The desirability of diversity is often mentioned, especially in liberal political philosophy. Diversity across a range of areas such as ethnicity and religion is regarded as adding to the flavour of democracy and enriching the nature of society. Opposed to this, however, is the desire of many in the state to restrict membership to those who are close to the majority population, and there are often rules to establish this sort of homogeneity. Sometimes the arguments for these restrictions on diversity are economic, sometimes they are based on security, and these arguments are clearly reasonable and have to be responded to by anyone in favour of increasing diversity. Here the discussion will be centred around not these pragmatic considerations but the idea that there is something to be said for preserving a degree of uniformity in the population of a country or region.
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