Resident Foreigners: A Philosophy of Migration

Description

From the shores of Europe to the Mexican-US border, mass migration is one of the most pressing issues we face today. Yet at the same time, calls to defend national sovereignty are becoming ever more vitriolic, with those fleeing war, persecution, and famine vilified as a threat to our security as well as our social and economic order. In this book, written amidst the dark resurgence of appeals to defend ‘blood and soil', Donatella Di Cesare challenges the idea of the exclusionary state, arguing that migration is a fundamental human right. She develops an original philosophy of migration that places the migrants themselves, rather than states and their borders, at the centre. Through an analysis of three historic cities, Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, Di Cesare shows how we should conceive of migrants not as an other but rather as resident foreigners. This means recognising that citizenship cannot be based on any supposed connection to the land or an exclusive claim to ownership that would deny the rights of those who arrive as migrants. Instead, citizenship must be disconnected from the possession of territory altogether and founded on the principle of cohabitation – and on the ultimate reality that we are all temporary guests and tenants of the earth. Di Cesare's argument for a new ethics of hospitality will be of great interest to all those concerned with the challenges posed by migration and with the increasingly hostile attitudes towards migrants, as well as students and scholars of philosophy and political theory. Cover Title page Copyright page Contents Introduction: In Short 1 Migrants and the State 1 Ellis Island 2 When the migrant unmasks the state 3 The state-centric order 4 A fundamental hostility 5 Beyond sovereignty: a marginal note 6 Philosophy and migration 7 A shipwreck with an audience: on today’s debate 8 Thinking from the shore 9 Migration and modernity 10 Columbus and the image of the globe 11 ‘We refugees’: the scum of the Earth 12 What rights for the stateless? 13 The frontier of democracy 14 The sovereigntism of closed borders 15 Philosophers against Samaritans 16 The primacy of citizens and the dogma of self-determination 17 If the state were a club: liberalism based on exclusion 18 The defence of national integrity 19 Owning the land: a baseless myth 20 Freedom of movement and birthright privileges 21 Migrants against the poor? Welfare chauvinism and global justice 22 Neither exodus, nor ‘deportation’, nor ‘human trafficking’ 23 Ius migrandi: for the right to migrate 24 Mare liberum and the sovereign’s word 25 Kant, the right to visit and residency denied 2 The End of Hospitality? 1 The continent of migrants 2 ‘Us’ and ‘them’: the grammar of hatred 3 Europe 2015 4 Hegel, the Mediterranean and the cemetery of the sea 5 Fadoul’s story 6 ‘Refugees’ and ‘migrants’: impossible classifications 7 The metamorphoses of the exile 8 Asylum: from ambiguous right to a dispositif of power 9 ‘You’re not from here’: an existential negation 10 The migrant’s original sin 11 ‘Illegals’: being condemned to invisibility 12 The terms of domination: ‘integration’ and ‘naturalization’ 13 When the immigrant remains an émigré 14 The foreigner who lives outside, the foreigner who lives within 15 Clandestine passages, heterotopias, anarchic routes 3 Resident Foreigners 1 On exile 2 Neither rootlessness nor roaming without direction 3 Phenomenology of habitation 4 What does it mean to migrate? 5 The global uprooting 6 ‘The earth-born’: Athens and the myth of autochthony 7 Rome: the city without origin and imperial citizenship 8 The theological-political charter of the ger 9 Jerusalem, the City of foreigners 10 On return 4 Living Together in the New Millennium 1 The new age of walls 2 Lampedusa: of what border is it the name? 3 Condemned to immobility 4 The world of the camps 5 The passport: a paradoxical document 6 ‘To each their own home!’ Crypto-racism and the new Hitlerism 7 Hospitality: in the impasse between ethics and politics 8 Beyond citizenship 9 The limits of cosmopolitanism 10 Community, immunity, welcome 11 When Europe drowned 12 The power of place 13 What does cohabiting mean? 14 Resident foreigners Notes Notes to Chapter 1 Notes to Chapter 2 Notes to Chapter 3 Notes to Chapter 4 EULA