Tamara Crnko

The collective right to self-determination is one of the core concepts in the political philosophy of immigration, used to justify the right of legitimate states to exclude potential immigrants. The right to exclude is seen as an essential aspect of control over membership composition, its character and future development, which are understood as essential aspects of communal self-determination. In this sense, the exercise of self-determination is viewed as largely incompatible with freedom to immigrate. This paper aims to challenge this view. It is claimed that, if self-determination is viewed as primarily serving the interest of a political community and its members to self-govern independently, control over migration is not essential for its exercise. The external dimension of self-determination entails a collective being able to choose policies and control its development without external coercion, while the internal component presupposes the existence of a political arrangement that allows some form of popular sovereignty or political participation of members of a political collective. If it can be shown that immigration is not incompatible with preservation of regimes of popular sovereignty, and if immigrants can be seen not as an external threat but as becoming a part of a political collective with mechanisms to accommodate them, then it is not clear that discretion over immigration is an essential aspect of the right to self-determination.

This paper brings together the discussions on international resource trade and immigration. Following Wenar’s analysis of the resource curse, the aim is to challenge the conventional view on immigration that asserts the right of states to have discretionary control over these policies. The paper shows that more liberal immigration is required as an additional remedial policy to persons harmed in unjust trade. The right to self-determination and territorial rights, which are used as the basis for the exclusion of immigrants, are in the context of this analysis constrained by both attentiveness to harm and the charge of inconsistency. Both rights, which are protected domestically, are violated by the unjust ‘might makes right’ trade rule in the international context, causing harm to people in resource exporting countries. This inconsistency presents a challenge to the moral plausibility of the conventional view in the context of the resource trade.

This paper critically examines the argument from self-determination as a justification for the state’s right to exclude immigrants. Central to this argument is the notion of self-composition, which links the right to self-determination with control over the composition and character of the political community, and relatedly, with the control over immigration. Building on the existing criticisms, this paper shows that, when unconstrained self-composition is in tension with liberal-democratic values, and when constrained to fit them, it becomes powerless in its intended role of defining the communal character and future. Attempts to defend it by appealing to protection of democratic institutions are also considered limited. Paper concludes by proposing a reconceptualization of self-determination that shifts the focus from self-composition to broader mechanisms of self-government which can justify migration controls while remaining compatible with liberal-democratic principles.