What an ambitious book! Cities and Immigration: Political and Moral Dilemmas in the New Era of Migration by Professor Avner de-Shalit sets out to recalibrate debates in the political theory of migration from states to cities and then to address the myriad controversies, confusions, and potentials that follow. In doing so, de-Shalit opens up endless questions, presents new theoretical perspectives, and makes the case for the poverty of state-centric migration theorization. The book is also methodologically ambitious. It is grounded on hundreds of interviews (with mayors and administrators, but more often locals, artists, retailers, or passing pedestrians) that bridge traditional political theoretical considerations with de-Shalit’s own personal musings. To that, he adds intermittent empirical and historical considerations. Although the book asks far more questions than it ultimately resolves, for the most part that is its strength.
The book consists of three substantive chapters and an “appendix.” Chapter 1 addresses the normative questions of if and how cities should control their borders. De-Shalit’s answer is a soft and interesting “yes.” He reviews many arguments by both state- and city-focused theorists—none of which I survey here—and finds that there are few good arguments for closing the city gates. However, although de-Shalit does not defend closed territorial borders, he does maintain that some cultural borders are sometimes worth protecting. For de-Shalit, civicism or urban communitarianism (I return to this idea) usually means openness and inclusivity, and that ethos needs protection. As a rule, however, protecting it by closing borders would scuttle its underlying principles. Hence, de-Shalit argues that protecting urban communitarianism requires opening the city to all, but there are exceptions that generate communitarian arguments for exclusion. For example, some immigrants could threaten the communitarian spirit due to what we could call preexisting conditions. So, cities can close the gates to criminals because, by their very criminality, they have indicated that they are misanthropes of one sort or another. The logic here is not the logic of protecting the culture (it is not David Miller’s liberal nationalism argument writ small), but almost one of self-ostracism by deed. The same logic allows de-Shalit to argue that certain “political criminals” (pp. 48–51)—by which he seems to mean people who are not convicted of a crime but are simply “illiberal,” such as sexists, racists, and Nazis—could also be excluded. A more slippery slope is hard to imagine. Nobody wants a Nazi to move in next door. But can this really suffice as a theory of immigration/integration politics? Maybe, but to find out, the endless puzzles portended by the argument need to be confronted head-on. Who would decide what constitutes a “political crime”? Where will the said Nazi live? Who investigates political criminality? Is anybody willing to endorse the creation of the city-police apparatus required for surveilling the political leaning of migrants?
The “appendix” follows the first chapter and should not pass without comment. It is cowritten by Dr. Despoina Glarou and is more aptly described as an essay. This essay is fascinating for two reasons. First, it does an admirable job of excavating the idea of “philoxenia,” the virtue ethic manifest as a practice of radical inclusiveness in Thessaloniki. Second, it embodies a way of addressing foreigners that appears to be totally distinct from the modern liberal theoretical hegemony. There are no discussions (this section is based primarily on interviews with locals) of rights or duties, just a virtuous disposition to the alien at your door. It is a breath of fresh air in a field often stifled by lifeless Rawlsian disquisitions. The quibble here, like elsewhere, is that one is left wishing that de-Shalit (and Glarou) developed these ideas further. In particular, the contrast between liberal migration ethics (including de-Shalit’s civicism) and “philoxenia” is unexplored.
Chapter 2 considers the grounds and conditions of city-naturalization and the political rights of the immigrant. De-Shalit argues that new immigrants should have the opportunity to become “genuine member[s] of the urban community” (p. 98), but (unlike Walzer) membership should not precede formal political rights. The reason, de-Shalit persuasively argues, is that political rights should be treated not as prizes for passing tests, but as means through which “genuine” membership could be realized. That is, rights then duties, not duties then rights, because rights foster civic communitarianism and civic communitarianism gives substance to duties.
Chapter 3 addresses the question of “city-zenship” and integration, comparing and contrasting three cases: Jerusalem, Berlin, and Amsterdam. From these studies, de-Shalit constructs three models of integration: sociological pluralism, axiological pluralism, and psychological pluralism, respectively the last realized as mutual assimilation based on inclusion from curiosity. It is an evocative account of how a city’s sociocultural particularities shape real-world integration. There is a great deal going on in this chapter, and it serves less as an exercise in modeling and more as a primer for how we should start thinking about and studying local integration politics. Again, there are many arguments and considerations. Central to this chapter is a historical digression into the enthusiastic collaboration of Amsterdammers during the Nazi occupation. How, de-Shalit asks, can we reconcile Amsterdam’s current model of integration with its participation in the deportation of Jews to the death camps? The attempt to historicize a city’s immigration and integration ethics is much appreciated. However, even though it is not obvious that this immense question needs an answer for de-Shalit to make his point, he turns to an expansive historical reflection—the 400-year history of Jewish immigration to Amsterdam, covered in one subsection—and comes to some brief conclusions regarding integration in Amsterdam today. The chapter ends with an interesting policy consideration that aims to match the political/cultural norms of the migrant’s city of origin to potential receiving cities. That is, if one accepts that cities have different cultures, then it follows that migrants from one city could be steered toward a city with a suitable culture of integration.
At every turn—I have only sketched a few of de-Shalit’s arguments—one is left wishing that arguments were developed as chapters and that passing remarks had been more fully developed into chapter sections. That is not a criticism per se; indeed, it is a sign of an important topic being recast in a generative and critical way. But the major problem is not the chapters that could be written, but the chapter on civic communitarianism that should have opened the book. De-Shalit uses the term “civicism” once (p. 17); sometimes he speaks of a “sense of belonging” or “an interest in the future of the city and its flourishing” (p. 99), but most often he simply speaks of a “sense of place.” These ideas are rarely defined but rather evoked as self-evident truths regarding how “we think” about city-zenship: “We think of festivals, we think of small parks at the corner of the street where parents bring their children to the swings, we think of the local fruit and vegetable market, we think of institutions of local democracy and deliberation, we think of the café” (p. 102). In light of how fundamental this notion is to every argument in the book, it would have been very useful to start with a chapter explicating it alone.
This book reads like a prolegomenon to a subfield that does not exist quite yet. The book’s central virtues are in showing that there are real puzzles that emerge once we reorient our perspective away from states and toward cities and in demonstrating that thinking through those puzzles is not a straightforward task and will require argumentative and methodological creativity. There is an enormous amount of work to be done. Cities and Immigration does an admirable job of getting the ball rolling.
