Minority Rights for Immigrants? Multiculturalism versus Antidiscrimination

Abstract

Contemporary immigration has reinforced calls for minority rights in liberal states, which accrue to immigrants (but also to citizens) qua member of an ethnic minorify group. It is often overlooked that such minority rights may be of two kinds: multicultural rights that protect cultural differences or antidiscrimination rights that attack discrimination on these grounds. I argue that the importance of multicultural rights has been greatly exaggerated, and that much of the work attributed to them has in fact been accomplished by group-indifferent individual rights. By contrast, antidiscrimination rights are growing stronger; even in Europe. However, to the degree that it tackles indirect discrimination, antidiscrimination cannot but be factually group-making, even in states that reject multiculturalism. © 2010, Cambridge University Press and The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. All rights reserved.