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Strangers and Members: Equality in an Immigration Setting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2015

Donald Galloway
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Extract

Immigration Law has as its primary subject the stranger: the outsider who is under no obligation of allegiance to the state, who is not represented in its political processes, and whose needs and interests are, in most situations, accorded less concern than those of people who already participate in the social and political life of a community. The immigrant stranger may, of course, appear in a variety of guises. He may be a wealthy entrepreneur or investor who belongs to another political community but who chooses to emigrate to advance his own or his family’s well-being. Alternatively, the stranger may be a person who has experienced life solely within the confines of a community that is plagued by economic deprivation. Such a person may be crippled by physical and emotional need or cultural fragmentation. His search is for a new social environment in which, it is hoped, these constraints will not be present in such exaggerated or severe measure. Sometimes the needy stranger will be seeking an immediate escape from a political regime which offers her no protection or which aims at her very destruction, and sometimes she will be searching for deliverance from the incessant, limbo-like tedium or the multitude of unspeakable terrors to which one is exposed in a refugee camp. Whatever the guise in which he or she appears, the stranger is someone with whom the modern political state must come to terms. He or she cannot be ignored.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , January 1994 , pp. 149 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 1994

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References

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