Alejandro Mosqueda

Citizenship regimes are institutionalized systems of formal and informal norms that define access to membership, as well as associated rights and duties. This paper studies illegalized migration as one of the major tests to assess whether citizenship regimes are fair institutions, based on a historical analysis of legislation meant to reduce illegalized migration in the United States between 1995 and 2022. We build our empirical research starting from a simple observation: despite the great number of bills introduced to reduce illegalized migration to the US, most of such initiatives fail to become law. In fact, 93.5% of all immigration initiatives did not even pass the chamber of Congress in which they were originally presented. Such a high rate of failure shows that these proposals are motivated by electoral aspirations, rather than coming from a genuine wish to help migrants or grant them citizenship. Furthermore, there is also an economic interest that justifies the maintenance of low-cost disposable immigrant labor, with no right to citizenship. Our analysis is an example of how state regulation processes seem to work to formalize, rather than alleviate or eradicate, the precarious legal statuses of illegalized migrants. We conclude that a globalized phenomenon such as citizenship requires going beyond merely institutional and formal conceptions. We need to rethink the institutional notion of citizenship, as a merely status held under the authority of a state and consider it from a cosmopolitan perspective and a multilateral basis. But as long as citizenship remains under the responsibility of states, illegalized migrants will continue to experience precarious citizenship.

This paper is an assessment of the conclusion that negligent agents are not morally responsible for the damages they cause, reached by Matt King in “The Problem with Negligence”. King’s argument involves two difficult issues that are often disregarded in discussions about moral responsibility. One is that it is not clear why we usually attribute responsibility in cases of negligence but not in cases of inadvertence even though both phenomena are characterized by the absence of conscious mental elements. The other is that any explanation of the responsibility attributed in cases of negligence and in paradigmatic cases should shed light on the features that both cases share. I will review these issues involved in King’s argument in order to avoid his conclusion and to clarify some important matters of our attribution of responsibility in cases of negligence and in cases of inadvertence.