San Diego Law Review
Document Type
Article
Abstract
The act of immigration alters several forms of human relationship simultaneously. It represents a change in physical location and so alters the relationship between persons represented by geographic concepts such as territory and property. In immigrating, immigrants acquire a new place in the world that they may understand, in some sense of the word, as their own. Immigration also alters a political relationship insofar as the immigrant acquires a new political status in virtue of that new home in the world. The immigrant ought to be understood as creating through the act of immigration a new set of relationships to other persons who share the immigrant's liability to the coercive institutions of a political state. Finally, immigration represents a change in social relationships, insofar as the individual joins not simply a political society but a social world constituted by the norms and practices of a culture and a civil society. Immigrants are both entitled and obligated to engage in the practices constitutive of membership in the society that they have joined.
Recommended Citation
Michael Blake,
Immigration and Political Equality,
45
San Diego L. Rev.
963
(2008).
Available at:
https://digital.sandiego.edu/sdlr/vol45/iss4/6