Challenging borders: The case for open borders with Joseph Carens and Jean-Luc Nancy
| Published date | 01 October 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088219859919 |
| Date | 01 October 2021 |
| Author | James A Chamberlain |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219859919
Journal of International Political Theory
2021, Vol. 17(3) 240 –256
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088219859919
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Challenging borders:
The case for open borders
with Joseph Carens and
Jean-Luc Nancy
James A Chamberlain
Mississippi State University, USA
Abstract
Joseph Carens develops one of the most prominent cases for open borders in the
academic literature on the basis of freedom and equality. Yet the implementation of
his social membership theory would mean that immigrants who have not yet lived in a
country long enough to become members would be excluded from political and social
rights, thus raising the possibility of their domination and subordination by citizens. Given
that these problems arise because Carens aims to balance the freedom of individuals
with the “claims of belonging” to a political community, can we theorize the relationship
between freedom and community differently? French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy does
just that, by showing how to think freedom and community as mutually constitutive.
Nancy thus offers the resources for an alternative case for open borders, grounded on
the claim that the freedom of community entails openness to the outside. Drawing also on
Nancy’s account of the common and of democratic politics, my Nancean argument for
open borders challenges Carens’s exclusion of nonmembers from the rights of citizens,
emphasizing instead the need for an ongoing political struggle to expand who is eligible
to claim rights as well as the scope of the rights themselves.
Keywords
Borders, migration, Joseph Carens, Jean-Luc Nancy
The attempt to control cross-border migration results in countless deaths and injuries,
the perpetuation of misery by limiting freedom of movement, the separation of family
Corresponding author:
James A Chamberlain, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762, USA.
Email: jac1287@msstate.edu
859919IPT0010.1177/1755088219859919Journal of International Political TheoryChamberlain
research-article2019
Article
Chamberlain 241
members and loved ones, and the mass detention and deportation of migrants. Within
the territories of nation-states, moreover, borders regulate and restrict the rights of
migrants to engage in economic and political activities, while migrants and citizens
alike are subjected to surveillance and policing to enforce those regulations. These are
indisputable facts of border control, although of course their prevalence and severity
reflects the practices undertaken within particular regimes. The key normative and
political question, however, is whether these effects of borders can be justified, and if
so, by appeal to which values and goals.
Against the dominant tendency in political thought and practice, a burgeoning litera-
ture in academia and beyond answers this question in the negative and instead calls for
open borders. For example, Chandran Kukathas (2012: 650, 652) defends open borders
by rejecting the claim that states may regulate migration as a matter of the legitimate
self-determination of political communities, arguing that it rests on a conceptually inco-
herent and historically inaccurate depiction of the state. Michael Huemer (2010) con-
tends that immigration restrictions unjustifiably violate the rights of potential migrants.
This essay, however, focuses on Joseph Carens’s (2013) case for open borders, which
he makes on the basis of freedom and equality.
As we will see, while Carens argues for open borders he also proposes to restrict citi-
zenship to those who have become members of society by living and working there for
several years. I show that this social membership theory leaves those who fall short of
this threshold in a curious ontological position: Despite shaping and being shaped by
society, they cannot (yet) claim membership of society. Moreover, in Carens’s proposal,
these nonmembers would not enjoy equal rights with citizens, thus raising the possibility
of the domination and subordination of the former by the latter. These problems arise
because Carens aims to balance the freedom of individuals with the “claims of belong-
ing” to a political community. But might it be possible to theorize the relationship
between freedom and community differently?
In the following pages, I argue that the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy offers the
resources with which to develop an alternative case for open borders that avoids the
problems identified with that of Carens. In particular, Nancy does so by showing how to
think freedom not as an encroachment on community and vice versa, but rather as mutu-
ally constitutive of one another. Rather than basing open borders on individual freedom,
the Nancean case for open borders thus argues that the freedom of community entails
openness. This argument for open borders has two advantages over that of Carens: first,
rather than relying on support for the equal freedom of nonmembers, it can build upon a
commitment to achieve freedom within the receiving community, and second, by offer-
ing an alternative account of community, it avoids excluding migrants who have not yet
reached the threshold of social membership (in Carens’s sense) from the full rights of
citizens.
The article is structured as follows. In the first section, I lay out Carens’s argument for
open borders and his social membership theory. I show how Carens’s proposal to base
citizenship rights on social membership would leave those who fall short of this thresh-
old subject to laws over which they have no say, place them in an economically precari-
ous position, and expose them to exploitation and abuse by employers. In the second
section I introduce Nancy’s deconstruction of the individual subject and his account of
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