Immigration seems to be on the minds of many liberal governments in a post-Brexit and post-Trump world. The European Union is still grappling with the consequences of the Mediterranean refugee crisis; France is riven between adhering to laicité on the one hand and respecting the wishes of Muslim minorities on the other; Australia is facing its own refugee dilemma, particularly in the light of the abuses documented at the Australia-run detention centre in Papua New Guinea; and of course anxieties abound in the United States regarding the status of Mexican immigrants. How liberal democracies should respond to the (perceived) threat of immigration is a question that has vexed moral and political philosophers in recent decades, in response to a planet increasingly united by globalisation and yet also increasingly fractured by the realities of globalisation.
This week on The Provocateur, I talk about immigration with Benjamin Boudou, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and editor-in-chief of Raisons politiques, the premier political theory journal in France. We explore his current research which aims to reinvigorate the concept of hospitality in political theory, specifically applying it to the contexts of immigration and frontiers. We also discuss briefly the current situations in Britain and France, as well as how to resolve the divide between analytic and continental approaches to political philosophy.
You can listen to the podcast here:
Further Reading:
Benhabib, S. (2004) The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carens, J. (2013) The Ethics of Immigration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Derrida, J. (2000) Of Hospitality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Fine, S. and L. Ypi (eds.) (2016) Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goodin, R. (2007) ‘Enfranchising all affected interests and its alternatives’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 35, pp. 40-68.
Kukathas, C. (2012) ‘Why open borders?’ Ethical Perspectives 19(4), pp. 649-675.
Miller, D. (2016) Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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