Why Pluralism Matters for Immigration Policies

• In Event: Democracy, Borders, and Immigration

Abstract

Pluralism is often conceived as pluralism within borders: it posits a set of ideals that govern the interaction within a people that is territorially bounded and well-defined. Pluralism is rarely understood as a relevant normative constraint when it comes to the discussion of border control and immigration. This paper contends that pluralist constraints apply because immigration policies that violate such constraints will undermine the possibility of pluralism within borders.

The paper puts forward two major arguments to support this contention. Firstly, when a people decide on a discriminatory immigration policy, they are discriminating against a part of their own. When they decide that they want to accept immigrants with certain traits but reject others, the people are deciding what traits define themselves and passing a judgment on those who lack those traits. When Americans decided that they preferred white European immigrants to Asian immigrants, they were both defining the American people as white and expressing their distaste against Asian Americans. Secondly, while political theorists often reduce immigration policies to abstract legal decisions, no immigration policy would be complete without a web of administrative, enforcement, and surveillance technologies, exercised not only at the borders but throughout the country as the state tries to search for and expel the “aliens within”. Discriminatory immigration policies result in surveillance, policing, and penal practices that discriminate against entire communities. When Hispanics are identified by the United States as likely to be illegal immigrants, entire Hispanic communities within the States are subjected to the said practices.

Both arguments rely solely upon our duty to each other as a people and not our duty to outsiders to establish the claim that immigration policies need to be subjected to pluralistic constraints. This paper concludes by showing how most contemporary immigration regimes would have to radically change to meet these pluralistic constraints.

Author

• Kai Yui Samuel Chan, University of California, Berkeley