The notion of social membership, as described in Joseph Carens' The Ethics of Immigration, asserts that due to the relations migrants develop with native citizens and state institutions, they are in turn owned political citizenship rights. Yet, it is not evident what such citizenship rights might entail "politically" for the migrants, given that democratic consensus in Western liberal democracies is assumed throughout the book (Carens 2013, pp.2-3). In aiming to demonstrate that the issues of migrant integration cannot be disentangled from democratic theory, this paper takes Carens' notion of social membership as a starting point for raising the following question: What sort of integration does this social membership account promote and how should it be modified? We argue that Carens' account precludes developing a conception of citizenship and integration seen as a participatory (based on non-domination (Pettit 1997)) and inter-subjective process of negotiation of principles and values of common belonging.
