Citizenship, domicile and deportability : who should be exempt from the state's power to expel?

First published online: 28 January 2020Legally and practically, only those with citizenship status enjoy absolute protections against deportation in liberal democracies. Yet deporting non-citizens who have resided on a state's territory for many years is increasingly controversial, as demonstrated by the many protests such deportations generate and the growing number of political theorists who argue that long-term residents should be granted a right to stay. In this article, I agree with these theorists that deporting long-term residents is morally troubling but propose an alternative theory about its wrongs. Instead of grounding these in the fact that such individuals have become de facto members of the societies in which they live, the contributions such individuals have made to their host societies, or their compatibility with these societies, I draw on theories about the moral importance of stable territorial residence as a basic background condition for human flourishing to formulate what I call a 'domicile principle of non-deportability'. This principle grounds such a moral and legal status in the fact that someone has made the territory in which they reside the centre of their most fundamental life projects and attachments. I also examine the implications of this argument for the comparison between citizen and long-term resident non-deportability