148 K. Oberman personal and political liberty depends as much on the freedom to stay as the freedom to move. We cannot make our own life decisions and engage in free political activity unless we are free to stay and to move as we wish. It is easy to picture the free movement debate in terms of stereotypes: the ‘young Euro jetsetters’ vs. the ‘resentful go-nowhere locals’. It is also easy to assume that freedom of movement is all about the movers and offers nothing to the stayers. But we need to think again. From a normative perspective, there is no sharp contrast. When we move or when we stay we are engaged in the same core activity: deciding how we spend our lives and with whom. Whatever choices we make, and wherever our choices take us, we should all be able to see how important it is that our choices are our own. Having come this far, we can now discern something misleading in De Witte and Bauböck’s terminology. The ‘immobile’ category is much too broad. It lumps together people who, due to poverty and other social barriers, cannot move with people who simply choose not to. In the case of the former, the correct response is to make free movement an effective rather than merely formal freedom by tackling poverty and other social barriers to movement. In the case of the latter, the correct response is to remind these people that they are not, in fact, immobile. They have made a choice about where they live and, thereby, exercised their freedom of movement. They should now allow others to do likewise. Of course, providing a philosophical argument for why everyone should value freedom of movement is not the same as actually convincing them. After Brexit, the latter task appears daunting. But the problem we face is, in at least one sense, easier than the problem Mill faced in his day. Mill had to convince people of the value of basic liberties. In our day, most people accept the value of basic liberties; they just fail to realize their full implications. Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

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