Membership is not a token of which there is a limited supply. Rather, national membership is a method, a way of being in the world, an approach toward others. Membership in a small group may indeed be limited, but on a national scale, membership is better understood as simply acknowledging someone’s humanity and basic human rights, of which there is no limit.
Abstract membership has unlimited supply. But practical membership has resource implications. Citizenship in the United States, for example, is unlimited, but practically it has to be limited by the fact that it will imply a dwindling supply of both material and service resources. This does not mean that all those who wish to exclude immigrants do so on these grounds. What it means is that no state can make citizenship infinitely open without paying huge resource costs. We are all citizens of the world. It costs us nothing and this is unlimited as every child born today automatically is a citizen of the world. But real decisions are not made globally. We do not have a global fire service or a global police force. We have bordred units where political decisions are made.
