Migrants cross the border between Macedonia and Greece. Valdrin Xhemaj/EPA. Some rights reserved.Images of countries pinballing migrants at borders and fighting over quotas will scar the European collective imaginary. In the first half of 2015, 137,000 migrants crossed the Mediterranean sea. Almost 68,000 of them reached Greece, while 67,500 arrived in Italy. Meanwhile, between January and April alone, almost 1,800 went missing or drowned.
What should social democratic parties do? All of a sudden, their basic ideas of equality and social justice are exposed to a question of 'scope'. Should migrants be part of their political programme as fellow citizens are? To put it in Rawlsian terms, should migrants fleeing from Africa and the Middle East be granted a social minimum as those taking part in the ‘basic structure of society’? Right-wing populist movements do have a clear answer to this question: no. They propose a kind of 'national priority principle' that might be summed up in these terms: as long as national economic resources are limited, an absolute priority should be given to mitigating the tragedies of compatriots.
