¹ Variations on this latter claim are made by, for example, Cole, Phillip, “Embracing the ‘Nation,’” Res Publica 6, no. 3 (2000): 237–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seglow, Jonathan, “The Ethics of Immigration,” Political Studies Review 3, no. 3 (2005): 317–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Abizadeh, Arash, “Does Liberal Democracy Presuppose a Cultural Nation? Four Arguments,” American Political Science Review 96, no. 3 (2002): 495–509CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bader, Veit, “Citizenship and Exclusion,” Political Theory 23, no. 2 (1995): 211–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On occasion, the objections are made against “liberal nationalism” rather than communitarianism per se.

² Arguments for open borders are not made only in terms of distributive justice. Some also argue for freedom of movement on autonomy-based grounds. See, for example, Dummett, Ann, “The Transnational Migration of People Seen from within a Natural Law Tradition,” in Free Movement: Ethical Issues in the Transnational Migration of People and of Money, ed. Barry, Brian and Goodin, Robert (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 169–80Google Scholar. I agree, however, with many others that autonomy demands adequate freedom of movement, and not necessarily the freedom to cross borders (though, of course, in some instances, the freedom to cross borders will be essential to protecting and promoting autonomy).

³ The term “foreign aid” here should be taken to be a placeholder for the broad range of tasks associated with assisting development in poorer countries.

⁴ Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 39Google Scholar. As I indicate here, I am mainly concerned with permanent migrants, who traditionally have occupied the attention of vigorous defenders of state sovereignty. That said, as a reviewer observed, there are many different categories of migrant streams to consider, including tourists, temporary migrants, and so on. Indeed, many countries with strong “nativist” movements are turning to temporary labor migrants, who can fill labor shortages, but who are temporary and are therefore not perceived to be a danger to the national culture. I believe (as does Walzer) that the presence of temporary workers as “partial citizens” can and does have a profound impact on the culture of the host community. See Walzer, “Membership,” in Spheres of Justice, chap. 3.

⁵ Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 62. Peter Meilaender makes a similar argument, according to which there is additionally a strong connection between a nation's public culture and the immigration policies it chooses to adopt. Moreover, immigration policies “shape membership itself, [and so] they inevitably have a profound effect upon the countries that adopt them” (Meilaender, Peter C., Toward a Theory of Immigration [New York: Palgrave, 2001], 59CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

⁶ Miller, David, National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 218CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Cultural preservationists do often argue for the right to control borders, as Arash Abizadeh correctly observes, but they rarely claim that the right to control borders is unmediated in the sense that it can be exercised for any reason whatsoever. See Arash Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders,” Political Theory 36, no. 1 (2008): 37–65. Walzer, Miller, and Meilaender, the best known and most persuasive of advocates for immigration control, all articulate the set of limits to which this right is subject. For example, Michael Walzer writes: “we seem bound to grant asylum … because its denial would require us to use force against helpless and desperate people” (Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 51). Or, as Meilaender observes, “in the plight of the truly desperate, then, as well as in the close bonds of the family, we confront powerful challenges to state sovereignty over migration” (Meilaender, Toward a Theory of Immigration, 183). More generally, as a reviewer for the journal points out, it is near-conventional to observe that the sovereignty of the nation state has eroded over time, and so I agree with Abizadeh that it is a mistake to claim that they have unilateral control over their borders (morally and actually). Two prominent accounts in this vein are Sassen, Saskia, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, and Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoğlu, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁸ Scheffler, Samuel, “Immigration and the Significance of Culture,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 35, no. 2 (2007): 102CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a similar argument, see Waldron, Jeremy, “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25 (1992): 787–88Google Scholar.

⁹ Scheffler, “Immigration and the Significance of Culture,” 107.

¹⁰ Miller, David, “Immigration: The Case for Limits,” in Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics, ed. Cohen, Andrew and Wellman, Christopher Heath (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 193–206Google Scholar. Miller contrasts what he terms “cultural continuity” with what he terms “cultural rigidity,” a concept that is roughly equivalent to Scheffler's “strong preservationism.” And, of course, Walzer is often taken to be advocating a strong preservationist view, since he argues for the right to control borders not only to preserve cultural continuity, but also to preserve cultural distinctiveness.

¹¹ Miller, “Immigration,” 200–1; see also Perry, Stephen R., “Immigration, Justice and Culture,” in Justice in Immigration, ed. Schwartz, Warren F. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 94–135CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In some cases, the cultural preservation argument is connected to a democratic argument; on this view, cultural preservation is important for its connection to preserving vibrant democratic politics. For advocates of this position, cultural preservation is not inherently valuable; it is instrumentally valuable insofar as it is able to support democratic practice. The objections that are raised against the cultural preservation argument are generally raised against this view as well, although there is some additional sympathy for this argument's commitment to democratic values. The skeptics reject the claim that a shared culture is necessary for the preservation of democratic values, and thereby in need of preservation itself. Others are skeptical about the possibility of separating the cultural argument from the democratic argument in the first place. For example, Jean Cohen writes, “my point is to indicate that there is an ‘elective affinity’ between a strong democratic stress on citizenship as the self-rule of a sovereign demos (which presupposes membership) and a communitarian stress on belonging and identity” (Cohen, Jean, “Changing Paradigms of Citizenship and the Exclusiveness of the Demos,” International Sociology 14, no. 3 [1999]: 250CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

¹² Kymlicka later abandoned the language of structure because it “suggests an overly formal and rigid picture of what is a very diffuse and open-ended phenomenon.” See Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 83Google Scholar.

¹³ Perry, “Immigration, Justice and Culture,” 112, 114; see Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, chap. 5.

¹⁴ Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 83.

¹⁵ Gans, Chaim, “Nationalism and Immigration,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1, no. 2 (1998): 165CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Ibid., 166. This thought is echoed in more general terms by Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz: “the prosperity of the culture is important to the well-being of its members. If the culture is decaying, or if it is persecuted or discriminated against, the options and opportunities open to its members will shrink, become less attractive, and their pursuits less likely to be successful” (Margalit, Avishai and Raz, Joseph, “National Self-Determination,” Journal of Philosophy 87, no. 9 [1990]: 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

¹⁷ Perry, “Immigration, Justice and Culture,” 114.

¹⁸ For an expression of discontent with respect to the plausibility of the autonomy argument for liberal nationalism, see Patten, Alan, “The Autonomy Argument for Liberal Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 5, no. 1 (1999): 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My own account here is less of an argument, and more of a presentation of two arguments that, in my view, work together to support the claim that culture is important to preserve: the autonomy argument as well as the democracy argument.

¹⁹ I will refer to the cultural continuity argument as a cultural preservationist argument when I mean to refer to the caricaturing of the argument by open border and free movement advocates.

²⁰ Whelan, Frederick G., “Citizenship and Freedom of Movement: An Open Admission Policy?” in Open Borders? Closed Societies? The Ethical and Political Issues, ed. Gibney, Mark (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), 11Google Scholar.

²¹ Seidman, Louis Michael, “Fear and Loathing at the Border,” in Justice in Immigration, ed. Schwartz, Warren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 137Google Scholar.

²² Carens, Joseph, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” Review of Politics 49, no. 2 (1987): 270CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It must be said that this argument does not apply to refugees. For discussions of the case of refugees, see Wilcox, Shelley, “Immigrant Admissions and Global Relations of Harm,” Journal of Social Philosophy 38, no. 2 (2007): 274–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shacknove, Andrew, “Who Is a Refugee?” Ethics 95, no. 2 (1985): 274–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Whelan, “Citizenship and Freedom of Movement,” 7. Note that Whelan sets out to defend restrictions on immigration on the grounds that important liberal values require the protection that is secured via border control, and that although Seidman is sympathetic to the open borders argument, he ultimately rejects it on feasibility grounds.

²⁴ There is considerable debate, which I am leaving aside here, concerning the nature of the “right” to culture. Here, I use “right to culture” to refer to the right that members of national cultures have to the stability that is essential to protecting their autonomy. But see Levy, Jacob, “Classifying Cultural Rights,” in Ethnicity and Group Rights, ed. Kymlicka, Will and Shapiro, Ian (New York: New York University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, and Kukathas, Chandran, “Are There Any Cultural Rights?” Political Theory 20, no. 1 (1992): 105–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ For the purposes of the argument, I am leaving the term “cultural claim” deliberately vague. It is worth noting at least three ways in which the term can be used: 1) it can refer to an individual's claim to have access to her culture; 2) it can refer to a cultural group's claim to practice and preserve a culture; 3) it can refer to a claim for cultural self-determination in a political sense, i.e., to a claim to form a political unit in which a particular culture is dominant and protected. Much work in political theory considers the normative differences that underpin these claims.

²⁶ The claim is framed in this way because, of course, it would be a mistake to suggest that Joseph Carens—the best-known advocate of open borders—gives short shrift to cultural claims more generally. Rather, he is quite sensitive to the cultural claims that are sometimes made by those who argue for border control. See, for example, Joseph Carens, “Migration and Morality: A Liberal Egalitarian Perspective,” in Free Movement, 25–47. Another advocate of relatively open borders, Michael Dummett, agrees that the importance of protecting vulnerable cultures may well justify closed borders in some cases. See his “Immigration,” Res Publica 10, no. 2 (2004), 115–22.

²⁷ I say “presumptively” because, after all, most advocates of open borders do accept some reasons for which it is justified to close borders to immigrants. As Veit Bader writes, “let us remove the bogus of an open border scenario from the political agenda! Some degree of closure is morally permitted and ethico-politically required” (Bader, Veit, “Fairly Open Borders,” in Citizenship and Exclusion, ed. Bader, Veit [London: Macmillan, 1997], 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Carens agrees on the importance of restricting “truly overwhelming” migration should it threaten “public order.” See Carens, “Aliens and Citizens,” 11.

²⁸ For critiques of national protectionism, see Pogge, Thomas, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Caney, Simon, Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. That said, Pogge does not follow up his critique of explanatory nationalism with an argument for open borders; rather, he argues in favor of substantially increased foreign aid, as I will discuss in section 5.

²⁹ A full normative theory according to which cultural claims are evaluated for their contribution to freedom of movement is beyond the scope of this paper, but is one towards which I am working at present.

³⁰ Kabachnik, Peter, “To Choose, Fix, or Ignore Culture? The Cultural Politics of Gypsy and Traveler Mobility in England,” Social & Cultural Geography 10, no. 4 (2009): 461–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ One might think that the controversy of the Israeli Law of Return is that Israel employs this law while, simultaneously, denying the same right to Palestinians. I do not deny that denying the right to Palestinians adds to the controversial nature of the Law of Return. Rather, I am pointing to one example of a generally controversial idea, namely, laws that permit the return of “kin” on “ethnic” or “cultural” grounds. Germany and Japan have both engaged in this practice as well. See, in general, Christian Joppke, Selecting by Origin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

³² Ibid., 162–70.

³³ Ibid., 162.

³⁴ Again, I do not wish to be taken as defending the Law of Return. For an analysis, please see ibid., chap. 4.

³⁵ This raises another, related, debate that I do not have the space to engage here: whether nonrefugee migrants can deploy cultural claims to support their applications to immigrate. David Miller argues, for example, that a nation state must supply adequate cultural options for its citizens; it is not therefore a moral imperative that we recognize the right to cross borders in search of a culture that is unavailable within one's borders. He writes: “one reason a person may want to migrate is in order to participate in a culture that does not exist in his native land. … But does this ground a right to free movement across borders? It seems to me that it does not. What a person can legitimately demand access to is an adequate range of options to choose between” (Miller, “Immigration,” 196). Yet Miller and others do seem sympathetic to arguments that nation states can choose among potential migrants on cultural grounds—in particular, with respect to refugees and, in some cases, with immigrants more generally. Carens, for example, generally supports Quebec's right to choose migrants who are fluent in French (a key aspect of Quebecois culture). See Carens, Joseph, “Immigration, Political Community, and the Transformation of Identity: Quebec's Immigration Politics in Critical Perspective,” in Is Quebec Nationalism Just? ed. Carens, Joseph (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. See also Joseph Carens, “Nationalism and the Exclusion of Immigrants: Lessons from Australian Immigration Policy,” in Open Borders? Closed Societies? 41–60. The point here, and it deserves more consideration, is that there seems to be a tension between the claim that states can choose migrants on the basis of cultural preference and the claim that migrants themselves cannot (beyond signaling their cultural preferences by requesting permission to migrate to a new culture).

³⁶ For more on the political and religious significance of the eruv, see Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva, “The Political Symbolism of the Eruv,” Jewish Social Studies 11, no. 3 (2005): 9–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Novek, Eleanor M., “Gates of Conflict: Communication, Symbolic Spaces and the Construction of Difference in Faith Communities,” Atlantic Journal of Communication 10, no. 1 (2002): 49–63Google Scholar.

³⁷ Of course, the state's refusal to grant access to the use of public space to create an eruv does not prevent Jews from observing their religion. Jews (women included) can continue to observe their religious obligations with or without the expanded eruv. It is also worth noting that the space encompassed by the eruv is not closed to non-Jews, who can move freely in the space, as well as into and out of the space, at all times. Indeed, the wire that creates an eruv is in most cases nearly invisible.

³⁸ Elis, Hadi, “The Kurdish Demand for Statehood and the Future of Iraq,” The Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies 29, no. 2 (2004): 191–209Google Scholar; Hadji, Philip S., “The Case for Kurdish Statehood in Iraq,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 41, no. 2/3: 513–41Google Scholar.

³⁹ Donovan, Shane, “Kurdistan: The Elusive Quest for Sovereignty,” Harvard International Review 28, no. 3 (2006): 8Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ This is not to say, however, that there is a unified Kurdish voice. Although the Kurds seem broadly to be committed to the idea of a unified and independent Kurdistan, there is considerable disagreement among Kurds (which has sometimes been violent) with respect to how to proceed.

⁴¹ I am assuming, here, that cultural claims are one essential—in fact, the essential—feature of claims to national self-determination. For the components of nationality, see Miller, David, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar, chap. 2.

⁴² Nickel, James, “Why Basic Liberties Are Bilateral,” Law and Philosophy 17, no. 5/6 (1998): 631Google Scholar. Bilateral rights are those where the right to engage in X includes “within its scope,” in Nickel's terminology, the right not to engage in X. For example, Nickel writes, “Freedom of religion—or as I prefer to say, freedom in the area of religion—is bilateral if it includes within its scope the liberty to refrain from religious belief and practice” (ibid., 627).

⁴³ That said, I do not mean to deny that the opportunity to move to flee poverty or violence is tremendously valuable and, indeed, more valuable than, for example, my freedom to move freely in and between Canada and the United States. The value may not be measured along the same dimension, however. My freedom to move/stay supports my freedom to make autonomous choices about my life; the freedom to move to flee violence or poverty may not necessarily be measured in terms of autonomy (at least, not in the first instance).

⁴⁴ Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 38.

⁴⁵ Carens, “Aliens and Citizens,” 270.

⁴⁶ Boswell, Christina, “Combining Economics and Sociology in Migration Theory,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34, no. 4 (2008): 549–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Radu, Dragos, “Social Interactions in Economic Models of Migration: A Review and Appraisal,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34, no. 4 (2008): 531–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arango, Joaquin, “Explaining Migration: A Critical View,” International Social Science Journal 52, no. 185 (2000): 283–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁷ Cole, Phillip, Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 29Google Scholar. Yet these observations lead neither Carens nor Cole to pay more attention to the concerns of potential migrants where they are, but rather to argue that we need to be prepared to sacrifice the demands of cultural preservation claimed by those who would keep migrants out.

⁴⁸ “International Organization of Migration: Global Estimates and Trends,” http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/about-migration/facts-and-figures/global-estimates-and-trends.

⁴⁹ Carens, “Aliens and Citizens,” 265.

⁵⁰ The Bureau of Economic Analysis provides up to date information concerning the gross domestic product of American states; see http://www.bea.gov.

⁵¹ Arango, “Explaining Migration: A Critical View,” 286–87. It is expected that the same will be true in the enlarged EU: “The average propensity to migrate is likely to decrease for the new Member States as their incomes further converge towards the EU-15 average. Moreover, incomes do not need to converge fully on the EU-15 average for migration rates to decline as the examples of Hungary and the Czech Republic show” (Governatori, Matteo et al. , Employment in Europe 2008 [Brussels: Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities, Employment Analysis Unit, 2008], 126Google Scholar).

⁵² At the time of writing, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Ireland have the most open of labor markets among states in the European Union; thus far, Romanians and Bulgarians are the only citizens of the EU who are not permitted access to their labor markets. Restrictions to the labor market across the EU are set to end in April 2011. For more, see Heinz, Frigyes Ferdinand and Ward-Warmedinger, Melanie, “Cross-Border Labour Mobility within an Enlarged EU,” European Central Bank: Occasional Paper Series 52 (October 2006)Google Scholar, available at http://www.ecb.int/pub/pdf/scpops/ecbocp52.pdf. For an account of the transitional procedures, through which all citizens will come to have access to all labor markets, see Governatori et al., Employment in Europe 2008, 112.

⁵³ Governatori et al., Employment in Europe 2008, 114. See chapter 3 in general, where the authors provide evidence that “there has been a substantial rise in labour mobility from several of the Central and Eastern European Member States to some of the EU-15, but numbers have been generally limited when compared with the population sizes of both receiving and sending countries” (ibid.).

⁵⁴ Favell, Adrian, “The New Face of East-West Migration in Europe,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34, no. 5 (2008): 711CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ Naomi Pollard, Maria Latorre, and Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, “Floodgates or Turnstiles? Post-EU Enlargement Migration Flows to (and from) the UK,” Institute for Public Policy Research (2008).

⁵⁶ Ibid., 45. The authors survey Polish migrants in the UK concerning their reasons for returning to Poland. Those surveyed include multiple reasons that may well be termed “cultural,” including a desire to raise their children in Poland, a longing for home, a desire to be with family, and so on. Again, this evidence is merely suggestive and considerably more work will need to be done to offer a fuller assessment of why, after all, migration across borders in Europe appears more frequently to be temporary than permanent.

⁵⁷ Brian Barry, “The Quest for Consistence: A Sceptical View,” in Free Movement, 280. The term “chain migration” also refers to the process by which migrants are legally permitted to aid their family members to join them once they have achieved permanent status in the host country.

⁵⁸ For discussions of chain migration, see Haug, Sonja, “Migration Networks and Migration Decision-Making,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34, no. 4 (2008): 585–605CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boyd, M., “Family and Personal Networks in International Migration: Recent Developments and New Agendas,” International Migration Review 23, no. 3 (1989): 638–70CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Bauer, T. and Zimmermann, K. F., “Network Migration of Ethnic Germans,” International Migration Review 31, no. 1 (1997): 143–49CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁵⁹ The references cited just above indicate just this, moreover.

⁶⁰ Although I have no evidence for this claim, I would hazard a guess that for many potential migrants, economic considerations alone would dictate that they migrate to locations other than the reproduced culture of origin, but that economic and cultural considerations taken together press them towards joining an ethnic enclave. There is some evidence, moreover, that there are significant economic disadvantages to joining these enclave communities. See, for example, Nee, Victor and Sanders, Jimy, “Trust in Ethnic Ties: Social Capital and Immigrants,” in Trust in Society, ed. Cook, Karen (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 374–92Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Pogge, Thomas, “Migration and Poverty,” in Citizenship and Exclusion, ed. Bader, Veit (New York: Macmillan Press, 1997), 14Google Scholar.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ Robert E. Goodin, “If People Were Money… ,” in Free Movement, 8.

⁶⁴ Bader, “Fairly Open Borders,” 30.

⁶⁵ Or we could compare an ideal world in which borders would be open with an ideal world in which “the vast majority of people [are] content with conditions in their own countries” (Barry, “The Quest for Consistence: A Sceptical View,” 279).