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2 L. & Ethics Hum. Rts. 1 (2008)

handle is hein.journals/lehr2 and id is 1 raw text is: Editors: Foreword This year's issue is based on the articles presented at the Academic Center of Law & Business second international human rights conference on the subject of Demography and Human Rights. The conference examined the role of demographic considerations in internal public policy and immigration policy raising challenging questions such as can a state strive to maintain a certain ethnic balance? Is it legitimate for the state to encourage higher birth rates, and if it is, can it do so along ethnic lines? While the morality of demographic considerations is rarely addressed by legal scholars and political theorists, their increasing use in the public policy debate in different parts of the world such as Europe and Israel makes the discussion of the morality of the demographic discourse and its implications for human rights (especially ethnic minorities and women) important. This issue of the journal hopes to fill this gap by initiating the philosophical and legal discussion on these issues. In the opening article, Seyla Benhabib argues that attempts by nation states to pursue demographic objectives in a globalized world are both unethical and futile. Taking a cosmopolitan perspective, she argues that democracy and demography are always in tension. Benhabib discusses three phenomena-transnational migrations, the emergence of zones of international capitalism escaping state sovereignty, and the rise of law without the state-which make the pursuance of demographic objectives by states especially ineffectual. Yossi Dahan and Yossi Yonah in their comment on Behabib's article criticize her cosmopolitan stance for underestimating the importance of communal belonging to the individual and use the example of migrant workers in Israel to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Benhabib's cosmopolitan approach. Jose Brunner uses the German contemporary public debate on demographic decline due to sub replacement fertility rates, in order to contrast liberal rights reasoning with demographic reasoning. He argues that liberalism and demography offer competing world views, and while liberalism conceives of humans as autonomous agents driven by rational self-interest, demography refers to them as mutually dependent members of a population. According to Brunner's argument, nevertheless, they both overlook the embeddedness of the individual in a particular society with a historically evolved culture and social institutions, and its effects on individual decisions and on demographic outcomes. The liberal underpinnings of diversity management in the U.S. are thoughtfully discussed in Peter Shuck's article. Using the examples of census categories and ethno-racial profiling he defends a liberal approach to diversity management that emphasizes government neutrality, group competition, anti-discrimination, and free and informed choice. Schuck suggests that the U.S. government should abandon conventional ethno-racial categories altogether. Various groups of immigrants are perceived by some as a threat to the public culture of Western democratic states. Christian Joppke offers a comparative 1

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