Mike Gadomski (Coastal Carolina University), "Migration and the Point of Self-Determination"

Forthcoming, Social Theory and Practice

By Mike Gadomski

Wade into any conversation about immigration these days and you’ll usually find a shared anchoring assumption in a sea of disagreement: countries get to decide who comes in or out. If the US doesn’t want to let Central American migrants into their territory, then they have no obligation to let them do so. There are lots of reasons one might think this, but a pretty compelling one is simply that the people of the US have the right to determine their own political destiny. Therefore, they get to decide their own border policy, just as they get to decide all of their other laws and policies. This a basic articulation of what we can call the self-determination case for the right to exclude, or the SDCRE (rolls right off the tongue, I know).

Not everyone finds the SDCRE convincing. It has always rubbed me the wrong way, too, but for different reasons. The first has to do with the nature of self-determination in general, and the second with the particular notion of self-determination that the SDCRE rests on. To my mind, these reasons motivate thinking about self-determination in a way that significantly complicates the SDCRE.

To start, it helps to consider the paradigmatic cases of self-determination, such as decolonization movements and anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles more broadly. Such cases involve resistance to power; the ideal of self-determination is invoked by the proverbial little guy against attempts by the powerful to invade, conquer, or otherwise control them. Notably, these cases are compelling—that is, we tend to think that the idea of self-determination gets a grip and exerts some force. On the other hand, when groups claiming self-determination are themselves in a position of relative power or are demonstrating behavior more typical of aggressors, their claims are more suspicious.

This thought is part of why the SDCRE has struck me as odd, at least in cases where the claimant is a relatively powerful state, such as, say, the US. In the paradigmatic cases, an oppressed group struggles to throw off their oppressor; in the US case, on the other hand, there is a large, wealthy country preventing mostly poor migrants who pose virtually no threat of usurpation or the like. (One reason why the “invasion” language of anti-immigrant political actors is effective is that an actual invasion would indeed be a clear violation of a country’s self-determination, and thus an obvious and major moral and political problem). 

The second worry about the SDCRE has to do with the conception of self-determination that it rests on. The common idea here is that political self-determination is akin to collective autonomy. On this view, the value of self-determination is the value of a group acting on its own will, analogous to how autonomy at the individual level involves an individual acting on their own will. There are lots of ways to cash out the link between this idea of self-determination and the right to exclude, but a question upstream of all of them is whether the idea of self-determination as collective autonomy is anything more than a distracting myth. In short, there are some significant problems with both with the self and the determination in this conception of self-determination. For one, it’s not clear that there is a coherent self nor that it overlaps with the state in the right kind of way to make good on an idea of group autonomy. And when it comes to the determination, it is conspicuously difficult to scale the kind of control an individual has over themselves to large and diverse political groups. If a state isn’t (and likely can’t be) self-determining in the relevant sense, then it is unclear why they should have a self-determination-based right to exclude.

A nice way to make of sense of both of these thoughts is to think of self-determination not as acting on one’s own will, but as making a claim against an imbalanced power relation. That is, it is primarily about resisting another’s attempt to control, and only secondarily, if at all, about controlling oneself. Understood in this way, self-determination is more akin to collective version of non-domination or relational autonomy than it is to the idea of individual autonomy as an agent acting on their own will. It aims at groups relating to each other on more or less equal terms. If this is right, then we can hang onto the idea of self-determination in a way that still explains the paradigmatic cases and avoids the problems with the idea of collective autonomy. In the paper, I build on some precedents in political theory (such as the work of Iris Marion Young) as well as the history of self-determination (and particularly anticolonial struggles in the Black Atlantic, regarding which I draw on Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire) to sketch such a conception and make the case for endorsing it.

Moving back to the question of the right to exclude, this notion of self-determination has some notable implications. The main one is that it makes it hard for wealthy and powerful states to justifiably claim self-determination against would-be immigrants. This is because their exclusion is not preventing any domination or hierarchical relationship (if anything, it instantiates it). It’s important to note, though, that self-determination will still entail the right to exclude if such a threat is present. Thus, a qualified version of the SDCRE remains intact (and the paper leaves untouched the many arguments for the right to exclude that don’t rely on self-determination). This also has the result that states that are low in the international hierarchy are much more likely to have a justified self-determination-based claim to exclude. In such situations, immigration will more closely resemble paradigmatic cases like colonization. I take this to be a positive feature of the view.

Doubting the right to exclude will probably remain a nonstarter in mainstream politics for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, it’s still important to get clear on just where that right may and may not come from. It’s also important that in doing so, we consider the histories and real-world manifestations of ideals like self-determination. This can not only enrich our investigations but also give them at least a slightly better chance of being politically relevant.