The value of democratic agency for immigrants: a justice-based account

There are numerous arguments in the literature for the democratic inclusion of immigrants, ranging from arguments for the inclusion of some immigrants in democratic decision-making on particular issues, e.g., border control or asylum policy, to arguments for the full-scale enfranchisement of all immigrants on the national level, i.e., granting them voting rights on a par with citizens. These claims for democratic inclusion are usually supported by considerations about the democratic boundary problem, and reference some boundary principle, e.g., the All Affected Principle or the All Subjected Principle. I argue that such arguments are insufficient for explaining the significance and value of democratic inclusion for immigrants. They treat democratic inclusion primarily as a matter of endowing immigrants with the purported benefits and protections that democratic participation rights provide, e.g., protection against the presumptive harm of unilateral state coercion. In this framework immigrants are mainly construed as passive recipients of the benefits of political liberties. This approach, however, fails to explain an essential element of the value of democratic inclusion, i.e., its relationship with immigrants’ agency. Democratic participation rights are rights to exercise our agency in specific kinds of ways, i.e., as co-authors of political decisions about the public rules that regulate and govern our interactions with others within the context of social cooperation. Successful accounts of democratic inclusion must explain why it is valuable for immigrants to be able to exercise their agency in this way, i.e., the comparative benefit of being subject to fair rules in the making of which they participated, compared with subjection to equally fair rules that were made for them by others without their agential involvement. In this paper I offer such an agency-based account of democratic inclusion. I consider two possible ways of explaining the value of the democratic agency of immigrants: an autonomy-based one and a justice-based one. On the first view, the value of democratic agency derives from immigrants’ interest in leading an autonomous life, while on the second, it derives from their interest in discharging the natural duty of justice or, in other words, becoming agents of justice within the political contexts in which they are involved. I argue that the justice-based account is superior to the autonomy-based one. While autonomy does ground the value of various forms of agency, democratic agency specifically involves acting together with others to shape a common system of binding rules, thereby exercising public authority. Our interest in autonomy may ground claims on being appropriately protected from the arbitrary exercise of public authority, but not claims to wield such authority ourselves. However, the interest in being not only patients but agents of justice, and to participate in the common project of achieving justice in the political contexts in which one is involved can ground claims for democratic agency. I show that immigrants retain this interest even in receiving states, i.e., outside their domestic political context, and that this provides the strongest reason for their democratic inclusion.