14
Molly Land, Kathryn Libal, and Jillian Chambers
These cases – and the judicial system’s response to individual defiance of unjust
laws – illustrate not only the possibility of other ways of expressing rights outside of
citizenship but also the risks that insistence on policing these boundaries could pose
for the legitimacy of the constitutional order. In this way, Kanstroom’s chapter is in
dialogue with the arguments of Tendayi Bloom, who later in the volume argues that
the state’s legitimacy derives not just from its accountability to its citizens, but also
the extent to which it attends to its relationships with and thus its obligations to noncitizens. Kanstroom similarly argues, “Since legitimate lawmaking both responds
to and generates communicative power from, as it were, below, noncitizens play
a central role in translating communicative power into administrative power
and law.”
The third chapter in this part, Chapter 9 by Serena Parekh, “Do Non-citizens
Have a Right to Have Economic Rights? Locke, Smith, Hayek, and Arendt on
Economic Rights,” explores the idea of economic rights and the ability to meaningfully participate in the economy as a prerequisite for the enjoyment of human rights.
Parekh begins by re-reading Locke, Smith, and Hayek, arguing that these scholars –
known best for their defenses of the free market – in fact anticipated involvement of
the state in the market in order to ensure individual equality and minimum
economic guarantees.
Focusing on the experiences of individuals who are present within a country but
unable to participate in the market because they lack work authorization (as opposed
to those outside of a country seeking admission), Parekh then argues that Arendt’s
ideas about the need for a “right to have rights”43 can be extended to participation in
the market. Parekh flips the usual neoliberal conception of economic citizenship in
which individuals voice their opinions through participation in the market and the
mechanism of consumer choice.44 According to Parekh, economic rights are not a
manifestation of citizenship, but its precursor. Parekh argues, echoing Arendt, that
“being human is not enough to have one’s economic rights protected.” Instead,
“non-citizens need a right to have economic rights, that is, a right to belong to an
economic community.” Whether or not one can actually enjoy human rights has
less to do with one’s citizenship than one’s place in the global economy.
Chapter 10 makes an explicit claim for rights based on non-citizenship. In
“Human Rights Are Not Enough: Understanding Noncitizenship and Noncitizens
in Their Own Right,” Tendayi Bloom argues in favor of the concept of “noncitizen”
rights. Rather than seeing citizenship as the sole foundational relationship between
an individual and a state and non-citizenship as its absence, she contends that
there is another foundational relationship, that of non-citizenship. Moreover, this
43
H. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (2nd ed., New York: Harcourt, 1978); see also S. DeGoyer
et al., The Right to Have Rights (London: Verso, 2018).
44
K. A. Faulk, “Solidarity and Accountability: Rethinking Citizenship and Human Rights,” in
Goodale (ed.), Human Rights at the Crossroads, pp. 98, 102.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press