A strike for democracy? Migration, the bigot's veto, and the electoral use of force

Abstract

Politicians and philosophers alike have warned that the spread of anti-migrant bigotry in the Western world requires a tragic trade-off regarding immigration policy: Although millions of asylum-seekers might be owed admission to Western democracies, there are many cases where they nonetheless ought to be denied entry, because their admission is overly likely to increase the electoral appeal of extreme rightwing figures and parties, thus endangering the host country's liberal democracy. This article scrutinizes this influential view, by juxtaposing electorally driven migration policy with electorally driven military strikes abroad. If turning millions of asylum-seekers away can be tragically appropriate as a means of thwarting the electoral rise of the extreme right, why cannot the same be true for military strikes overseas that might harm a far smaller number of innocent outsiders? I examine what—if anything—explains the difference between these two cases.