The Indeterminate "We": A Case against Unilateral Border Control

Extant theories of territorial exclusion justify the right to unilateral border control based on an interest exclusively shared among a political community. This justificatory approach introduces civic boundary drawing, i.e., the identification of the "we," into discussions about free movement and immigration control. I first set out a normative framework—consisting of the higher-order constraints of context consistency and non-arbitrariness—that structures my evaluation of the different civic boundary drawing criteria offered by three prominent accounts of unilateral border control, including Wellman's freedom of association account, Pevnick's associative ownership account, and Blake's jurisdictional theory of exclusion. I then argue that there is no satisfactory way of civic boundary drawing because the substantive requirements respectively inferred from the two higher-order constraints contradict with each other. Due to this internal incoherence in the current justificatory approach, the identified "we" is indeterminate, making us unable to capture the interest internally shared among this indeterminate group. It is thus implausible to motivate a defense for the right to unilateral border control based on the ungroundedly-assumed internally shared interest.