Why Voluntariness Cannot Ground Cultural Rights Restrictions for Immigrants

Should immigrants have fewer cultural and language rights than citizens and long-settled groups, and if so, on what moral ground? In the first part of the paper, we develop a novel critique of Kymlicka’s account of voluntary cultural rights alienation, arguing that it is only plausible in the context of emigration, not immigration. We argue that the choice to immigrate cannot be considered voluntary without it being sufficiently clear to the migrant what her rights and duties will be in the new society. If so, then voluntariness cannot morally ground a particular rights regime in the destination country. Any such rights regime must be justified on independent moral grounds. Secondly, we argue that voluntariness can play a different role in a normative argument for cultural rights-differentiation between citizens and denizens. It can i) mitigate the overall injustice of differential treatment; and it can ii) instantiate the justice of how rules apply to the immigrant in a reasonably just society. Thirdly, we sketch an alternative moral grounding of cultural and language rights differentiation that rests, not on voluntariness, but on a contextual analysis of the relevant interests involved. While the protection of these relevant interests gives us reasons to prioritize the language(s) of long-settled groups in many cases, there is no general case for restricting the full recognition of language and culture to long-settled groups.