A growing town needs engineers and construction workers. Some residents want to recruit them from abroad. Others worry about housing, schools, and whether the town can sustain the services it already promises. The national government considers expanding admission, and an argument begins about who should decide.
For a person hoping to enter, the decision may determine where a family can live. For residents, it may affect the community in which they will raise their children. Both sides have something real at stake.
Can a political community govern itself if it has no authority to decide who may join it?
David Miller has defended the right of democratic states to control immigration. His view poses one of the strongest challenges to Foot Democracy, the freedom to choose one’s political community. Miller does not simply claim that foreigners matter less. He asks what happens to collective self-government if existing members cannot shape their community’s future.
I take that question seriously. The freedom of individuals to choose a political home cannot be developed by pretending that the receiving community has no legitimate interests. But those interests cannot settle every claim to Entry in advance, either.
Why Miller Defends Immigration Control
Miller’s central concern is political self-determination. A people governs itself not only by electing officials, but also by making decisions about its common future. The composition of the population affects that future. Admission policies influence the number of residents, the capacity of public institutions, and the terms on which people become members.
In Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration (2016), Miller defends a state’s authority to regulate immigration while examining moral constraints on how that authority is exercised. A community’s collective decisions deserve weight, he argues, even when an outsider would benefit from entering it.
Consider a city that has invested for decades in a particular mix of public services and local institutions. Its residents may disagree over whether to grow quickly, slowly, or not at all. Such disagreement is part of democratic politics. To say that they have no special standing in decisions affecting their common institutions would weaken the idea of collective self-government.
Miller’s position is often described as a right to exclude. That phrase can sound harsher than the argument requires. A right to control admissions is not a duty to refuse foreigners, and Miller does not suggest that every exclusion is morally acceptable. He defends room for political judgment, constrained by duties toward people outside the community as well as toward those within it.
That combination is what makes his argument important. A serious response must address the value of self-government, not merely condemn closed borders.
What Changes When New Members Arrive?
The composition of a political community is not fixed by nature. It changes through births, deaths, migration, and the choices of people who already belong. Yet immigration raises a distinctive question: people who are not yet members ask to join institutions whose responsibilities existing residents currently bear.
Miller points to reasons why a community might care about population size, shared public culture, and the future composition of its citizen body. These are not the same consideration. A concern about whether schools have enough space is different from a desire to preserve a language or a particular political culture. Each needs its own justification. None should be treated as a blank check for discrimination.
Miller’s understanding of national culture is not simply ethnic or frozen in time. A public culture can be reshaped, including by newcomers. Democratic deliberation nonetheless depends on shared practices—ways to debate, make decisions, and disagree peacefully. The difficult question is who may legitimately influence the pace and direction of cultural change, and how far that influence may extend over people who wish to join.
The Limits of Exclusion
Miller’s position is not that a country can ignore human rights whenever its voters prefer to do so. His defense of admission control distinguishes a universal right to enter any state one chooses from more urgent claims to protection. He also treats the status of people already living within a society as morally important.
In “Is There a Human Right to Immigrate?” he argues that a person’s basic interests require access to an adequate range of options, not to every possible occupation, way of life, or destination. This matters because the case for a universal human right to immigrate weakens if a person’s essential interests can be protected without admission to a particular country. Miller also rejects the argument that freedom to move within a state must, by logical extension, establish a corresponding right to move into any other state. Domestic freedom of movement, he argues, protects against dangers of state-imposed segregation and restriction that have no exact equivalent across borders.
This distinction matters. A prospective migrant seeking an additional economic opportunity and someone who cannot secure basic rights at home may have different claims. Refugees have especially urgent claims, although the location and form of protection require further decisions. Family connections also make some claims particular rather than interchangeable. A person who has made a settled life in a country cannot be evaluated as though still standing outside the border.
At the same time, saying that human rights set limits does not tell us exactly where those limits fall. Is a restriction justified by housing shortages? Must a state first consider expanding housing and public services? What does it owe a person for whom another country is not merely attractive but the only realistic place to live safely with family?
The hard work begins when these questions are asked separately. A democratic decision can be supported by a majority and still be unjust. Miller’s attention to collective responsibility is a reason to examine the limits of admission rules carefully, not to abandon the examination.
Beyond the Debate about Coercion
In the previous essay on Arash Abizadeh, I discussed Miller’s distinction between preventing entry and coercing a person, and Abizadeh’s objection that border rules operate through threats of state force. The disagreement concerns whether and why foreigners must participate in making border rules.
But the distinction between prevention and coercion cannot by itself settle whether inherited political membership should remain so difficult to revise. Miller’s argument about adequate options poses a different, and in my view deeper, challenge.
The Strongest Challenge to Foot Democracy
Foot Democracy concerns individual political-community choice. It includes Exit, meaningful Entry, and a credible route toward membership. Hand Democracy, by contrast, concerns the collective self-government of a political community. Both freedoms matter in The World Citizen Society.
Miller’s deepest challenge is not merely the cost of admission. It is his argument about sufficiency. If a person already has an adequate range of opportunities to work, practice a religion, form relationships, and pursue a life at home, why should that person also have a human right to enter another country?
I think something important remains unanswered. A person may have enough economic and personal options yet have little freedom to choose the political community under whose authority those options must be exercised. Foot Democracy assigns independent political value to that choice. We do not say that people need no democratic voice simply because the government offers them adequate living conditions. Choosing a political community is not identical to voting within it, and entry imposes responsibilities on others. Still, the adequacy of other opportunities does not exhaust the question of political belonging.
Miller’s argument presses hardest at Entry. If individual choice is to become effective, who decides what obligations the receiving community must take on? If residents cannot refuse admission except in exceptional cases, how much remains of their power to determine their future?
These are not objections that can be dismissed by calling admission a matter of individual choice. A political community is not a hotel. New members do not merely purchase access to existing services. They become participants in a system of shared rights, duties, taxation, and rule-making. Their entry affects others, just as the community’s refusal affects them.
Yet Miller’s qualified defense of self-determination raises a question in return. He does not defend exclusion without moral limits, and his approach recognizes the importance of reasons for admission decisions. But if adequacy at home is enough to defeat a migrant’s claim to a general right of entry, existing members retain decisive discretion over whether that migrant may ever join their political future. Residents inherited many of their political advantages through birth, just as prospective migrants inherited their disadvantages. Does the value of collective self-government justify assigning such weight to inherited membership?
There is another complication. Existing residents are not a single voice. Some want to welcome relatives, colleagues, or neighbors from abroad. Others oppose admission. The right of a people to govern itself does not identify which interests should prevail, or tell us what standing should be given to those outside the current electorate.
For that reason, Miller presents a formidable challenge to Foot Democracy, but not a final answer to it.
Who Should Have the Final Say?
I do not propose that each application for membership be decided by a worldwide vote. Nor do I think a receiving community should enjoy unlimited discretion simply because it has an elected government. Both approaches leave a central freedom inadequately protected.
An institutional response could begin by separating three questions.
First, what are the genuine public purposes for limiting Entry? Miller himself argues that rejected applicants deserve relevant reasons, including reasons for choosing one applicant over another. I agree. My further question is whether those reasons can be challenged through an effective review process, and whether the system leaves meaningful avenues of Entry open over time. Vague claims that newcomers will change the community are not enough by themselves.
Second, what avenues of Entry must remain available? A meaningful freedom of political-community choice requires more than permission to apply for a favor. General rules, reciprocal agreements, regional arrangements, and reviewable decisions could gradually make entry less dependent on arbitrary discretion. How such measures should work remains an open design question.
Third, what happens after admission? A government may admit someone for a limited period, on terms clearly understood at the outset. But what if work, family, and years of residence turn a temporary stay into a life? The moral significance of actual settlement cannot be settled by the original label alone. Foot Democracy is skeptical that a person’s political future can be defined permanently by the first admission contract. The receiving community’s authority to regulate entry does not provide a permanent license to deny the standing of people who have genuinely become part of its life.
These are proposals for further institutional development, not rules that existing international law or my two books have already settled in detail. They also do not guarantee an immediate right to settle in every territory. Their aim is to give both the individual claim to choose a political home and the collective claim to self-government a place in the same political argument.
A Community Worth Choosing
Return to the town that needs workers. Its residents are entitled to debate schools, housing, and their common future. The applicants outside the border are more than invisible variables in that debate. They are people seeking places to work, live, and perhaps eventually participate as equal members.
Miller reminds us why democratic self-government matters to the people already there. Foot Democracy asks us to recognize the political freedom of people who wish to join them.
I do not believe that political communities must lose their identity or their capacity for self-government to become more open to membership choice. But their right to govern themselves must be understood alongside the freedom of individuals whose lives cross the boundaries they govern.
The question is not whether a community may ever say no. It is whether adequate opportunities elsewhere are enough to close the question of political membership—or whether the freedom to choose a political home deserves protection in its own right.
References
- David Miller, Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration (Harvard University Press, 2016). Publisher/archival record.
- David Miller, “Is There a Human Right to Immigrate?” in Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership (2016). Oxford repository.
- David Miller, “Why Immigration Controls Are Not Coercive: A Reply to Arash Abizadeh,” Political Theory 38(1) (2010): 111–120. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591709348194.
- Arash Abizadeh, “Democratic Legitimacy and State Coercion: A Reply to David Miller,” Political Theory 38(1) (2010): 121–130. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591709348192.
- David Miller, “How to Think about Immigration: Control, Protection, Discretion and Democracy,” Juncture 23(1) (2016): 41–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2050-5876.2016.00893.x.
- David Miller, “Selecting Immigrants” author’s working paper, especially the obligation to give rejected applicants relevant reasons.
- Toshiyuki Nishimura, The World Citizen Revolution, especially Chapter 39.
- Toshiyuki Nishimura, The World Citizen Society, especially Chapters 2–4.