The Moral Weight of Noncitizen Relationships

Within the enterprise of political theory, citizenship is commonly assumed to be the only way to guarantee the rights and freedoms of territorially present noncitizens. And yet, noncitizens continue to navigate their presence – negotiating, contesting, and responding to the terms by which they are governed – including noncitizens who do not possess or expect the arrival of citizenship. What, if not citizenship, are these practices grounded on? I argue in this paper that in order to understand the presence and membership of noncitizens, we must take relationships seriously. Indeed, it is precisely because relationships have so much moral weight that they have so passionately motivated arguments for closed borders and restrictive immigration policies as well as arguments for more inclusive and expansive notions of membership that extend to long-term noncitizens. The same concept is used in an inclusionary and exclusionary way, but I suggest that in order to fully capture the experience of noncitizens, relationships are yet to be understood in another way – not as proxy for affiliations that justify the scope of citizenship, but as a condition that imposes moral obligations on the state to attend to the needs of particular people regardless of their legal status. This view suggests that relationships are not in fact delimited by a horizon of citizenship, and generate obligations because of the moral weight of relationships themselves. Relationships have moral value because they compel states to consider the people who are negatively affected by their authority, and to engage with their particular needs and demands in a way that is unique and conditional. The fact that such compulsion arises does not mean that these demands will be met, the same way that citizenship does not automatically satisfy the demands of its bearers, but it does mean that they carry a moral force that cannot be avoided. The central insight of this view is that noncitizens are able to navigate their presence because they are caught in a complicated relationship with those states that can be invoked to contest and negotiate, successfully or unsuccessfully, the ways in which they are governed. Moreover, relationships expose the sheer size of the constituency that is affected by the past and present actions of states, a constituency that is invariably larger than the group that citizenship theory is constantly in the process of defining. Relationships enable people to focus on addressing specific vulnerabilities resulting from specific relationships instead of being at the mercy of an institution which functions precisely to define which harms, and which relationships, fall within the purview of the state, and which do not. Thus, the twofold advantage of the third view is that it attends to empirical realities of noncitizen struggles for rights and recognition, while exploring normative justifications for moving beyond citizenship without relying on global or post-national accounts of membership.