Search results for ""Author Chandran Kukathas""

A compelling account of the threat immigration control poses to the citizens of free societies Immigration is often seen as a danger to western liberal democracies because it threatens to undermine their fundamental values, most notably freedom and national self-determination. In this book, however, Chandran Kukathas argues that the greater threat comes not from immigration but from immigration control.Kukathas shows that immigration control is not merely about preventing outsiders from moving across borders. It is about controlling what outsiders do once in a society: whether they work, reside, study, set up businesses, or share their lives with others. But controlling outsiders—immigrants or would-be immigrants—requires regulating, monitoring, and sanctioning insiders, those citizens and residents who might otherwise hire, trade with, house, teach, or generally associate with outsiders. The more vigorously immigration control is pursued, the more seriously freedom is diminished. The search for control threatens freedom directly and weakens the values upon which it relies, notably equality and the rule of law. Kukathas demonstrates that the imagined gains from efforts to control immigration are illusory, for they do not promote economic prosperity or social solidarity. Nor does immigration control bring self-determination, since the apparatus of control is an international institutional regime that increases the power of states and their agencies at the expense of citizens. That power includes the authority to determine who is and is not an insider: to define identity itself.Looking at past and current practices across the world, Immigration and Freedom presents a critique of immigration control as an institutional reality, as well as an account of what freedom means—and why it matters.

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John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has been enormously influential in philosophy, political theory, welfare economics and jurisprudence. This book is a systematic study of Rawls's work. It provides a clear and concise account of Rawls's ideas, situates them within contemporary debates and submits them to critical scrutiny. The authors discuss the background against which A Theory of Justice was written, the contractarian character of Rawls's theory, his claims about justice and his arguments for them. Finally the authors look at Rawls's emerging self-interpretation and self-critique, identifying the different phases of his later development. Clear and accessible to non-specialists, this book will also be of great value to students in philosophy, sociology and economics.

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