Contextualizing Migrant Political Rights: Reconsidering State Duties

• In Event: State Duties and Migrant Obligations: Who Owes What?

Abstract

How should rights to political participation be defined and distributed - and how does the fact of migration complicate the issue? To answer these questions, normative theorists often take the state as their starting point, arguing that state actions (coercion or some related idea) generate a duty to grant political rights to those affected by that action (by being coerced, living in the state’s territory, or some other inclusion principle). While this state-centric strategy has been useful for explaining the moral necessity of democratic participation rights, it often fails to include some of the most politically vulnerable migrants when these migrants do not yet stand in the right kind of relationship to a receiving state. Instead, this paper argues that we can gain purchase on the problem of distributing political rights by first thinking both above and below the level of the state – bringing in both the individual and the international system. Individuals’ interests are crucial to generating a right to political participation and, given the fact of increasing mobility and migration today, the context for distributing political rights unavoidably transcends state borders. By looking to both the individual and international levels of analysis, we can see why stateless and other politically vulnerable migrants ought to be candidates for rights of political participation somewhere, even before they would qualify on any given state-centered theory of political inclusion.

States don’t fall out of the story entirely, of course. Rights of political participation inevitably involve rights to participate in specific – usually state – institutions. However, once again, considering a particular migrants’ relationship to a host state is most useful after considering the individual and international level of analysis. The paper argues that an individual migrant’s relation to states matters in two ways when determining what political rights they ought to have and where. First, whereas individuals have an interest in ‘taking part’ in governing themselves (drawing on language from the UN Declaration of Human Rights), the specific content of political rights depends on institutional context: the states in which they might plausibly participate. Second, determining which states have what duties to which migrants depends on migrants’ relationship with both sending and receiving states. On this account, democratic states have greater duties to speedily offer opportunities for political participation to migrants with no opportunities for participation in their sending states: stateless persons and political refugees. Overall, the paper argues that by considering migrants’ individual interest in ‘taking part’ and their international context first, we can avoid the problems of under-inclusion that fall out of more state-centric theories of distributing political rights.

Author

• Joseph Cloward, Stanford University