Rethinking Multiculturalism with (and against) Raz

Abstract “Migration minorities” are groups that have been formed through mass migratory movements caused by a multiplicity of factors, including war, natural disasters, climate change, and state persecution. They are in normatively significant ways distinct from the kinds of groups that have, since Will Kymlicka’s pioneering work, been central to multicultural theories—namely, immigrant groups formed through the voluntary migratory decisions of individuals and families, and national minorities, who have often been involuntarily incorporated into larger states dominated by other ethno-cultural groups. They lack the institutional completeness of national minorities. The kinds of normative arguments for the accommodation of such minorities that have dominated the literature, including in Joseph Raz’s early work on multiculturalism, therefore do not apply to them. Arguments better tailored to migration minorities can, however, be constructed on the basis of distinct Razian materials. A first argument is premised in the view that autonomous deliberation over options requires both sufficient options (a task that societal cultures are well situated to carry out) and an interpretive grid on the basis of which to make these options intelligible. Migration minorities, which still exercise a claim on the identities of their members, can provide such a grid. A second argument focuses not on rights, but on meaning-conferring duties and the importance and non-substitutability of cultures with which one possesses biographical links, as nonvoluntary sources of such duties.