Abstract
To discuss any issue of social rights seriously, we have to begin not only with the “practical possibilities” or the contending policy proposals on national legislative agendas, but also with governing ethical principles, whatever they may be and wherever that discussion may take us. This is not to say that principles ought to govern policies, as of course they cannot and probably should not, but that principles ought to inform policies ought to be where we start out from before we get to wherever we are going. Otherwise, we are in the value-less world of might makes right. Even if “the right” is held, in a democracy, to be the desire of the majority, this simply marks a numerical extension of the realm of might but makes no ethical improvement on it. In any event, with respect to the contemporary mass migration of peoples, it turns out to be not only undesirable, but impossible, to discuss policy without quickly adverting to the more general realm of principle.
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Notes
See Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
The best description of this ideology of liberal, or in this case liberal “feminist,” nationalism in situ is Judith Ezekiel’s account of laicite, in “French Dressing: Race, Gender, and the Hijab Story,” Australian Feminist Studies (spring 2005). See also Joe Carens, “Muslim Minorities in Contemporary Democracies: The Limits of Liberal Toleration,” Chapter 6 of Culture, Citizenship, and Community (New York: Oxford, 2000).
In a wonderful and entertaining essay, C. Wright Mills pointed out that sociology courses in “deviance” (“Nuts and Sluts,” as they were affectionately called by Harvard undergraduates), were originally created by middle-American Protestants appalled by the social order of immigrant-dominated New York City. See Mills’s “The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists,” in Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., Power Politics and People: the Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills (New York: Galaxy Books, 1974).
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© 2014 Philip Green
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Green, P. (2014). The Discourse on Immigration: Myths and Principles. In: American Democracy. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137381552_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137381552_7
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