DISQUS

It is complicated to change your citizenship, especially as an adult -- two of my kids are adopted from Korea, my brother was born in Mexico; these caused minor complications. My co-author came as an adult from the Soviet Union; that's quite a bit harder, though it wasn't as hard for him as for some of the immigrants (refugees, mostly) I've known... and my daughter-in-law's green card travails have just begun. We'll see. Being an adult involves doing lots of complicated things. Sure, it should be easier, but when you say your membership is not voluntary because it's "exceedingly hard" to change, I do wonder about the standard being exceeded. Wikipedia claims about a million people per year coming in, and many other countries accepting quite a few yearly immigrants. If you've unsuccessfully tried to leave the US, or tried a bunch of other countries that all rejected you, then I'm sorry and I agree that your US citizenship is not consensual. Or at least that it's deplorably far from 100% consensuality; I view consensuality and therefore "just powers"/legitimacy as a matter of degree, where no plausible government is perfectly consensual or utterly fails of consensuality. But try a google search for "immigration Australia"; there are people who want your business. It's not the way it was for my g-g-g-uncle Edgar Metcalfe, shanghaied onto a whaling barque some years before the Civil War and jumped ship in Australia a couple of years later.
Seriously, my understanding is that US citizenship is importantly consensual, about as consensual as it currently gets (except for back-and-forth within the EU, I guess) and that North Korea, for example, is importantly non-consensual. This has a lot to do with the legitimacy of the governments thereof, as I see them.

However, it's possible that this is a distraction, even though it affects legitimacy of government. I do claim that, in this case, my (A,B,...Q) association is primarily voluntary, but suppose it isn't: it still has goals and by-laws to which the members, voting democratically under a supermajoritarian constitution, have consented; the system is voluntary in that sense. Among these goals and by-laws, we have some redistributive policies: education for all, paid for by all; emergency medical care, similarly funded; and (to use Adam Smith's phrasing) the "poor laws". These are largely per capita expenses; if you increase the head-count, you increase the expense, and if you increase the head-count without comparably increasing the total income, then you may break the system.

Now, I believe that increasing the head-count will in the long run increase the total income adequately, but I admit that in any given year, it might not. So I wouldn't let in everybody at once, even though I'd let in a lot more than we do now. Will, you appear to be saying: "Let people in, even if you're right about it breaking the system. It is a matter of principle; they have the right to come; you do not have the right to agree on a system of mutual benefits that depends on what you have in common (culture, income, whatever) and which therefore cannot survive letting in all who want to join it." This strikes me as a really remarkable principle.

I certainly don't want to oppose your freedom of "voluntary association"; the thing is, I want you to have the freedom to form voluntary associations which exclude me. For instance, you might be forming an association with generous medical benefits, in which case you might say that an influx of 55-year-olds would put too much stress on your projected costs. Then again, you might be forming an association dependent on shared culture, in which case you might say that guys whose phuds are in computer science would be too hard to assimilate amongst the philosophically economical group you'd probably be forming. Note that both of these arguments relate to your "Do No Harm": there are some associations, with some combinations of goals and by-laws, whose members would actually be harmed by admitting too many guys like me.
A whole lot of US voters, as members of a moderately voluntary association (which does, after all, derive its just powers from the consent of the governed), feel that both of these arguments apply...not necessarily to aging geeks, but to a lot of people that they think would like to come here. To the extent that their shared citizenship is consensual (never perfect, not that bad) I think it confers upon us the "positive duties" that we, through our representatives as limited by the Constitution as amended, say it does. :-) Our fellow-citizens look at regions with a lot of recent (legal+illegal) immigrants, and some think admitting more people involves a net social cost, i.e. less money left to spend on their own children, and that open immigration would bring in too many to be assimilated. That's harm. This strikes me as reasonable in principle, even though I think almost all of my fellow-citizens overestimate the costs, underestimate the benefits, and underestimate the effectiveness of assimilation; I would therefore favor a drastic increase in the openness of immigration. I guess that puts me on your side in practice, but I think you're disagreeing in principle, saying that even if they are right in practice, even if there's a net social cost (from education and emergency services), the "right" of (A,B,C,D,...Q) to form an exclusive voluntary association, called a "nation", must in principle yield to the "right" of Z to move in and voluntarily associate with citizen J who offers Z a job. I don't see this at all. Nor do I think it makes sense to say that Z is "harmed" by denying him the benefits of entrance. Summary? I therefore think you're denying the right of (A..Q) to form an exclusive voluntary association in the first place (as a matter of principle), and thus in practice you're denying their right to form associations with high per capita costs -- associations which by definition cannot survive an arbitrarily large proportion of low-income members. I'm thinking of a phone call, some years ago, telling me that my wife and very small daughter had been hit while in the cross-walk of our village's main stoplight; by the time I got to the local hospital, I was told that they'd been redirected (in separate ambulances) to the trauma center forty minutes off. Later, I was happy to pay the bill and add a donation, but no forms were required in advance. I do not want to tell my fellow-citizens that they must, as a matter of principle, extend such no-questions-asked emergency services (or even the yearly school budget vote) to everyone who wants to come, even if that breaks the budget. At some level, it might indeed.
Yes, I want more open immigration, we can certainly assimilate a lot more than we're doing now. But I don't believe that exclusive voluntary association, especially the sort of voluntary association which depends on some shared properties (culture, income level) is inherently wrong. Do you?

I assume you'd call me an unprincipled particularist, e.g. I spend more freely for my kids' education than (via taxes and donations) for my neighbor's kids, yet I spend more freely for these than (via state taxes) for others in my state, more freely for these than (via federal taxes) for others in the US, and beyond that I contribute to various groups for education in Afghanistan, Iraq, Thailand and so forth -- yet this is not a rigid hierarchy. I do what I can, balancing costs, as I think most of us do. I suppose that my new daughter-in-law, a Greek citizen but US graduate student, has been partially supported by my state and federal taxes, and I think that's fine. (Back when I had to supervise graduate students, some were US citizens and some were not, but all were partially supported by US taxes, and that was fine too.) Assuming she gets dual citizenship eventually, that will entitle her to more entitlements, including a vote on which entitlements US citizens should be entitled to, and I think that's also fine, even when she disagrees with me.
I would therefore like to propose a model for unprincipled particularism of the sort that I try to follow.
Basically I think people like me feel pulled or pushed by links to others which we interpret as implicit and explicit contracts; some of these are probably hard-wired as evolutionary psychology tries to describe, and others not. Some of them are equivalence relations readily interpreted as group memberships, and others not. There is no fixed decision procedure, no deontic-logic theorem-prover that settles choices for people like me, not even an attempt at perfect consistency: I suspect it's more like a Minsky society-of-mind arrangement, a constant debate between very stupid speakers saying "this is okay." and "this is Good!" and, of course, "no no No Very Bad!" They represent links, some of which carry responsibility, some of which are memberships.
US citizenship is a moderately consensual membership; it would be more consensual if it were easier to come and go (and I would like that. I would like that a lot.) It seems perfectly reasonable to me that US citizens should agree, through their representatives, to do more for each other than they do for those who have not joined up. This applies to most consensual groups. Some of these are pretty feeble: I wouldn't even be aware of my high school class as a continuing, consensual group (derived, of course, from a non-consensual origin) if it hadn't been for an instapundit interview of classmate. Still, it's likely that there is some marginal request which, other things being equal, I would reject from a random member of h.sap, but would agree to from one of those people that I very hazily remember from almost forty years ago. I take it you disapprove; you would prefer to feel as strongly linked to everyone as to anyone. I'm skeptical that this is even possible, so I doubt that you can really achieve the logical consistency which you seem to think desirable. In fact, I doubt that you believe it: so I've probably misunderstood. I'd appreciate an exposition on what you mean by "particularism"... or of course, point to previous expositions.