Vol. 15 No.2 (February 2005), pp.155-160

ELUSIVE CITIZENSHIP: IMMIGRATION, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE PARADOX OF CIVIL RIGHTS, by John S. W. Park.  New York: NYU Press, 2004.  240pp.  Cloth.  $45.00.  ISBN: 0814767141.

Reviewed by Donna C. Schuele, Department of Political Science, University of Southern California.   Email: dcsclv@pacbell.net

In ELUSIVE CITIZENSHIP: IMMIGRATION, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE PARADOX OF CIVIL RIGHTS, John S. W. Park sets out to grapple with a conflict between two aspects of the commitment to liberal democracy, set within the general framework of immigration, and Asian American immigration to the United States specifically.  In doing so, Park skillfully combines an examination of liberal theory, particularly as elucidated by John Stuart Mill, John Locke, and John Rawls, and an examination of the historical experience of Asian Americans.  This interdisciplinary work is based on Park’s doctoral dissertation, which he completed as a student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Boalt Hall.  [Reviewer’s note: I also received my Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy.  Dr. Park attended the program many years after I did, so I was unfamiliar with his work until asked to review this book.]

Park begins with a paradox facing liberal democracies.  On the one hand, Park notes, liberal theory “rejects arbitrary factors as a ground for greater rights or privileges; ” however, at the same time, liberal theory embraces “the bounded nation-state, with enforceable borders and a relatively clear set of rules to determine membership” (p.11). The first commitment Park denotes  the “principle against ascriptive status” (p.11), and the second, the “principle of sovereignty” (p.12).  Under the principle against ascriptive status, Park explains, no one ought to be treated for better or worse “based on a characteristic for which he or she is not responsible”—i.e., a characteristic that seems arbitrary from a moral point of view (p.12).  Meanwhile, sovereignty, historically treated as both descriptive and prescriptive by liberal democracies, “is grounded on notions of self-determination” (p.12). The paradox arises when a liberal democracy, in determining membership, bases that determination on an arbitrary characteristic, such as the birthplace of the individual.

Park finds that the historical experience of Asian immigration and citizenship in the United States provides a valuable case study of the paradox.  This setting presents individuals physically present within the boundaries of a liberal democracy nonetheless denied membership in that polity by virtue of ascriptive status, and provides the opportunity to examine the ways in which the paradox was framed, debated, negotiated, and ultimately resolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Yet, lest the reader conclude that the study is of historical value only, Park underscores the contemporary significance of his inquiry by examining the modern, on-going impulses to deny [*156] membership rights to those physically present in the United States, particularly in California and Texas.  (Added to this list now would be Arizona, which in November 2004 enacted a California Proposition 187-style law restricting government services to undocumented residents.)

The book is divided into three sections, “Theory,” “Law,” and “Homeless Strangers.”  In the section on theory, Park lays out the paradox, as described above, focusing on the work of Mill, Locke, and Rawls.  Park chose these theorists “because they represent to some extent the libertarian, utilitarian, and egalitarian strains of liberalism” (p.12).  He finds that they have much to say about the role of luck, fortune, and fate, and did not shy away from confronting the arbitrariness of life.  Locke’s late seventeenth-century preoccupation was centered on denying the legitimacy of a nonconsensual monarchy and emphasized consent as central to legitimate government.  Locke argued not only against the legitimacy of inherited political power (as with a monarchy) but also against the legitimacy of social inequality based on inheritance of private property, especially in a system of primogeniture.

Mill too was concerned with fortune and arbitrariness.  Writing in the nineteenth century, he focused on the inequality of women and of slaves, both stemming from accidents of birth.  And while supportive of the notion of private property, Mill nonetheless shared Locke’s concern with the unearned benefits that come from inheritance and other acquisitions of property without work.  Mill was particularly incensed by those who profit from good luck at the same time they looked down upon the poor.  He went a step further than Locke in connecting political participation more closely with desert, by opposing property ownership as a qualification for voting, an idea popular at the time.  Instead, Mill argued for tying suffrage to education, so that political equality could be linked to equality of opportunity and not accidents of birth.  Each thinker, Park concludes, “tried to imagine liberal societies that mitigated the fact of arbitrariness in the world” (p.25).

Finally, Park examines concerns over luck and chance that appear in John Rawls’ work, particularly his seminal A THEORY OF JUSTICE.  Park provides a clear elucidation of Rawls’ devices, describing how those in the original position employing the veil of ignorance would form a government in which ascriptive characteristics, “arbitrary from a moral point of view,” would be “leveraged . . . for the benefit of society, with a view to the improvement of the less well-off” (p.32).  According to Rawls, a reasoned sense of justice would begin by accounting for luck, such that the only fair choice would be to agree to a scheme in which luck and fortune were mitigated.

Yet, for all of the expressed concern of Mill, Locke, and Rawls about the way in which luck and ascriptive status ought to be accounted for in the establishment of a government, Park finds it “somewhat remarkable” that none of these theorists considered in a sustained way the significance of determining membership in the polity based on birth (p.36).  Instead, concern with issues of membership and belonging gave way to grappling with issues of how to protect the security and stability of governments [*157] founded on consent.  Any focus on how membership ought to be assigned or denied in the first instance was lost to a discussion of the right of a commonwealth, once created, to protect itself from persons it did not want included.

For Locke, the “bounded commonwealth” was crucial: “it gave members the space to articulate and bind one another to a settled meaning of the law of nature, so as to give themselves determinate rules that did not exist before in the state of nature” (p.38).  The unbounded commonwealth, by this formulation, would be no different from the state of nature.  For Mill, the bounded nation-state was essential for a free, liberal society to flourish.  He distinguished between “civilization” and “savagery,” evincing the fear of the time that European colonists might be tempted by the “‘inclinations of savage life’” (p.39).  Mills held out both the promise that savages could be accepted into civilized life and the responsibility of civilized peoples to assimilate savages, seeing this arrangement as the only way to avoid the persistent threat of civil war, animosity, and chaos.  Underlying this concern was an assumption of the necessity of a shared political culture.  Mill, Park argues, did not believe in the possibility of a multiracial or multiethnic liberal society.

Rawls, Park notes, disagreed that a multicultural society could not survive, but he also saw the value of a common political culture and a shared sense of community. Rawls, like Locke, saw the need to protect the liberal community from nonliberal peoples, particularly those who had organized into “outlaw states.”  Arguing that “liberal nations can and should protect those values that make them distinctive,” Rawls implied that these nations should have the “freedom to act independently as collective bodies” (p.42).

All three theorists assumed that liberal communities would retain the ability or right to exclude outsiders.  Yet, Park notes, the historical and current realities of international immigration have led critics to question the efficacy and justice of exclusion by liberal societies.  Political theorists have given attention in recent years to questions of migration, racial and ethnic diversity, and liberal pluralism and national sovereignty.  More plainly, they have asked, “can liberal societies justly exclude persons from entry or membership without violating principles of equality?”  And, more specifically, can the state treat those who have already entered – with or without formal permission – as “perpetual strangers,” “relying on their immigration status alone to justify legal, political, or economic disabilities?”  And, most timely, can liberal states – “because of the chaos that unregulated migration might cause” – “impose boundaries to protect the very institutions that many members regard as social and political achievements?” (pp.45-46)

Park notes that changes in migration patterns have caused Western political theorists to “rethink basic liberal commitments and, in some cases, to reaffirm what liberalism is, or should be committed to” (p.47).  But, despite disagreement on these matters, theorists agree that American immigration policies are “‘irrational’ when measured against liberal ideals” (p.48).  Park concludes: “Balancing the two [*158] competing commitments at the core of liberal theory, between an aversion to ascriptive status and the necessity for national sovereignty, has proved exceedingly difficult.  We have not arrived at that future point” (p.49).

Moving from the theoretical to the concrete, Park next attempts to show “how American immigration law grew . . . in the midst of this tension, both reflecting and amplifying it” (p.49). He details, through an examination of Asian immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, what occurred when “an ostensibly liberal society was confronted with large numbers of persons who [were] culturally distinct, politically different, and noticeably nonliberal” (p.50).  Park focuses on the life experiences and jurisprudence of California, and subsequently, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field, whose appellate career spanned the period from 1857 to 1896.  Field’s significant influence over the development of immigration law occurred in the context of struggling with the “Chinese Question,” in which Field “confronted the difficulties of maintaining a just balance between an impartial rule of law irrespective of ascriptive status, and the intense desire among many of his countrymen to exclude newcomers because of their purported differences in culture and manner” (p.53).  Park highlights the apparent contradictions within Field’s initial jurisprudence, which on the one hand expressed aversion to discrimination against the Chinese, based on first-impression interpretations of the Civil War Amendments, while inviting federal immigration restrictions justified on the basis of national sovereignty.  And, once the elective branches acted on Field’s suggestions, the Court upheld these immigration laws against challenge by excluded Chinese laborers.  However, as Park points out, when exclusion evolved into expulsion, Field returned to a jurisprudence that focused on discrimination due to ascriptive status.  Park’s framework of the paradox provides a strong explanatory vehicle for what would otherwise appear as a contradictory and arbitrary jurisprudence on the part of Justice Field.

Having detailed the establishment of immigration law in late nineteenth-century America, Park goes on to examine the effects and extension of this law in the twentieth century.  As he notes, by logic the law that developed in the context of Chinese exclusion ought to have been applicable to other racial and ethnic groups, but in fact the operation of the law extended only to Asians.  Here, Park describes both the fuller development of immigration law, including the hardening distinction between citizens and “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” and the variety of strategies adopted by Asian immigrants to avoid the impact of the increasing number of rules that discriminated against them.  Again, Park’s framework provides the basis for understanding the Asian experience once citizenship did become a possibility.  As he shows, the story does not end with the repeal of laws barring Asians from citizenship.  Instead, Asians entered the polity in a way uniquely shaped by their earlier experience.  The long-held belief in their inability to assimilate led Asians to embrace all things American while hiding or rejecting their ethnic make-up and ancestral culture.  It also required Asian Americans to demonstrate hyper-patriotism [*159] that included, for Japanese Americans, a willingness to enlist in the military during World War II, and for Chinese Americans, a willingness to inform on suspected Communists during the Cold War.   These efforts, Park concludes, while challenging the nation’s use of race and ethnicity in the exercise of sovereignty, ironically in many ways “helped to further the distance between citizens and strangers” (p.103).

ELUSIVE CITIZENSHIP is a well-executed interdisciplinary work combining the theoretical and the empirical in ways that benefit the understanding of both.  For students with minimal familiarity with liberal political theory, Park does an excellent job of laying out the positions of Mill, Locke, and Rawls, and tying the concerns that animated each philosopher to the realities of his time.  Focusing upon the Asian-American immigration experience provides a real-world application of political theory and an opportunity to make sense of the seemingly contradictory acts of lawmakers and Asian immigrants.

With this work, Park does not attempt to construct a new political theory or to extend our knowledge of Asian American history by delving into previously unexamined archives.  Rather, his purpose is to take the fine efforts of philosophers and historians and construct a framework that allows us to understand both political theory and historical narrative in a richer and more useful way.  In doing so, he succeeds handily.

It is with the concluding chapter, however, that the reader is left unsatisfied.  Park is not interested merely in explaining the development of American immigration law generally, or describing the Asian-American experience specifically.  Instead, Park’s final chapter suggests that his agenda is forward-looking and prescriptive.  The paradox is not a relic; it is alive and well today in California’s Proposition 187, Arizona’s recent similar enactments, and post-9/11 immigration policy now colored by the spectre of foreign terrorism on American soil.  Ultimately, then, Park’s framework can be applied to inform current debate, at a time when the promise of equality under the law has reached a certain level of fulfillment, while, on the other hand, the imperatives of national sovereignty have never been so widely accepted.

It is here that Park would have done better to undertake deeper research of recent events and engage in more sustained analysis of the paradox.  His discussion of the anti-immigration mood of the mid-1990s, targeted primarily towards newcomers from Mexico and Latin America and resulting in Proposition 187, has a cursory feel.  Meanwhile, a focus on modern-day manifestations of the paradox is incomplete without attention to significant changes in the framing of the immigration debate wrought by the 9/11 attacks.  It is no small irony that Congress was, with President Bush’s blessing, poised to consider at the moment of September 11, 2001, the renewal of a Clinton Administration program extending the promise of permanent residency and citizenship to modern-day “perpetual strangers.”  We may never see the likes of those days again.  [*160]

It may be disappointing to some that Park does not consider thoroughly the implications for the future within the paradox he so ably frames and illuminates.  But his book nonetheless provides a solid basis for forward-thinking readers themselves to extend the debate over who rightfully may be included or excluded from a liberal democracy.  This work deserves a wide readership, and is particularly rich for use in undergraduate political theory, legal studies, history, and political science courses, where it is sure to spark a lively, timely and informed discussion.

REFERENCES:

Rawls, John.  1971. A THEORY OF JUSTICE. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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© Copyright 2005 by the author, Donna C. Schuele.