Postcolonial Migration and Relational Inequality: The Complexities of Positive Contact as a Relational Equality Promoting Tool

Abstract Recently, some political philosophers have started to argue that the history and continuation of colonial injustices means that former colonising states have no right to exclude members of former colonies or colonially inflected societies. However, less attention has been paid to the issue of how postcolonial migrants ought to be treated once admitted into former metropoles. In this paper I assess whether postcolonial migrants ought to be required to socially integrate once admitted. On the one hand, there seems to be a compelling argument in favour of this requirement, because of the relational equality promoting benefits of social integration. I show how postcolonial migrants are subject to relational inequality within former metropoles and draw attention to compelling empirical evidence that shows that facilitating close and frequent interactions between members of ‘outgroups’ and ‘ingroups’ is an effective means of promoting relational equality. However, I then argue that postcolonial migrants ought not to be required to socially integrate for two reasons. Firstly, such policies in fact risk reinforcing relational inequality, and secondly, they risk subjecting postcolonial migrants to unreasonable burdens. This does not mean that former colonising states ought to dispense with social integration policies altogether, but they ought to be more attuned to the preferences of postcolonial migrants. In contexts in which they oppose social integration policies, a more appropriately relational egalitarian act would be for former colonising states to keep open the possibility of future social integration, rather than to impose it.