ABSTRACT
IMMIGRATION, on a significant scale, is now and will continue to be a significant feature of political life in Western liberal democracies. The intense desire of the migrants to make a better life for themselves (often against the background of intolerable conditions in their home countries) combines with the economic needs of public and private sector employers in the receiving states to defeat populist agitation for highly restrictive immigration controls. But if the fact of ongoing immigration is indisputable, the normative implications of that fact, both for the immigrant groups and for the societies they enter, are much less clear. In particular, what can either party legitimately expect of the other? How far is it reasonable to expect immigrants to adapt to existing conditions in the host society, and how far must citizens in the host society bend to accommodate ‘the strangers in our midst’? These are the questions that have prompted the present article.
