more generally? For example, can we justify directing extra resources for disabled people as a means to improve their citizenship? Is granting the right to vote to prisoners or minors justified (if it is justified) as a means of ensuring their equal citizenship? A further issue is what duties, if any, are owed by mainstream citizens to provide a route from marginal to full citizenship? Should, for example, migrants (including temporary migrants and asylum-seekers) be provided with welfare benefits or free language classes?

The diversity of objections to marginal citizenship points to the problem of how to address unjustified marginalization. Has citizenship the practical and moral resources to remedy this harm, or do we need to draw on theories of social justice more generally? On the face of it, we find some disagreement in response to this question. Virginia Mantouvalou’s paper argues that the normative category of citizenship is unable to defend fully the entitlements of those, such as immigrant domestic workers, who are excluded from labour protections granted full citizens. As a normative category that relies on enforcement through national jurisdictions, it is unable to incorporate the legitimate entitlements of such workers. We should instead turn to more inclusive moral categories such as human rights and their more pervasive enforcement to remedy harmful marginalization. In a similar vein we find Stark arguing that justice as democratic egalitarianism is the most appropriate basis to address the wrongful marginalization of citizens with disabilities. Without strong entitlements to fair equality of opportunity, people with disabilities experience entrenched inequalities that lead to their civic marginalization. Cook’s paper, however, appeals to duties of respect owed by adult citizens to child-citizens and argues for the end of marginalization of competent minors by a minimum voting age. Whilst there are clearly different modes of argument deployed in objection to mar-ginalization, we can draw on recent work by Andrew Mason (Mason 2012) to ask if these are incompatible arguments, or perhaps different yet complimentary? On Mason’s view, arguments from justice can address the fundamental questions of the grounds and scope of citizenship. Arguments from coercion, reciprocity and brute bad luck may yield objections of justice to wrongful marginalization. These arguments from justice, however, are not the same as an articulation of the value of citizenship itself. Mason interprets the value of citizenship through a conceptualization of equal membership: on that view we require strong justification for unequal treatment between those citizens at the centre and at the margins. In this light what originally seemed opposing kinds of arguments against marginal-ization now appear more compatible as addressed to different questions within the problem of marginal citizenship.

Certain kinds of marginalization follow from the fact that individuals are in a process of developing closer relationships with citizens in full standing. Both children and many immigrants experience progressively closer and more fully developed relationships with other citizens. The marginal citizenship of these cases may be less due to morally invidious choices of a polity. But their capacity to develop progressively fuller relationships through thicker engagement creates duties on citizens to provide a route from marginal to full citizenship. David Owen and Linda Bos-niak focus closely on the question of the route from marginal to full citizenship, and reveal the great complexity of the conditions of marginali-zation of many immigrants. Routes from margins to centre are fraught with pragmatic obstacles and so clarifying duties such as amnesty and naturalization provides a crucial part of the story of the dynamic relationships those with full citizenship have towards those at the margins.

David Owen’s paper considers, first, what reasons there are to grant resident migrants citizenship in the first place, and second, what entitlement the former should enjoy prior to their acquiring citizenship. On the first question, Owen draws on Robert Dahl’s work to argue that those subject to the laws of a polity should normally be a member of it. Nevertheless, this does not mean that every category of migrants – for example, temporary contract workers or irregular migrants – should be able to acquire citizenship equally easily. On the second question, Owen maintains that all migrants should enjoy securely protected human rights, and many of them (short-term and irregular migrants perhaps excepted) should enjoy many of the socio-economic entitlements of citizens as well.

Linda Bosniak considers the issue of when states should grant amnesty to irregular migrants through an investigation of the concept of amnesty itself. Amnesty can involve forgiveness for a legal transgression; it can simply be an administrative reset mechanism or can involve a transformation of the official view to vindicate those who violated some law or norm (as with US citizens who resisted the draft during the war in Vietnam). Amnesty in immigration is typically some combination of amnesty as forgiveness and administrative reset, both of these being means by which governments demonstrate their accountability.

Virginia Mantouvalou focuses closely on an increasingly sizeable category of marginal citizen: immigrant domestic workers. She describes how this kind of labour is of ever greater importance in developed economies as many women have taken advantage of opportunities for paid employment, creating greater demand for replacement domestic labour. Those stepping into meet this demand are often immigrant women who lack citizenship and therefore many of the core labour protections it entails. Mantouvalou examines recent judicial decisions regarding the labour rights of immigrant domestic workers, and argues that both morally and legally we find human rights a more effective framework than citizenship through which to address such illegitimate marginalization.

Cynthia Stark argues that democratic equality is more able than luck egalitarianism (and the equal opportunities for welfare version in particular) to include disabled people within the scope of justice. For Stark, luck egali-tarianism fares badly in accounting for a system of equal access to social and economic roles associated with full citizenship as it allows for a caste system in employment and fails to ensure appointments on grounds of qualifications. When applied to the case of disabled people, luck egalitarianism may have deleterious effects on the justice claims of people with disabilities, in particular as it has limited grounds to justify ex ante interventions to ensure equal opportunities for welfare. Lacking properly grounded and enforceable entitlements of justice, disabled people experience marginal citizenship. Democratic egalitarianism can protect against marginalization more effectively.

Steve Smith continues the discussion of disability and marginal citizenship through contrasting a passive model of citizenship entitlements, associated with a medical model of disability, with a more active model orientated around disabled people’s participation in social life which coheres with the more current social model of disability. The latter view draws on values such as agency and self-determination, amenable to both liberals and citizenship theorists. As Smith notes, however, the phenomenon of value incommensurability can undercut measures to improve disabled people’s social participation because of the way that some disabled people have come to cherish their outsider status. Despite being marginal, disabled people’s lives need not be worse than able-bodied people; in some circumstances, for at least some people, marginalization can be a source of value.

Peter Ramsay and Philip Cook both consider marginalization through disenfranchisement. Ramsay looks closely at the recent dispute between the UK Government and the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) on prisoner voting and argues that prisoner disenfranchisement is justified if it is limited to those who have placed themselves beyond the margins of citizenship through actions deserving imprisonment. Certain offences violate the conditions necessary for democratic citizenship in others. Therefore, imprisonment is an appropriate response to the negation of citizenship by such offenders. Prisoner disenfranchisement confirms the status of criminals as beyond the margins of democratic citizenship.

Philip Cook’s paper argues that a procedural test of minimum literacy and moral independence should replace a minimum voting age. A minimum voting age is subject to a range of objections, including that it fails to promote the democratic citizenship of children. Adults have duties to create and sustain civic institutions that promote the development of children’s democratic citizenship. It is also reasonable to require competency from those participating in coercively enforced collective decisions. An age-based test should be replaced with a requirement that all voters self-register by completing a simple registration form in writing, and cast their vote personally and independently. This ensures that those lacking minimal electoral competency are excluded from the franchise, yet includes all those who could experience the pedagogical benefits of voting.

The last paper in this issue, by Jonathan Seglow, takes a tangential approach to marginalization by examining the concept of contribution. Against the view of some liberals that each person should define for themselves their plan of life, Seglow argues that the opportunity to contribute positively to others’ lives is an important dimension of human flourishing and one to which an adequate theory of social justice should take account. Contributory practices, especially those channelled through publicly recognized civil society institutions, promote the goods of meaning, self-respect and reliance, and are also a means of combating the marginalization many citizens are apt to suffer in contemporary societies.

Whilst we find no easy consensus regarding the appropriate responses to marginalization, we do find marginal citizenship increasingly salient and productive as a subject of enquiry. By focusing on the complex circumstances and moral claims of those at the margins, this issue highlights the importance of clarifying the nature and justification of marginal citizenship. The Editors are grateful for the support of Royal Holloway, University of London and the University of Leicester for the conference on ‘Citizenship at the Margins’ and to all the contributors to that event and this issue.

Reference

Mason, A., 2012. Living together as equals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Citizenship and the marginalities of migrants

David Owen

Politics and International Relations/Centre for Citizenship, Globalisation and Governance, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

How should we conceive and address the position of migrants in receiving states? The argument offered here presents an account of this position in terms of civic marginalization, that is, marginalization relative to the norm of the national citizen. Two dimensions of civic marginalization are distinguished. First, marginalization with respect to the status of national citizenship which is addressed in terms of the issue of whether specific kinds of migrants should be entitled to access to national citizenship, and what, if any, conditions governing such access are justifiable. Second, marginalization with respect to the rights and duties of the national citizen, which is addressed in terms of the rights to which specific types of migrant are entitled and the duties which can be demanded of them as well as the duties of the state towards them. Distinguishing these two dimensions also helps to bring into focus their interaction with one another by demonstrating that whether, and under what conditions, a migrant has access to national citizenship is normatively consequential for their rights and duties and the duties of the state towards them. The argument also offers methodological reflections on approaching this topic and draws attention to the strengths and limitations of its own methodological strategy.

What is owed to migrants by receiving states, and what do migrants owe to these states? This question occupies an increasingly central place in debates within political theory. However, addressing this question requires at least two fundamental methodological choices.¹ The first concerns how much, if any, of the normative structure of the current political order one chooses to treat as background conditions for the purposes of the enquiry. The second concerns the normative orientation adopted, that is, for example, whether one chooses to work within the terms of a specific theory of justice or of freedom or, alternatively, adopts a more catholic approach. These choices are related in that the degree to which one builds features of the existing normative architecture of politics into one’s account has implications for how much appeal one can make to, for example, widely held democratic norms (norms which, typically, can be supported on a variety of different theoretical grounds and, hence, the adoption of which need not require one to commit oneself to a specific theory). It is important to be explicit about these choices for two reasons. The first is that they specify what the argument is – and is not – committed to doing. The second is that it helps to clarify the advantages and limitations of the approach adopted. For these reasons, I will introduce the argument of this article by situating it in relation to these choices before laying out its structure.

The approach adopted in this article holds in place the normative pre-sumption that states have a general entitlement to regulate their own border regimes in ways compatible with respect for basic human rights, where this includes their entitlement to limit their own authority to regulate their border regimes, and concomitantly, to construct normatively consequential distinctions within the general class of migrants. It does so in order to investigate the legitimate forms of state practice towards migrants within such terms. The advantage to this approach is that it starts from a set of presuppositions that are widely held by states and that it can provide reasonably determinate guidance with respect to the duties that democratic states owe to migrants and that migrants owe to democratic states under such conditions.² It should be noted, however, that this choice does not come without consequences. Thus, it brackets questions such as whether states should be entitled unilaterally to regulate their own borders and, of perhaps more immediate salience, whether states should be entitled to offer distinct conditions of entry and residence to migrants. These are important questions. Indeed, it will become apparent that such questions cannot be fully bracketed in our enquiry. This does not mean, however, that it is pointless or mistaken to try to get as far as we can without entering the more controversial and contested waters that such questions inhabit. Rather, it will make explicit the points at which the presuppositions that serve as the background for this approach are thrust into the foreground and, hence, become the necessary focus of normative attention.

In adopting this stance towards the normative structure of our current political order, this approach also adopts a relatively catholic approach to the normative issues under investigation drawing on widely held understandings of national citizenship and of democratic norms. The orientation adopted in this article deploys the concept of civic marginalization as an analytic lens through which to address the conditions of legitimacy of the conduct of democratic states towards migrants under the basic presumptions of the legitimate exercise of state agency that are being taken as background givens for the purposes of this argument. By ‘the civic marginalization of migrants’, I refer to the phenomenon of being (or becoming) marginal relative to the abstract norm of equal membership in the democratic state as that norm is concretely instantiated in the figure of the national citizen. The rationale for adopting the lens of civic marginali-zation is, firstly, that it allows us to situate state-differentiated types of migrant in relation to the norm of national citizenship in a way that clarifies the normative differences at stake in such differentiations and, second, that it enables us to attend to the legitimacy and significance of state practice in differentiating between migrants in terms of their access to citizenship. The focus of the former is on duties to, and rights and duties of, migrants; the focus of the latter is on the availability and terms of routes to national citizenship for migrants. It is, I will argue, important to take these two aspects of the civic marginalization of migrants together because they are related in ways that are normatively consequential with respect to the duties of the state. The state may have special duties to migrants who are not owed a route to national citizenship in virtue of the vulnerability to which they are exposed by this presumptively justifiable condition of civic marginalization. Given this approach to the topic, the argument will be structured in the following way. I will begin by addressing the availability and terms of routes to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Preface
• 1. The margins of citizenship: introduction
• 2. Citizenship and the marginalities of migrants
• 3. Amnesty in immigration: forgetting, forgiving, freedom
• 4. Workers without rights as citizens at the margins
• 5. Luck, opportunity and disability
• 6. Citizenship and disability: incommensurable lives and well-being
• 7. Voters should not be in prison! The rights of prisoners in a democracy
• 8. Against a minimum voting age
• 9. Marginalization as non-contribution
• Index