Immigrants, Nations, and Citizenship*

IMMIGRATION, on a significant scale, is now and will continue to be a significant feature of political life in Western liberal democracies. The intense desire of the migrants to make a better life for themselves (often against the background of intolerable conditions in their home countries) combines with the economic needs of public and private sector employers in the receiving states to defeat populist agitation for highly restrictive immigration controls. But if the fact of ongoing immigration is indisputable, the normative implications of that fact, both for the immigrant groups and for the societies they enter, are much less clear. In particular, what can either party legitimately expect of the other? How far is it reasonable to expect immigrants to adapt to existing conditions in the host society, and how far must citizens in the host society bend to accommodate ‘the strangers in our midst’? These are the questions that have prompted the present article. I shall approach it by thinking of the relationship between the immigrant group and the citizens of the receiving state as quasi-contractual. In other words, each side claims certain rights against the other, and acknowledges certain obligations in turn. These rights and obligations are not to be understood exclusively in legal terms. The quasi-contract I am envisaging will have legal components—for example, I will argue that immigrant groups should acknowledge a general obligation to keep the law of the states they enter—but it will also include normative requirements that cannot sensibly be cast in legal form. The underlying issue is what constitutes a fair balance of rights and obligations on either side. This issue is far from being settled in political debate in Western democracies. At one extreme, we have those who would impose on immigrants a very strong obligation to assimilate to the cultural patterns