In Between: Immigration, Distributive Justice, and Political Dialogue

Abstract

How is distributive justice possible with respect to immigration if political decisions about entry and membership cannot be grounded in the symmetry of a prior commonality, human or otherwise, that could guarantee reciprocal relations between members and nonmembers? This paper deals with both aspects of this question. Initially, it engages critically with Seyla Benhabib’s plea for “dialogical universalism,” showing why the strong discontinuity between political and moral reciprocity precludes understanding distributive justice as the process of mediating between political particularity and moral universality. Subsequently, it suggests that a way out of this conceptual and normative impasse can be found in the fact that boundaries create a double asymmetry. This double asymmetry is constitutive for the “dia” of the political dialogue that sepa-rates and joins members and nonmembers. This “in between,” which eludes control by the parties to a dialogue, is the realm of distributive justice.

Keywords: immigration, borders, distributive justice, political dialogue, cosmopolitanism