Citizenship regimes are under pressure. Decades of neoliberalism have eroded the social rights that make citizenship into a form of equal membership. Concurrently, democracies have hardened the borders of their citizenship regimes . In this paper, I contend that these two dynamics are interlinked. Based on this diagnosis, I argue that the familiar claim that democracies must choose between broadening and deepening citizenship is, in the long-term, mistaken. Deepening citizenship is necessary for broadening citizenship because economic precarity trengthens support for the far-right. Broadening citizenship is necessary for deepening citizenship because only an inclusive conception of citizenship can counter the neoliberal nationalist ideology that fuels the erosion of social citizenship.

According to a common argument in defense of border control, legitimate states have a right to exclude on grounds of collective self-determination. I argue that the value of self-determination can also serve as a basis for criticizing states’ immigration policies. Specifically, I contend that the externalization policies of states in the Global North often undermine the self-determination of peoples in the Global South. I identify five pathways by which externalization policies undermine self-determination. I conclude by tentatively suggesting some potential implications of this argument for broader debates about the governance of migration.

Can awarding migrants fewer legal rights than citizens ever be just? This paper explores this issue. I first outline an abstract argument in favor of rights differentiation. According to this argument, people's rights ought to track their independent claims; since these claims may vary, some rights differentiation is permissible. I then suggest that this argument threatens to undermine the institution of citizenship because citizens' claims on the state can differ in just the way migrants' claims can, and the rights of citizenship can be unbundled and awarded piecemeal. To resolve this tension, I offer a novel account of the normative functions of citizenship, which turns on the assertion that citizenship's public conferral of equal rights promotes status equality and confers equal recognition. This account sets firm bounds on rights differentiation without ruling it out entirely.

In Beyond Empathy and Inclusion: The Challenge of Listening in Deliberative Democracy, Mary F. Scudder defends a listening-based approach to deliberative democracy. On this account, democratic legitimacy requires that citizens listen to each other's deliberative contributions to give them fair consideration. She opposes this listening-based approach to a recent "empathic turn" in deliberative democratic theory, which emphasizes the importance of imaginative perspective-taking in democratic deliberation. Scudder develops an incisive critique of relying on empathy in democratic deliberation. According to her argument, our capacity to empathize is severely limited, and empathy cannot replace, but only distort listening. This argument suggests that we should listen rather than empathize in democratic deliberation. In this paper, we challenge the implicit assumption that empathy and listening must be regarded as mutually exclusive alternatives. We argue that empathy still has an important place within a listening-centric approach to democracy because empathy can improve listening broadly understood, according to its own inherent aim of ensuring fair consideration. Specifically, we identify three constructive roles that empathy can play in facilitating democratic listening: it can help us to understand what someone has said, see where someone is coming from, and promote mutual understanding. We argue that recognizing these constructive roles for empathy in democratic deliberation is compatible with acknowledging empathy's limits and accepting that we should sometimes prefer listening without empathy. Ceasing to conceive of empathy and listening as mutually exclusive options opens up new questions and we close by discussing some potential directions of future study.

In this introductory essay to the special issue on relational equality and migration, I first introduce a familiar way of conceiving of the connection between equality and migration, one that focuses on distributive inequality. I then provide an overview of the state of the debate concerning relational equality and migration. I conclude by summarizing the contributions to this special issue.

Migration blackmail occurs when one state threatens to engineer a “migration crisis” on the borders of a target state by creating or permitting an irregular migration flow unless political or economic concessions are made by the target state. States may have legitimate interests in resisting migration blackmail. However, migrants have strong interests in accessing international protection and avoiding harm. These goals may seem to stand in tension and generate a dilemma: it may seem that there is no way for target states to effectively resist and deter blackmail while adequately respecting migrants’ interests. This paper explores what is problematic about migration blackmail and how states may permissibly respond to it. I argue that target states are not permitted to close their borders in response to migration blackmail but instead must respect the right to seek asylum. I offer four complementary arguments for this conclusion: (1) not all cases of migration blackmail are dilemmatic; (2) target states have often contributed to the circumstances that give rise to migration blackmail and so may bear some responsibility for the situation; (3) the interests of migrants in accessing protection and avoiding harm outweigh states’ interests in resisting blackmail; and (4) states have options available to resist migration blackmail without contravening the right to asylum.

It is widely believed that immigrants, after some time, acquire a claim to naturalize and become citizens of their new state. What explains this claim? Although existing answers (may) succeed in justifying some of immigrants' rights claims, they cannot justify the claim that immigrants are owed the opportunity to naturalize because these theories lack a sufficiently rich account of the purpose of citizenship. To fill this gap, I offer a novel egalitarian account of citizenship. Citizenship, on this account, partially protects immigrants against social hierarchy by realizing social equality in a publicly accessible manner. This explains claims to naturalize.

Political philosophers often operate with a primarily humanitarian picture of refugee protection: asylum is seen as an apolitical institution; displacement as an ahistorical phenomenon. In discussing states' obligations towards refugees, philosophers are frequently either silent on the causes of forced displacement or attribute sole responsibility for displacement to the refugees' states of origin. Asylum as Reparation offers an important corrective to this picture. Souter observes that displacement is frequently caused or enabled by the actions of external states. This is obvious in the case of displacement induced through wars of aggression, like Russia's in Ukraine and the United States' invasion of Iraq. However, Souter suggests that external states can also bear responsibility for displacement caused by climate change and forced migration events whose origins lie in colonization, as with Belgium's role in Rwanda. When the actions of external states cause displacement, Souter argues that those states bear special reparative responsibilities towards those whose displacement they helped cause. Souter does not deny that asylum has an important humanitarian function: indeed, he specifies the nature of this function in Chapter 2. Rather, he argues that asylum can have a plurality of moral functions, one of which is reparative.