Vulnerable minorities and democratic legitimacy in refugee admission

ABSTRACT

In this paper I defend the view that the democratic legitimacy of refugee admission policies requires the democratic inclusion of asylum seekers. I argue that this includes not only granting them formal participation rights, but also ensuring that they have a sufficient level of participatory capabilities to exercise these rights. This leads to the specific problem of asylum seekers with vulnerable minority backgrounds. Their participatory capabilities may be hindered by social injustice stemming from their state of origin which the receiving state, one might argue, has no duty to redress. Redressing inequalities that stem from social injustice in other states may be thought of as being beyond the limits of refuge, and therefore unreasonable to demand from receiving states. I propose a defence of what I call the Inclusion Thesis against this objection based on the idea that the democratic inclusion of asylum seekers is necessary for making sure that they can enjoy their basic right to have a say. Receiving states do not generally have a duty to rectify unjust inequalities among asylum seekers that stem from their states of origin. However, when this is necessary for making sure that they can enjoy their basic rights, they may be required to do so. Therefore, since receiving states have a duty to ensure that asylum seekers with vulnerable minority backgrounds can enjoy their basic right to have a say, they also have a duty to make sure that their participatory capabilities are equalized.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• democracy
• democratic inclusion
• participatory capabilities
• global justice

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen and Annamari Vitikainen as well as the anonymous referees who provided valuable comments on this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Some authors sharply distinguish between legitimacy and authority taking democracy to be strictly a matter of the latter rather than a former (see Garthoff 2010). In this paper I do not take such views into account.

² Note that decisions made by administrative personnel or the executive branch, that is, many decisions that pertain to refugee admission, are also subject to democratic authorization, albeit indirect.

³ Although there may be good reasons for the naturalization of refugees and other immigrants over time (Rubio-Marín 2004; Owen 2011; De Schutter and Ypi 2015; Ziegler 2017).

⁴ Iris Marion Young (2002) calls the type of disadvantage such minorities suffer in democratic deliberation and decision-making internal exclusion. For an illuminating analysis of this phenomenon see chapter 2 of her Inclusion and Democracy.

⁵ Note that the problem arises for supranational institutions as well. For example, were the EU to make and implement all refugee policy in Europe, there would still remain a question as to whether redressing democracy-hindering injustices for asylum seekers which originate in other parts of the world is a requirement of democratic legitimacy in the European level.

⁶ Note that we generally recognize a basic right against total enslavement, i.e. the total loss of our capacity to determine the most important aspects of our own lives.

⁷ Although asylum seekers whose state of origin was in the past colonized by the receiving state or suffered from some such injustice may have as strong claims as domestic victims of injustice.