Religion & Law

Liav Orgad has posted an interesting new paper, Illiberal Liberalism: Cultural Restrictions on Migration and Access to Citizenship in Europe. Here's the abstract:

This article addresses a simple but important and understudied question: Is culture a legitimate criterion for regulating migration and access to citizenship? While focusing on France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Denmark, I describe how these states embrace illiberal migration policies which violate the same values they seek to protect. I then construct a two-stage set of immigration-regulation principles: In the first stage, immigrants would have to accept some structural liberal-democratic principles as a prerequisite for admission; these principles are not culturally-oriented but constitute a system of rules governing human behavior in liberal democracies. In the second stage, as part of the naturalization process, immigrants would have to recognize and respect some constitutional principles essential for obtaining citizenship of a specific state. I call this concept 'National Constitutionalism'. As the American debate on immigrant integration policy comes at a decisive moment, the European experience has some important lessons for U.S. policymakers.

How does the Church handle this tension?  On one hand, the Church emphasizes the importance of culture and warns about the homogenizing dangers of globalization.  On the other hand, the Church speaks out in favor of liberal immigration policies.  Would the Church ever support restrictions on immigration in order to maintain a distinct culture?  Perhaps the Church teaches that keeping people out reflects an overly narrow or defensive view of culture?  Or maybe that culture is not coterminous with political boundaries, so immigration policy is a poor proxy for defense of culture?  Has the Church already addressed this tension somewhere?