Citizenship and Arbitrary Law-Making: On the Quaintness of Non-national Disenfranchisement

Abstract

The paper explores forms of arbitrariness in relation to citizenship and migration policies. Non-national disenfranchisement follows from certain migration policies, and these may be cast as an arbitrary form of domination, that may undermine political legitimacy. Political exclusion is the vertex of a chain of other forms of exclusion: the denizenship of the politically powerless is particularly bothersome because liberal-democratic systems lack incentives to promote their rights. We have singled out the specificity and quaintness of the argumentative strategy employed to sustain non-national disenfranchisement. It differs from other argumentations in favour of disenfranchisement because it is not framed in derogatory terms and shifts the burden of proof from the state over to the individual.