10 - The Constitution in the Shadow of the Immigration State

Summary

Asha Kaushal takes as her subjects the relationships between immigration law and constitutional law, and between external and internal sovereignty. Kaushal focuses in particular on the importance of immigration to the constitution of ‘the people’. As she writes: ‘Immigration is both an external objective of the constitutional order and a modifier of that order’. Her chapter approaches these connections between outward projection and inward constitution by way of a conceptual and historical exploration of the relationship between citizenship and constituent power. These concepts, it turns out, surprisingly, are not often discussed in the same frame. Kaushal details what she calls the ‘division of labour between immigration law and constitutional law’ and the foundational role of the internal/external distinction in that division, through a rich historical overview ranging from Emer de Vattel’s public international law to modern Canadian judicial decisions on the Charter’s demands in the context of immigration law.