Does international human rights protection trigger a Copernican revolution for immigration law?

Schlegel, Stefan (2023). Does international human rights protection trigger a Copernican revolution for immigration law? In: Sakurai, Tetsu; Zamboni, Mauro (eds.) Can Human Rights and National Sovereignty Coexist? Global Perspectives on Immigration and Multiculturalisation (pp. 186-215). London: Routledge 10.4324/9781003102717-12

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Immigration law can only be understood if it is analysed as a field of law that struggles with a dynamic and unruly ingredient it can neither shake off nor properly integrate: human rights protection. This chapter argues that the intrusion of human rights into immigration law almost inevitably led to a slow-onset revolution, a Copernican Revolution that has the potential to eventually move everything upside down and to bring the periphery to the centre. The interest of receiving states used to be at the centre of immigration law. The Copernican Revolution tends to put the interests of immigrants at the centre of immigration law, thereby turning the former objects of this field of law into its subjects. This process is everything but linear. The emancipatory dynamic that unfolds thanks to the Copernican Revolution is regularly met by attempts from courts and lawmakers to halt or reverse it. This chapter argues that the resulting chaos is best understood as a clash between two different kinds of revolution. The first one is slow, but ground-shaking in its emancipatory potential, the second is bursting out in waves of fierce pushbacks, but conservative in its intent.

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