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Felix Hathaway's avatar

Interesting post.

Your contention that a polity has the right to exclude potential immigrants who want to cause harm, even if only in the far future at the ballot box comes up a lot in the discussion of (normally) Muslim immigration to the UK (and probably other western countries). To what extent does / should this right actually hold, particularly in the case of 'quietist' authoritarian groups who campaign for illiberal ends within a democratic structure?

Some examples:

Those planning violence - excluding them seems clearly justified.

'Quietist' authoritarians - would appear to be excludable under your arguments? This seems very hard in practice and is certainly not current policy.

Proselytisers / ideas - If it is wrong to exercise the right of free movement to harm other people or deprive them of their rights, is it not wrong to exercise the right of free speech to encourage others to do the same? And if we would compromise on free movement in the above cases, why would we not also compromise on free expression (for citizens, not just potential immigrants)?

It seems hard to arrive at a practical policy that does not entail placing potential immigrants into 'risk buckets' with different restrictions for different groups, however this also seems deeply illiberal.

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William H Stoddard's avatar

Having property claims go back decades is at best debatable. At least in Anglo-American law, we have the principle of adverse possession, under which, if I act for a number of years as if something were my property, it becomes (in some measure) my property: If, for example, I walk across your yard to get to the road, eventually I acquire an easement that permits me to go on walking across your yard in perpetuity. This is probably a good legal principle, if we want to avoid ongoing conflicts.

If we aren't trying to achieve some Platonic ideal of justice under which all wrongs are set right (and, for example, any survivors of the Canaanites have claims against both the Jews and the Arabs), but simply to settle current conflicts and get on with our lives, at some point we need to be ready to stop entertaining old claims.

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