Freedom of Association, Relational Egalitarianism, and Immigration: An Internal Critique

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines whether freedom of association can justify a right of states to exclude immigrants. The question is practically urgent because border control determines who may move, seek asylum, reunite with family, and access legal protection. In contemporary political theory, one of the most influential defenses of the right to exclude is developed by Christopher Heath Wellman. He argues that legitimate states possess a right to political self-determination, that freedom of association is integral to self-determination, and that freedom of association includes the right not to associate. From this, he concludes that legitimate states may exclude would-be immigrants, even “desperate refugees”. I argue that this conclusion does not follow. While Wellman’s argument has been debated, existing critiques primarily rely on external normative principles, leaving the internal validity of Wellman’s argument underexplored. This thesis takes a different route and addresses this gap through internal critique. Rather than rejecting or outweigh freedom of association, I provisionally accept it, for the sake of argument, and ask whether it supports the exclusionary conclusion Wellman derives from it. The normative analysis is twofold. First, through conceptual analysis, I argue that the paradigmatic cases that make freedom of association intuitively plausible, such as marriage, and private homes, involve what I call private sphere, private territory, and non-coercive prevention. Immigration exclusion lacks these conditions. Second, for the sake of argument, I accept Wellman’s relational egalitarian claim that injustice consists in relations of domination and subordination, and then test, through reflective equilibrium, whether immigration exclusion can really be placed outside such relations. Supported by Hohfeldian analysis, I show that the liberty-right not to associate does not by itself generate a claim-right to exclude. I conclude that Wellman fails to establish a state right to exclude immigrants. Immigration exclusion cannot be justified by the right not to associate alone. The right not to associate must be constrained by both (1) the form of association in question and (2) the kind of relation that exclusion creates. A supporter of Wellman must therefore provide a further normative justification explaining how associational freedom can generate a political right to coercively exclude outsiders. Without such an argument, the inference from the liberty not to associate to border exclusion remains unjustified.