The mass movement of people across the globe constitutes a major feature of world politics today. The first comprehensive overview of various positions within political philosophy on immigration, this original text offers a radical critique of these positions. Cole argues that there is a serious gap between the legal and social practices of immigration and naturalization in liberal democratic states and theoretical justification for such practices within the tradition of liberal political philosophy. How can liberal states develop institutions of democratic citizenship and at the same time justifiably exclude "outsiders" from participating in those institutions? The book examines various responses to this contradiction within the liberal tradition, and finds none of them satisfactory, arguing that this has serious implications both for liberal practice and theory.

Phillip Cole is Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Wales, Newport. He is the author of The Myth of Evil (Edinburgh University Press 2006), Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration (Edinburgh University Press, 2000) and The Free, the Unfree and the Excluded: A Treatise on the Conditions of Liberty (1998).