  As was explained above, Phillip Cole has offered reasons to question the view that democratic governance depends upon there being closed borders. More recently, though, Arash Abizadeh (2008) has extended this reasoning to argue that democratic principles are actually incompatible with a state’s right to unilaterally exclude outsiders. As he puts it, “anyone who accepts a genuinely democratic theory of political legitimation domestically is thereby committed to rejecting the unilateral domestic right to control and close the state’s boundaries…” (Abizadeh 2008: 38) His argument involves two core premises, one moral and the second descriptive. The moral premise is his construal of the democratic justification thesis, which stipulates that a state’s coercive presence is illegitimate unless it is democratically justified to everyone coerced. The second premise is merely the descriptive observation that a state coerces foreigners when it forcibly prevents unwelcome immigrants from entering the state’s territory. In light of these two points, Abizadeh concludes that a state may not unilaterally exclude outsiders; it can permissibly adopt an exclusive immigration policy only if it democratically justifies this practice to outsiders. In other words, it would be impermissible for a state to forcibly restrict outsiders without first giving these outsiders a vote in the referendum which decided whether or not to adopt this restrictive immigration policy.