Part II — The life the design leaves alone

15. Arriving and Belonging

An arrival's rights come before any papers. A member's rights stay the member's own, whatever a people, language or faith asks of those who belong to it. The two relationships share one limit: the person seeking protection is owned by nobody, the republic and the community included.

The chapter follows an arrival, a disputed asylum record and a collective consent that stops supporting a permission. Each asks what an institution may decide, what stays protected and who must answer when its record fails.

Rights do not stop at arrival

Newcomers, migrants, refugees and stateless people keep standing, the floor, liberty, fair process and remedy wherever the republic has jurisdiction or effective control. Help follows from presence alone. Citizenship, documents, manner of arrival and time spent there are outside its conditions, and a missing record counts against nobody. The public duty is to serve first and reconcile afterwards, keeping standing, the floor, liberty, language, process and remedy continuous throughout.

The newcomer case records only presence under the republic's reach, with papers, immigration status and length of residence all absent, and standing, the floor and free movement follow. The ballot has its own route. It follows from recorded adulthood, and the full franchise adds ordinary residence and a chosen political home at each tier, as The Vote Conviction Does Not Take (Chapter 18) sets out. Citizenship is absent from both tests, and presence alone gives no ballot. Immediate help comes first, ahead of all of it.

Food, shelter, care, education, communication, courts and the reporting of violence stay separate from immigration enforcement. A service is barred from enrolling someone into an enforcement record as the price of help, from collecting status for that purpose and from passing its records to enforcement. Scarcity does not change whose needs count: arrivals belong in the affected population, and status is a forbidden ground for their priority.

Asylum means a right to a fair determination, with accessible information, an advocate, an interpreter, a hearing, reasons and an appeal that suspends removal. Expulsion and extradition require individual decisions and review, including the person's connections, family and any child affected. Nobody may be sent into persecution, torture or another categorically forbidden abuse, directly or through onward transfers, and a diplomatic assurance leaves that prohibition intact. Collective expulsion is prohibited.

Immigration detention of a child is prohibited. Adult detention requires individual necessity, judicial authorisation, a maximum, independent review and a real alternative outside custody shown insufficient. Taking nationality as punishment, or in a way that leaves someone stateless, is prohibited, and a child born in the republic who would otherwise be stateless must have nationality recognised. The former resident keeps a right to return; the ballot stays with residence.

Labour exploitation, ecological damage and rights violations forbidden at home stay forbidden when a public purchase, investment, trade arrangement or corporate form would export them. The relevant control and supply chain must be examined, and the duty survives a change of contractor, affiliate, flag or forum.

These are rights, limits and duties. A compatibility finding under them orders nobody to be detained, expelled or moved.

Conflicting versions stop the finding

The asylum case completes a fair-determination record. It identifies the case, constitutional version, current period, evidence, independent review, challenge route and alternate reviewer. Completion produces the specified legal conclusions about the determination; a grant of asylum lies outside them.

The conflicting-version case asks what happens when an authorised writer enters a second constitutional version in a field that must hold one value. Completion stops. The rules treat both entries alike, so a later entry or a favoured writer settles nothing.

The result withholds reliance on an ambiguous record and leaves open which entry is false. Resolving the disagreement takes further acts: a usable determination needs the ambiguity resolved and its conditions met, and independent review, correction and the alternate route for certified nonresponse remain owed. Meanwhile the delay falls on the claimant.

The failure concerns the determination's record alone. The substantive claim keeps its full strength, and the floor and the service firewall stay in place. Refusing an unusable decision leaves every protection of its claimant owed.

Belonging without surrendering rights

Indigenous peoples hold protected internal and local self-government, institutions, language, culture, education, collective land and resource title, participation and remedy. Linguistic, religious, ethnic and other minorities hold culture, language, education, media, association, accessible services and participation rights. Territorial government needs more than cultural difference: an independently shown historical or territorial basis and the constitutional democratic route.

Membership needs both self-identification and the community's lawful acceptance process. Multiple memberships are possible. A person may leave free of any official veto, any loss of common rights and any public exposure of private identity. Exit ends that membership alone; it leaves the person's origin as it was, and a separate land interest survives the exit itself. A dispute has an independent procedural challenge, and membership stays outside any measure of worth, risk or political weight.

Internal selection and customary law may differ from general-government rules. Individual voice, dissent, confidential help, children's rights, equality, liberty, reasons, appeal and final constitutional review all survive them. Nonmember residents retain common services, housing and property protections and their equal general-government ballot. Internal autonomy creates neither another general-government vote nor unilateral secession.

Permanent relocation, extinguishing or irreversibly impairing collective title, transferring sovereignty over collective lands, destroying a sacred site, placing hazardous material or inflicting comparable existential harm requires free, prior, informed, actual collective consent. That consent must concern the same people, land, proposed act, version and harm. A convenient spokesperson, silence, missing participation or a conflicting result counts for nothing in its place. Collective consent leaves ecological ceilings and direct animal protection binding, and it authorises no force against an individual.

Other material effects require consultation before commitment: accessible information, adequate time, lawful representatives and affected members, consideration of alternatives, accommodation, public reasons and review. Consultation informs the decision without giving a blanket veto; a collective's refusal is decisive only for the existential harms above. Temporary lifesaving evacuation needs its own emergency authority, independent review, safe continuity, return and repair, and it leaves title where it was. Conservation is no excuse for dispossession or forced assimilation.

A current, independently reviewed defect can withhold the affected permission and require preservation, correction, restitution or other rights-respecting remedy. Anyone may request review without the operator's permission; private evidence access needs a separate entitlement. A failure to respond, shown by positive evidence, places a duty on an independent alternate.

When a consent record is defective

In the consent sequence, a record for the same people, land, proposed act, version and harm completes with its required representation, review and challenge route. A second record permits the specific effect by joining that consent.

An independent defect finding then withdraws reliance on the consent record. The rules withhold both the consent conclusion and its dependent permission. The responding office owes preservation, correction and remedy; the auditor owes review of related cases and non-repetition. Another collective's unaffected record continues to complete. One defective consent is a finding about that record alone, and says nothing against a people or against consent in general.

Withdrawal reaches forward: an act already performed stays done, and the sequence marks where permission ends and repair is owed.

What this cannot settle

Collective identity belongs to the collective: the findings above concern records about membership and consent, and decide nobody's identity. Whether a foreign assurance is truthful, and whether another state cooperates, lie beyond these records. The institutions of reception, interpretation, registration and land administration, and whether any admission, consultation or repair takes place, belong to the second book.

The next part asks how those institutions become answerable. The rights in this chapter need public functions capable of acting, and limits that prevent the power to act from becoming power to decide whose rights count.

Run it: the companion runs this chapter's cases on your own device, at dhilipsiva.dev/rights-nobody-has-to-earn/cases.

Argument: The person before the status

The companion states these rules as Article 14.

I make presence the ground of help and residence the ground of the vote because the people a government acts on every day are the people living under it. A status test sorts them into those who may safely ask and those who may not, and someone who fears that a clinic reports its patients has reason to stay away. François Crépeau and Bethany Hastie argue for a firewall between immigration enforcement and public services, so that irregular migrants can reach fundamental rights and basic services.^[1] The same reason puts the ballot with residents. Claudio López-Guerra argues that resident non-citizens should vote and that excluding nonresident citizens is permissible,^[2] and some democracies go part of the way: New Zealand enrols permanent residents who have lived there continuously for a year, and Chile, from 2026, lets foreigners vote after more than ten uninterrupted years counted from permanent residence.^[3]

The residence line takes a side in a live dispute over who belongs in a demos: everyone a decision affects, or everyone subject to the government that makes it. Robert Goodin argues that the principle of enfranchising all affected interests, read coherently, gives a say to everyone who might possibly be affected by any possible decision, so that in principle virtually everyone would vote on virtually everything; he then looks for second-best institutions that approximate it.^[4] That principle cuts against any bounded electorate, this one included. I draw the line at the people a government governs directly, day to day, because they are the ones its decisions bind and the ones who can hold it to account at the next election. People affected from outside keep what the design owes anyone within its jurisdiction or effective control, and receive no ballot.

For collectives I require actual consent only where the harm is existential. A consent requirement for relocation or lost title limits the wider society's power over a group: what Will Kymlicka calls an external protection, which he argues need not conflict with individual rights, as against an internal restriction, a group's claim to limit its own members' liberties.^[5] A veto over every material effect would give a spokesperson power over members and neighbours alike, and Ayelet Shachar warns that accommodating a group can expose its vulnerable members to sanctioned violations within it.^[6]

The strongest alternative leaves membership to whoever grants it. Christopher Heath Wellman argues that a legitimate state's freedom of association gives it a presumptive right to exclude outsiders, even people seeking asylum;^[7] help and the vote could then follow admission. States kept control even where they bound themselves: the Refugee Convention lifts its bar on return for a refugee reasonably regarded as a danger to the country's security, or convicted of a particularly serious crime and a danger to the community.^[8] For collectives the strongest alternative asks more. The Inter-American Court required the Saramaka people's free, prior and informed consent for large-scale projects with a major impact within their territory,^[9] whereas ILO Convention 169 makes agreement or consent the objective of consultation and lets relocation proceed through national procedures when consent cannot be obtained.^[10]

My rules cost something against each. The firewall takes a source of information from enforcement, and the bar on return leaves the republic to meet a dangerous person's danger within its own law, at its residents' risk. A former resident who made a home abroad loses the vote in the place left behind, and people outside the republic whom its decisions affect gain no vote there. A people facing a large but reversible harm receives consultation and reasons where the Saramaka standard would let it refuse.

I would reconsider the firewall if people without papers used services as readily where enforcement reads service records as where it cannot; the residence line if former residents stayed as bound by a place's decisions as the people living there, or if a workable institution gave people affected from outside a say without taking the government's accountability from those it governs; and the consent line if harms classed as reversible repeatedly proved permanent once consultation had let them proceed.