International Studies Compendium Project

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Comment on this article   At its most basic level politics involves “control, influence, power, or authority.” If we add to this definition Weber's concerns about legitimacy and the importance of controlling territory, together with Aristotle's more normative focus on issues of participation, citizenship, and justice, we have a fairly complete picture of what Robert Dahl (1991) calls the political aspect. We can see immediately how migration touches on each of these dimensions of politics: the procedural or distributional dimension – who gets what, when, and how?; the legal or statist dimension, involving issues of sovereignty and legitimacy; and the ethical or normative dimension, which revolves around questions of citizenship, civil society, justice, and participation ( Kymlicka 1995 ; Carens 2000 ). Choosing policies to control migration leads us to ask who is making those decisions and in whose interest. Are policies being made in the interest of migrants, workers, employers, “the state,” or some other group? Are these policies contributing to the national interest and are they just? Does migration weaken or strengthen the institutions of sovereignty and citizenship? At what point should migrants become full members of civil society, with all the rights, duties, and responsibilities of a citizen? As in other social sciences, but especially economics, the key concept here ... log in or subscribe to read full text