In Immigration and Democracy, Sarah Song argues that both support of open borders and nationalist accounts of immigration restriction are morally indefensible. The book is divided into three parts. The first examines the modern state’s power and control over immigration, developing in particular the argument that the democratic political community’s right to collective self-determination implies a qualified right to set its own immigration policy (p. 74). In her view, this right to control immigration is part of a package of territorial rights that peoples have as a matter of self-rule and flows directly from the idea that a people functions as the collective agent behind democratic self-governance. By offering an account of a people, she separates herself from other political theorists who have imagined either a nation, joint owners of political institutions, or individual members of voluntary associations acting as the collective agent standing behind the “self” of collective self-determination. With a civic republican emphasis on the value of citizenship, she defines a people as “constituted by a history of participating together in ways that express an aspiration to be authors of the rules governing their collective life” (p. 71).
In the second section of the book, Song refutes both global distributive justice arguments for open borders and the justification of a normative right to unrestricted international movement. In doing so, she develops a persuasive case against Joseph Carens’s normative arguments for open borders (e.g., see The Ethics of Immigration, 2013). She reasons that global inequality is not equivalent to global injustice, and even when global inequality does violate the dictates of justice, she explains why open borders are a poor policy instrument for rectifying distributive inequality across borders. As a counterproposal, she endorses development assistance as a more effective remedy for alleviating the suffering of the world’s poor (p. 91). Positioning her argument against Kieran Oberman’s view, Song asserts that the claim of a normative right to unrestricted international movement is conceptually flawed. Additionally, she explains why Carens’s cantilever argument does not ground the reasons for an unlimited right to international freedom of movement. Her criticism rejects the libertarian-minded defense of freedom of movement as intrinsically valuable, arguing instead that protection of a right to intrastate freedom of movement can sufficiently protect our instrumental interests in pursuing intimate relationships, securing employment and career opportunities, worshipping freely, experiencing diversity, and achieving educational opportunities and self-development (p. 97).
Most importantly, the third and final section of the book evaluates the implications of the unique theoretical contribution that Song builds in Chapter 4, where she provides the framework for her central claim that democratic collective selfhood implies a basis for qualified control over immigration law and policy. Her culminating chapters address how to balance the liberal democratic state’s right to control immigration against the rights of entry that refugees, family members, and other various categories of forced migrants may seek. Her goal in these chapters is to set moral limits on the liberal democratic state’s control over immigration, clarify the types of exclusion that are unjustifiable, and provide insight into how the state ought to make discretionary determinations about whom to admit for membership. She ends her book with a brief discussion of what the liberal democratic state owes to resident noncitizens, including those unauthorized by the state.
The strengths of this volume are manifold, ranging from its synthetic overview of contemporary political theory on the subject of immigrant justice to its incisive analysis of how twentieth-century immigration reform in the United States resulted in the construction of a preference system that privileged the role of the traditional family in admissions decisions. Following insights from Alice Ristroph and Melissa Murray, Song advances an argument for the value-added that might stem from replacing the concept of the traditional family in the preference system of U.S. immigration law with an idea that caregivers and nonfamilial intimates ought to be given recognition in admissions decisions (p. 145).
A major achievement of Song’s view is found in her criticism of David Miller’s nationalist approach to immigrant justice, which avows that liberal democracies have a right to self-determination that permits immigrant exclusion on the basis of protecting “national culture” (e.g., see Strangers in our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration, 2016). Although Song is careful to acknowledge that Miller rejects immigration restrictions based on race as morally impermissible, she recognizes that this constraint is in tension with Miller’s overall view. Given that national identity has so frequently been inextricable from historical narratives that understand race and ethnicity to be the central feature of “what it means to be American, British, French, Australian, and so on” (p. 34), Miller’s mistake exists in imagining that permitting exclusions on the basis of national culture does not also invite simultaneous exclusions on the basis of ethnic and racial ascriptions. Song’s second chapter, “Looking to Law: The Plenary Power Doctrine in US Immigration Jurisprudence,” testifies to the messiness of trying to disentangle Miller’s idea of national culture from racial discrimination. Song’s discussion addresses how the U.S. Supreme Court established that “absolute power over immigration is essential to the sovereignty of states” (p. 17). In Chae Chan Ping v. the United States (1889), Nishimura Ekiu v. United States (1892), and Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), Song explains how the Court drew on the international legal theory of Emer de Vattel (Law of Nations, 1758) to establish that government control over immigration is a defining element of sovereignty. She argues, however, that the “turn toward plenary power was also fueled by anti-Chinese racism and a racialized vision of American national identity,” which enabled the Court to equate immigration control of Chinese immigrants as a path toward safeguarding white purity from the foreign threat of racial mixing (p. 25).
Although Song’s criticism of Miller’s cultural nationalism is explicit, I wanted to understand in more depth how Song would position her own view vis-à-vis Michael Walzer’s argument in Spheres of Justice (1983). She correctly points out that Walzer’s theory of membership is premised on the idea that collective self-determination allows democratic peoples to exercise control over immigration law and policy and so protect what he calls “communities of character,” but like Song’s theory this is not an unqualified power. Walzer places constraints on the democratic community’s sovereign exercise, requiring that temporary guest workers and legal permanent residents be incorporated into membership and that refugees be given admission. My question for Song concerns her ontological account of a democratic people that is rooted in participation, shared historical experience, and aspirational unity: How distinct is this idea of collective self-determination from Walzer’s view, which also holds it as the authoritative basis for democratic control over immigration? Song could easily respond that shared participation in political institutions helps separate her idea of collective agency from other political theorists who have also imagined that rights to collective self-rule offer a foundation for immigrant exclusion. However, this potential answer would problematize her position that temporary guest workers are not owed full incorporation into membership. On her account, temporary guest workers cannot have failed to meet a standard of participation that would make them a constituent part of democratic collective agency. This ought to translate into a conclusion of temporary migrant labor being owed full rights of incorporation by the democratic state, but Song instead only requires a set of bundled rights, falling short of the package protected for citizens (pp. 157–58).
When she turns to the question of what the state owes unauthorized migrants, Song again does not decide to apply a rationale of shared participation in political institutions as the standard for admission into the boundaries of democratic constituent power. Rather, Song defers to Carens’s standard of social membership and the passage of time as being criteria for unauthorized migrants to become eligible for incorporation (pp. 185–87). On this point, she relegates participation in political institutions to a lower-order facet of social membership and a byproduct of the passage of time. If Song had maintained her standard of participation as the basis of membership in a democratic people by foregrounding it in her justification of why unauthorized immigrants are owed a pathway to citizenship, as well as why democratic states are limited when it comes to carrying out deportation, I would have found her theory more consistent. Overall, however, Song’s desire to advance a “controlled borders and open doors” (p. 190) theory of immigrant justice will resonate with those who believe that democratic values themselves can provide an ethico-political framework for immigrant justice.
