From Open Borders to Political Membership: Joseph Carens and Foot Democracy

Imagine a woman who moves to another country at twenty-five. She works, makes friends, raises a child, and grows old there. She follows local elections because the results affect her family, but she cannot vote. Her residence permit is renewed, yet it remains dependent on conditions she does not entirely control.

Two questions arise. Should she have been allowed to enter? And why, after building her life there, must she remain a political outsider?

Joseph Carens has made us take both questions seriously. His defense of open borders challenges nationality’s moral privilege. His argument about social membership asks what a society owes people who have become part of it.

I agree with much of this work. But my own theory leads me to ask a further question: can the freedom to choose one’s political community be understood as a dimension of democracy itself?

That is where I want to connect Carens’s work with what I call Foot Democracy.

The Moral Case for Open Borders

In his 1987 essay “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” Carens asked readers to look beyond the familiar assumption that states may exclude outsiders whenever their citizens prefer it. Why should the place of one’s birth give some people vastly greater opportunities than others?

He approached the question through three traditions: Rawls’s concern with fairness and equality, Nozick’s emphasis on individual liberty, and utilitarianism’s concern with overall well-being. Despite their differences, Carens argued that each supplies reasons for more open borders.

Consider someone born where jobs are scarce. Across a border, that person could work safely, earn more, and build a family. If an inherited passport is the decisive obstacle, what justifies closing that possibility?

Carens’s answer is not that movement can never be regulated. His claim is that restrictions require moral justification that takes the interests of outsiders seriously. The interests of current citizens matter, but their preferences do not automatically settle the issue.

We often begin with state authority and treat aspiring migrants as exceptions. Carens asks us to begin also with the excluded person, whose reasons must count.

This matters for the World Citizen framework. A formal right to leave means little when no alternative community will admit you. Exit without meaningful Entry leaves political choice constrained.

Yet a right to cross a border is not quite the same thing as a secure right to belong on the other side.

Citizenship as an Inherited Privilege

Carens made a comparison that I consider especially important. In 1987, he called citizenship in Western liberal democracies “the modern equivalent of feudal privilege.” A person may receive extraordinary advantages through an accident of birth, while another is denied similar opportunities for the same reason.

The comparison between birthright citizenship and feudal privilege is not something I claim to have invented. Carens stated it powerfully in 1987 and continued to use it.

In The World Citizen Revolution, I use the term Nation-Based Feudal Order for a related, but not identical, historical diagnosis. The civic revolutions transformed the relation between people and their rulers. Subjects became citizens with claims to participate in government. But the political community to which people belong remained largely tied to nationality inherited at birth.

The word feudal does not mean that today’s states are literally medieval lordships. It points to a structural problem: an important relationship in political life remains assigned to individuals largely without their consent or choice.

Carens’s analogy directs attention to unequal life chances protected by borders. My historical question places additional emphasis on a division left substantially intact by civic revolution. We came to recognize a freedom to choose rulers, but we have not yet recognized an equivalent democratic freedom to choose the political community within which we are ruled.

Their emphases differ.

When Residence Becomes Membership

Carens does not stop at the moment of Entry. That is one reason his work is so valuable.

In The Ethics of Immigration and in essays such as “On Belonging,” he argues that living in a society over time creates moral claims of membership. A child raised in a country does not remain a stranger merely because of the citizenship recorded on a document. Nor can a government adequately describe a person who has built an adult life in a place as a temporary visitor forever.

Carens deliberately separates two levels of argument. He first examines immigrants’ rights while provisionally accepting the conventional assumption that states may control admission. In later chapters, he challenges that assumption and develops the case for open borders. This method shows why the claims of settled residents deserve attention even from readers not yet persuaded by open borders.

Time matters because years of ordinary life produce attachments, obligations, and relationships. Carens also resists leaving judgments about belonging to officials’ discretion. Such judgments can become discriminatory.

Suppose a worker enters on a temporary permit. Ten years later, that worker has a spouse, children, neighbors, and a job. If the government can remove this person as though nothing has changed, the label of temporary residence no longer reflects the life that has been built.

Carens argues that long residence eventually creates claims to secure residence and citizenship. He treats citizenship as full political membership and directly addresses democratic participation. He is not merely defending labor mobility.

This is close to my concern with political equality among those who reside in a community. People who live under its rules should not remain permanently divided into those who govern and those who are governed without an equal political standing.

Still, one issue remains: how does a person become able to choose that community before years of residence have made membership morally compelling?

The Person Who Has Not Yet Arrived

Return to the woman in the opening example, but imagine her at twenty-five, before she moves.

Carens has a powerful answer to her claim to Entry: a closed border cannot be justified simply by assuming that the existing members’ interests outweigh hers. His open-borders argument takes prospective migrants seriously, not just people who have already settled.

His social-membership argument answers a different question. Once someone becomes part of a society, what rights should follow? The arguments are connected, but they address different moments in a person’s life.

For World Citizen Theory, this distinction matters. An individual should not have to wait until a long period of residence has created an undeniable moral claim before the freedom to choose a political community becomes a democratic concern. The decision to seek another political home is already an exercise of political agency.

I call this freedom Foot Democracy. It includes the possibility of leaving one political community, entering another, establishing life there, and obtaining a secure path to political membership. It is not simply tourism, labor mobility, or the movement of capital. Nor is forced displacement or deportation an exercise of this freedom: choice belongs to the person, not to the power that expels them.

Entry cannot be made meaningful by declaring that everyone may go anywhere at any time. Communities have responsibilities for public services, safety, and current residents’ rights. Designing admission and membership rules is difficult. I do not think it can be settled by a slogan.

But the difficulty of designing a right does not make the underlying question disappear. We should ask what institutions could progressively make genuine political-community choice possible, rather than treating birth-assigned membership as the permanent starting point.

Is Political-Community Choice a Democratic Freedom?

In familiar democratic theory, we ask whether citizens can elect representatives and replace a government. I call that dimension Hand Democracy: a community’s democratic self-government through its members.

There is another decision that elections normally do not give an individual the power to make. Which political community will be the home of their political life?

Someone can live under a democratic government and still have little opportunity to join another community. Another may be welcomed as a worker but denied secure membership.

Here I am extending the question raised by Carens, not claiming that he neglected democracy. He explicitly argues for the political inclusion of settled immigrants. He also maintains that even a more just world with open borders would continue to have meaningful differences between members and visitors. I agree that membership does not vanish when borders become more open.

But why call choosing a political community a democratic freedom, rather than simply an individual liberty? Democracy concerns the relationship between people and the political power that governs them. Choosing rulers is one way of exercising agency over that relationship; choosing the political community in which one is ruled concerns another part of it. The choices differ, but the first does not exhaust political freedom. That is the reason I distinguish Hand Democracy from Foot Democracy.

Arash Abizadeh has also challenged the notion that existing citizens alone may decide border policy. Because border controls use state power against outsiders, he argues, outsiders must have opportunities to participate in the political processes that justify those rules. My question is related but different: what would it mean to protect a person’s freedom to choose a political community and seek equal membership within it?

A defender of collective self-determination may object that deciding who belongs is central to a community’s right to govern itself. Michael Walzer gives this objection particular force. I take it seriously. Yet existing members’ authority does not by itself establish that outsiders have no political freedom concerning the communities they may join. Nor does an individual’s wish to enter override every responsibility of the receiving community. How these freedoms can coexist must be worked out through institutions that respect basic rights.

The aim is to make political membership a relationship people can choose.

The Strongest Question for My Position

A critic might say that Carens already gives us the two essential elements: a moral case for open borders and a moral case for the membership rights of residents. Why introduce the additional language of Foot Democracy?

It is a fair challenge. New terminology has no value if it merely renames an existing argument.

My answer is that the democratic problem remains visible even when we agree on both moral arguments. Freedom of movement concerns access across a territorial boundary. Social membership concerns the rights that grow from living in a society. Foot Democracy asks us to consider the individual’s ability to choose a political community as one continuous issue of political freedom, connecting departure, admission, residence, and equal membership.

That formulation matters when institutions are designed. A state could admit workers freely and still deny them any lasting political future. Another could promise naturalization to long-term residents while allowing almost no one to enter. The two policies might each be defended as an immigration compromise. Neither, by itself, would create meaningful freedom to choose political membership.

My terminology does not make Carens’s arguments obsolete. It identifies what democratic institutions should protect throughout a person’s journey between political communities.

Freedom to Move, Freedom to Belong

Carens asks us to take the excluded person’s moral equality seriously. He also asks us to recognize that the people who have made their lives in a society may already belong to it, whatever their passports say.

Those arguments bring us a long way toward a world in which birth does not decide nearly everything about political opportunity.

I want to carry the question one step further. Civic revolution gave people a stronger claim to choose who governs them. Should they not also have a meaningful freedom to choose the political community in which they seek to live as equals?

I do not think the answer is to abolish all political boundaries or to establish one world government. Political communities can remain distinct, and their members can continue to govern themselves. The challenge is to reconcile that freedom of collective self-government with the individual’s freedom to seek another political home.

For the woman who crossed the border at twenty-five, political-community choice should matter before decades of residence make her claim impossible to ignore. She was seeking a possible political home from the moment she decided to move.

Carens helps us understand why we cannot justify exclusion merely by invoking inherited privilege. Foot Democracy asks what it would take to turn political-community choice into an enduring democratic institution.

We have learned to question rulers we did not choose. We should also learn to question why the political community assigned to us at birth must be the only place where we can fully belong.

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References and Further Reading

1. Joseph H. Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” The Review of Politics 49, no. 2 (1987): 251–273.
2. Joseph H. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford University Press, 2013).
3. Joseph H. Carens, “On Belonging,” Boston Review.
4. Joseph H. Carens, “Who Gets the Right to Stay?,” Boston Review (originally published 2009).
5. Joseph H. Carens, “The Ethics of Immigration Symposium: Joseph Carens Replies,” Crooked Timber (2014).
6. Joseph H. Carens, “Politics, Principles, and Open Borders,” Columbia Law School blog (2021).
7. Arash Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders,” Political Theory 36, no. 1 (2008): 37–65.
8. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Basic Books, 1983), chap. 2.
9. Toshiyuki Nishimura, The World Citizen Revolution (2026); The World Citizen Society (2026).

Related Essays

• Hand Democracy and Foot Democracy
• Why Exit Is Not Enough: The Missing Problem of Entry
• Ayelet Shachar and the Birthright Lottery
• Rainer Bauböck and the Politics of Belonging