Identity and the Demand for Inclusion: The Critique of Methodological Nationalism and the Political Theory of Immigration

ABSTRACT

Political theorists of immigration who are critical of restrictive immigration policies generally rely on abstract, universal, cosmopolitan principles, while defenders of such restrictions focus on concrete identities. This status quo overlooks the ways attention to concrete identities can challenge restrictive immigration policies, and neglects important insights from the critique of methodological nationalism in social theory and migration studies. I first identify the strongest case for immigration restrictions, with attention to the exceptions to the right to exclude it demands, the “associative ownership” account, whose promise is due in part to avoiding over-reliance on nationalist justifications. This account has overlooked those whose identities have been coercively constituted by the actions of the state in question, who have a potentially justified demand for inclusion. The critique of methodological nationalism demonstrates the shortcomings of using national identity to determine who merits such an exception, and of abandoning judgment to states themselves.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ For example, David Miller, “Immigration: The Case for Limits,” in Andrew Cohen and Christopher Wellman (eds), Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 193–206; National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration (Cambridge, MA, UK: Harvard University Press, 2016). See also Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), ch. 2; and Anna Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Explanation (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 199–204.

² In his now-canonical case for open borders, Joseph Carens, considers the case for open borders from three universalist and liberal perspectives: Rawlsian, Nozickian, and utilitarian. “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” Review of Politics 49:2 (1987), pp. 251–273. See also Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013); Philip Cole, Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); Chandran Kukathas, “Why Open Borders?” Ethical Perspectives 19:4 (2012), pp. 649–675; Alex Sager, Against Borders, Why the World Needs Free Movement of People (London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020).

³ Rogers Smith, “National Obligations and Noncitizens: Special Rights, Human Rights, and Immigration,” Politics & Society 42:3 (2014), pp. 381–398.

⁴ The term was first coined by Herminio Martins in “Time and Theory in Sociology,” in John Rex (ed.), Approaches to Sociology: An Introduction to Major Trends in Sociology (London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 246–294. For helpful discussion of Martins’ argument and an excellent overview of the first two waves of critiques of methodological nationalism in social theory, see Daniel Chernilo, A Social Theory of the Nation-State: The Political Forms of Modernity Beyond Methodological Nationalism (London, UK: Routledge, 2007), pp. 9–32.

⁵ Martins, “Time and Theory,” p. 276. The characterization of methodological nationalism as a cognitive bias comes from Alex Sager, Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility: The Migrant’s Eye View of the World (Cham, CH: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), p. 18.

⁶ See, for example, Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? (London, UK: Polity Press, 2000), and Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Condition: Why Methodological Nationalism Fails,” Theory, Culture & Society 24:7/8 (2007), pp. 286–290.

⁷ Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration, and the Social Sciences,” Global Networks 2:4 (2002), pp. 301–334, and Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism, The Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology,” International Migration Review 37:3 (2003), pp. 576–610.

⁸ Bridget Anderson, “New Directions in Migration Studies: Towards Methodological De-Nationalism,” Comparative Migration Studies 7:36 (2019), p. 4. The primary exception here is Alex Sager; see his “Methodological Nationalism, Migration and Political Theory,” Political Studies 64:1 (2016), pp. 42–59; and Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics. Another recent work that seeks to develop an understanding of borders that avoids the errors of methodological nationalism, and draws normative conclusions from such an exercise, is Paulina Ochoa Espejo, On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy and the Rights of Place (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020).

⁹ Sager, Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics, pp. 3–5. For an extended case that this feature of methodological nationalism has contributed to scholars and historians failing to identify a substantial “anarchist civilization” in the highlands of Southeast Asia, see James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

¹⁰ Sager, Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics, pp. 8–9; Chris Rumford, “Seeing like a Border: Toward Multiperspectivalism,” in Chris Rumford (ed.) Cosmopolitan Borders (London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), pp. 39–54.

¹¹ Elizabeth Cohen, Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

¹² For a critique in the first vein, against border restrictions, see Sager, Against Borders. For a critique of the very idea of borders in democratic politics, See James Chamberlain, “Minoritarian Democracy: The Case for No Borders,” Constellations 24:2 (2017), pp. 142–153.

¹³ This builds on my approach in “Justice for Border-Crossing Peoples,” in Richard Marbock and Marc Kruman (eds), The Meaning of Citizenship (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2015), pp. 170–209.

¹⁴ Carens, The Ethics of Immigration.

¹⁵ Ibid, 229.

¹⁶ Paulina Ochoa Espejo makes the case that, as part of the project of moving beyond methodological nationalism, we should reject any meaningful role for identities in theorizing borders; see her On Borders, pp. 2–5, 14, 59–63. For reasons stated above, I see my project as broadly complementary to this one.

¹⁷ Smith, “National Obligations”; Rogers Smith, “Constituted Identities and the Obligation to Include,” Ethics & Global Politics 1:3 (2008), pp. 139–154; Rogers Smith, “Living in a Promiseland? Mexican Immigration and American Obligations,” Perspectives on Politics 9:3 (2011), pp. 545–557.

¹⁸ Ryan Pevnick, Immigration and the Constraints of Justice: Between Open Borders and Absolute Sovereignty (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011).

¹⁹ Miller, National Responsibility, pp. 217–218.

²⁰ Avery Kolers, “Attachment to Land: Status or Achievement?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 42:2 (2012), pp. 101–124.

²¹ Anna Stilz, “Nations, States, and Territory,” Ethics 122:3 (2011), pp. 572–601.

²² On the indigenous construction of what white settlers saw as wilderness, see William Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82:3 (1992), pp. 369–385; Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations on the Americas before Columbus (New York, UK: Vintage, 2005), pp. 360–378. On forcible removal of indigenous people from new national parks, see Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of National Parks (New York, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000).

²³ Pevnick, Immigration, p. 35.

²⁴ Sager, Against Borders, p. 62.

²⁵ Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, and Meera Balarajan, Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 17–3.

²⁶ David Earnest, “Neither Citizen nor Stranger: Why States Enfranchise Aliens,” World Politics 58:2 (2006), pp. 252–275; Ron Hayduk and Kathleen Coll, “Urban Citizenship: Campaigns to Restore Immigrant Voting Rights in the US,” New Political Science 40:2 (2018), pp. 336–352.

²⁷ David Nichols, The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

²⁸ Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic Monthly 313:5 (2014), pp. 54–71.

²⁹ Miller, National Responsibility; Strangers in Our Midst.

³⁰ David Miller, “Social Justice in Divided Societies,” in Philip Van Parijs (ed.), Cultural Diversity or Economic Solidarity? (Brussels, BE: Debroeck University Press, 2004), pp. 13–31.

³¹ John Exdell, “Immigration, Nationalism and Human Rights,” Metaphilosophy 40:1 (2009), pp. 131–146.

³² For a meta-analysis of a number of studies looking for such an effect, see Tom van der Meer and Jochem Tolsma, “Ethnic Diversity and its Effects on Social Cohesion,” Annual Review of Sociology 40 (2014), pp. 459–478.

³³ Miller, “Immigration: The Case for Limits,” p. 200.

³⁴ Pevnick, Immigration, p. 139.

³⁵ Walzer, Spheres of Justice, pp. 46–47.

³⁶ Miller, National Responsibility, p. 228, following an argument originally advanced by Michael Blake in “Immigration,” in R.G. Fry and Christopher Wellman (eds), A Companion to Applied Ethics (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 224–237.

³⁷ Miller, National Responsibility, p. 229.

³⁸ Miller, Strangers in our Midst, p. 64.

³⁹ Miller, National Responsibility, p. 131.

⁴⁰ Pevnick, Immigration, pp. 137–139.

⁴¹ For a compelling overview and critique of arguments that suggest using immigration to try to discharge global justice-related duties, see Kieran Oberman, “Poverty and Immigration Policy,” American Political Science Review 109:2 (2015), pp. 239–251.

⁴² Pevnick, Immigration, p. 39.

⁴³ Ibid.

⁴⁴ Smith, “Constituted Identities,” p. 141.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ In this sense, Smith’s CCI obligation is a version of the “all subjected principle” of democratic inclusion defended by, amongst others, Nancy Fraser. See Nancy Fraser “Abnormal Justice,” Critical Inquiry 34:3 (2008), pp. 393–422. On my reading, Fraser’s principle would extend to more people than the CCI exemption, as it includes anyone “subject to a given governance structure” (p. 411) regardless of the degree to which that subjection has shaped their identity.

⁴⁷ Anderson, “New Directions,” p. 3.

⁴⁸ Pevnick, Immigration, pp. 68–70.

⁴⁹ Arash Abizadeh, “On the Demos and its Kin: Nationalism, Democracy and the Boundary Problem,” American Political Science Review 106:4 (2012), pp. 867–882.

⁵⁰ Pevnick, Immigration, p. 40.

⁵¹ Ibid., 119 n12.

⁵² Ibid., 122, emphasis in original.

⁵³ Smith, “Constituted Identities,” p. 150. See also Smith, “Living in a Promiseland?”

⁵⁴ Smith seems to recognize that national identity alone may not be sufficient to evaluate a CCI claim with respect to Filipino Amerasians. Among that group, he holds out children and grandchildren of US military personnel – who have suffered significant discrimination due to their ethnicity – as particularly deserving of CCI; see “National Obligations,” p. 387. Elsewhere, he relies primarily on national identity categories.

⁵⁵ Eileen Luna-Firebaugh, “The Border Crossed Us: Border Crossing Issues of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas,” Wicazo Sa Review 17:1 (2002), pp. 159–181.

⁵⁶ Ken Ellingwood, Hard Line: Life and Death on the US/Mexico Border (New York, UK: Random House, 2004), ch. 7.

⁵⁷ Joel Palka, Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory and Archeology of Indigenous Cultural Change (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005).

⁵⁸ Kate Ervine, “Conservation and Conflict: The Intensification of Property Rights Disputes under Market-Based Conservation in Chiapas, Mexico,” Journal of Political Ecology 181 (2011), pp. 66–80.

⁵⁹ Jeffrey Cohen, The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004).

⁶⁰ Michael Baud and Willem van Schendel, “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,” Journal of World History 8:2 (1997), pp. 211–242.

⁶¹ John House, “The Frontier Zone: A Conceptual Problem for Policymakers,” International Political Science Review 1:4 (1980), pp. 456–477; Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation, and State (London, UK: Routledge, 1999).

⁶² Miller, National Responsibility, pp. 274–276.

⁶³ Smith, “Constituted Identities,” p. 148.

⁶⁴ Goldin, Cameron and Balarajan, Exceptional People.

⁶⁵ In most political theories of immigration, migrants are rarely if ever accorded morally significant agency of their own. Exceptions to this trend include Gwilym David Blunt, Global Poverty, Injustice and Resistance (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020), ch. 4; Luis Cabrera, The Practice of Global Citizenship (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Robin Celikates, “Constituent Power Beyond Exceptionalism: Irregular Migration, Disobedience, and (re-)Constitution,” Journal of International Political Theory 15:1 (2019), pp. 67–81; Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); and Sager, Against Borders, ch. 7.

⁶⁶ Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

⁶⁷ Ibid., 99.

⁶⁸ Paulina Ochoa Espejo, The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).

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David Watkins

David Watkins is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Dayton. He is the coauthor (with Scott Lemieux) of Judicial Review and Contemporary Democratic Theory: Power, Domination and the Courts (Routledge, 2017), as well as articles in Polity, Political Theory, and Perspectives on Politics.