In defense of citizenship testing: a reply to Daniel Sharp

Abstract

I have argued that citizenship tests are not, in principle, unjust, were they to accurately test the acquisition of those particular aspects of local history and vocabulary necessary for participation in the local political community. Daniel Sharp disagrees, and argues that such tests are always unjust; they impose unjustifiable burdens against all and only migrants seeking admission to political citizenship. In this paper, I defend the possibility of a just test. I argue, first, that the burden on prospective citizens is not an undue or unjust one, were we to have some reason available to us by which that burden might be justified; and, second, that some such reason is available, given the relevance of local knowledge to political discourse–a relevance acknowledged in both current law and in theories of public reason.