Abstract

All over the world immigrants are only granted the right to participate in national elections if they have been living in the country for a certain number of years, and this requirement of retrospective residency is throughout accepted in the philosophical debate on immigrants’ voting rights. This paper argues that it is morally inacceptable to make immigrants’ right to vote dependent on retrospective residency, and as such not only claims that all states currently violate a large number of individuals in one of their basic political rights, and contributes to the debate about a just system of political participation rights, but also questions how citizenship, to which voting rights are currently tied in almost all countries, is currently understood and regulated.