State, nation and immigration: the national order facing the challenge of immigration

Abstract

The article questions the usual views on migration, which characterize it merely as the provisional movement of foreign labor and obscure its fundamentally political meaning. The article highlights that it is objectively the permanent movement of citizens or members of a nation, in short, political subjects. This is unmentionable and inadmissible for a social and political world based on organizational principles and categories of thought tied to a nation-state, where the distinction between the national (and therefore, belonging to the political body) and non-national (excluded from the political), are crucial for the legitimacy and perpetuation of the order. Consequently, the goal of the article is to break with that worldview in order to found a new political relation between migration and order.