I would like to thank Ben Herzog for his careful and generous reading of my book, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights. As he notes, my main argument is that “the perplexities of the Rights of Man,” examined by Hannah Arendt in the context of statelessness in the first half of the twentieth century, have not been fully resolved by moving to the framework of universal human rights. Despite the important changes in our legal and political landscape, asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants continue to find themselves in a condition of “rightlessness,” as they are left with a precarious legal standing, confined in detention centers or camps, and expelled from the political and human community. These problems have been even further aggravated since the publication of the book as the troubling news of the current “refugee crisis” highlights, and they demand a critical inquiry into the perplexities of human rights, including those arising from the intertwinement of a universalistic conception of personhood with the principle of territorial sovereignty. These perplexities are not dead ends, however, as they have been navigated by various groups of migrants for the purposes of making new claims that reconfigure our understanding of rights, citizenship, and humanity. With these key points in mind, I would like to briefly address two of Herzog’s critical remarks.

First, Herzog suggests that my discussion of the new rights claims made by sans-papiers in the final chapter “overlooks the importance of the national logic as the world’s organizing principle.” But that discussion, in line with the rest of the book, highlights how principles of nationality and territorial sovereignty install divisions and hierarchies within the universal human rights framework to the effect of relegating most migrants, particularly those in an irregular status, to a much narrower set of rights with uncertain guarantees. I am reluctant to understand this problem, however, in terms of a “national logic,” especially because this phrase suggests an unchanging, ironclad system. Contemporary border-control practices, as well as migrants’ contestations of those practices, point to transmutations (and not simply reinscriptions) of the nation-state and the principle of territorial sovereignty—and not always to the effect of increasing rights protections for migrants, as can be seen, for example, in transnationalization of border security technologies that challenge conventional understandings of “national logic.”

Herzog’s second critical remark is related to the amount of attention Arendt gets in Rightlessness in an Age of Rights; while appreciative of the interpretive insights that the book provides into her work, he suggests that I could have engaged instead with “numerous additional occurrences of rightlessness.” Herzog is right to point out that the book’s analyses of detention, deportation, and refugee camps do not exhaust contemporary instantiations of rightlessness by any means, and one could definitely add here, as he proposes, the problems of internal displacement, human trafficking, felony disenfranchisement, guest worker programs, and ethnic and racial minorities. But my goal in this book was not to offer an exhaustive list of problems of rightlessness. I focused on some “representative figures,” or “examples,” which Arendt (in a Kantian way) understood to be particulars that could reveal the general in their very particularity. Instead of envisioning the book as an exercise in applying theory to numerous cases, I strove to create a critical encounter between these contemporary examples and Arendt’s political theory. That task entailed rethinking and revising Arendt’s key concepts and arguments, including her controversial concept of the “the social,” her understanding of “labor,” and her proposition of a “right to have rights.”

Such rethinking was necessary not only because we inhabit a different landscape but also because Arendt’s political theory itself is replete with perplexities or puzzles with no easy answers. These perplexities are of interest to me partly because of my “disciplinary sensitivities” as a political theorist, but also because grappling with them, I hope, gave rise to new ways of thinking about the contemporary predicaments and struggles of migrants.