Of States, Rights, and Social Closure - 9780230600317

The governance of migration is one of the most significant challenges faced by contemporary industrialized societies. Reports on illegal immigration levels and human trafficking, and immigration riots around the world dramatically highlight the mounting strains on liberal democracies with respect to their capacity to effectively formulate and regulate immigration and integration schemes. Changes in forms and levels of migrants' mobility bring into question the centrality of the role of the state in terms of controlling access to economic, social, and political rights. Of States, Rights and Social Closure considers the challenges of the governance of migration, and the responses to these challenges by nation-states, in three parts. In the first part of the book focuses on the “liberal paradox,” here defined as the (increasingly acute) discrepancy between universal self-understanding of liberal democracies on the one hand and liberal democracies' parochial definition of “political community” and basic socio-economic rights framed exclusively in national terms on the other hand. The second part focuses on the limits of governing migration; the changing role of the state in determining membership, establishing citizenship rights, and governing immigration is discussed from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The third part addresses the emerging relationship between national sovereignty and expansion of rights in a Europeanized migration and citizenship context. It evaluates with respect to empirical research findings the extent to which migration policies and politics have surpassed the governing capacities of the nation-states in the face of increasing levels of Europeanization.