![]()
New challenges in immigration theory: an overview
Crispino E.G. Akakpoa and Patti T. Lenardb
aInstitute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; bGraduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
Normative political theory over recent decades has focused mainly on what ought to be done as far as migration policies are concerned. It faces a basic challenge, which stems from two competing, yet equally fundamental, ideals underpinning liberal democratic societies: a commitment to moral universalism and the exclusionary requirement of democracy. The objective of this special issue, ‘New Challenges in Immigration Theory’, is to provide a conceptual overview of (some) immigration theories and to highlight the challenges new streams of immigration pose for normative (political) theory and liberal democratic practice. The issue will consider how to reconcile state-based exclusion with a commitment to equal moral concern for all persons, by focusing on the non-standard immigration questions that have so far been ‘neglected’ by normative political theory. In line with this objective, the issue will discuss some of the inadequacies of the dominant political theories of immigration and show how such theories can be expanded to take account of new migration challenges such as brain drain, climate migration, detention of irregular migrants and asylum seekers, rights of labour migrants, transnational networks of movement, and so on.
Introduction
Normative political theory of immigration had its birth in a response to John Rawls’ proposal that, to identify the best principles of domestic justice, we should willingly accept the ‘considerable abstraction’ that societies are closed, and thus offer their citizens a ‘more or less complete and self-sufficient scheme of cooperation, making room within itself for all the necessary activities of life, from birth to death’ (Rawls 1993, p. 18). The response questioned two assumptions in this statement: that entering and exiting societies transpired only by birth and death and that a complete life can necessarily easily and satisfyingly be lived within the confines of one state. In fact, it was, and is, increasingly the case that people enter societies via migration and that more and more people spend portions of their lives living outside of their state of citizenship. These observations served to highlight a tension in liberal democratic theory: whereas liberal political philosophy is founded on a commitment to the moral equality of persons, immigration challenges this commitment by highlighting that the right of states to choose their members treats others unequally in some key respects. Attempts to reconcile the liberal universal concern for all persons with the reality of state boundaries and their exclusionary policies continue to prove difficult within the limits of liberal political theory.
This special issue, ‘New Challenges in Immigration Theory’, provides a conceptual overview of the central debates in immigration and then goes on to highlight the challenges that new streams of immigration pose for normative (political) theory and liberal democratic practice. In so doing, the issue will contribute to ongoing attempts to reconcile state-based exclusion with a commitment to equal moral concern for all persons. By focusing on the non-standard immigration questions that have so far been neglected by normative political theory, the contributions highlight some of the weaknesses of the dominant political theories of immigration, and suggest some strategies we can deploy to expand the normative boundaries in order to account for these new migration challenges, which range from those posed by high- and low-skilled labour migration to those posed by climate migration and border control strategies. Michael Blake and Phillip Cole outline the major normative questions in the political theory of immigration. The normative positions these scholars outline are challenged by the articles contributed by Alexander Sager, Joseph Carens, Valeria Ottonelli and Tiziana Torresi, Stephanie Silverman and Mathew Lister. These latter articles aim to force the reformulation of the central positions in normative political theory of immigration. Their contributions highlight that offering a persuasive theory of immigration demands that political theorists work very hard to inform themselves of the concrete challenges facing all three parties to immigration: migrants, sending states and receiving states.
Framing the debate
So-called open border theorists challenge the deeply embedded assumptions of liberal democratic theory, which ignored, as Rawls did, that membership in a political society itself is a source of moral, and increasingly also, political controversy. Led by Carens’ (1987) seminal defence of open borders, many scholars became preoccupied by an ignored, but glaring tension in liberal democratic theory; between two competing, yet equally fundamental ideals underpinning liberal democratic societies: a commitment to moral universalism and the apparent, and always assumed without justification, exclusionary requirement of democracy. An open borders position stems from focusing on the perspective of the migrant, i.e. to privilege her right to cross borders except in exceptional circumstances, and to adopt a position of wariness towards claims that more migration is unfeasible (Kukathas 2005).
Fundamentally, says Phillip Cole in the introductory piece to this special issue, it is not possible to reconcile coercive borders with a commitment to equality; here and elsewhere, Cole (2000, 2006) rejects attempts like Blake’s to argue for the moral relevance of borders, even in a world that is just along all other dimensions. Cole says, ‘immigration controls represent the failure of liberal political theory’. It is, in particular, a mistake to imbue the borders that divide states with moral relevance – Cole rejects the claim that it is possible to defend political borders, in spite of their historically arbitrary placement; they cannot, as Michael Blake claims in his contribution to the special issue, justify a distinction in the rights possessed by those on one or the other side of state borders. Their very arbitrariness makes them indefensible, and defending them highlights the incoherence of attempting to justify views according to which citizens can enjoy better or worse life prospects in virtue of their relative location with respect to an arbitrarily erected border.
The response to this challenge, or to the demand that liberal democracy defend its exclusionary assumptions, is multifold. For some, it seems transparently obvious that one feature of democratic self-determination is the right to have full or nearly full control over the membership of a population (Simmons 2001); it is integral to our understanding of sovereignty that membership is at the discretion of the already existing members. For others, the defences rest on protecting the social cohesion on which democratic practice depends; social cohesion is a fragile and essential democratic resource, and since immigrants, in some cases, can threaten social cohesion, and since democratic states are best able to judge when this is a threat, democratic states are justified in controlling their membership (Miller 2005). And for others still, the exclusionary tendencies are defended for their contributions to protecting access to social justice policies for members. These social justice policies – those that are defended by egalitarian political theorists – are so valuable that, if it is possible that immigration threatens them, the democratic community is justified in excluding by reference to a critically important good, i.e. the importance of fair distribution of material resources within a democratic state. Another component of this argument worries, with some justification, that the social cohesion that underpins a commitment to redistributive policies can be threatened by an influx of immigrants who remain at the margin of society.
In response to Cole’s complaint, and others like it, Michael Blake offers an attempt to justify the state’s right to exclude. At the heart of Blake’s jurisdictional justification for exclusion are the relationships that bind members of an already existing political state, and the obligations to which these relationships give rise. This justification for exclusion, says Blake, stems from a commitment to avoid imposing obligations on individuals – we have, he argues, at least a limited right to protect ourselves from incurring unwanted obligations. We can do this by examining the right to exit, which is in part protected because no government can compel its citizens to remain, for the reason that doing so forces them into relations they prefer to sever. Any migrant’s demand to enter can, similarly, be resisted by citing the desire of the excluding state to be protected from forming unwanted relations and the attendant obligations. The advantage of his approach is, it avoids resting on controversial cultural defences of the right to exclude; the good of community is a good worth preserving, Blake acknowledges, but not one that is so significant as to justify complete exclusion as some sometimes are thought to suggest (Walzer 1983).
Cole and Blake’s views serve as bookends of a sort, delineating a strong case for the right to move as well as a strong case for the right of states to exclude. Having identified the parameters of the debate between open and closed border advocates, the remaining contributions to this issue focus on the specific migration patterns to which these theories might apply. The contributors thus aim to encourage a discussion between the framework offered by the political theory of migration and these new and difficult migration challenges.
In particular, the contributions to this special issue raise specific challenges to immigration theory by focusing on discrete migratory streams, rather than migration as a whole. They show us that the normative questions raised by each of these streams are distinct and that it is worth treating them independently. Together, they serve to challenge our basic understanding of the phenomenon of migration itself, forcing us to think more seriously about three key elements of the migratory experience, including: (1) when migration serves and when it undermines global redistributive justice, (2) the (moral and practical) significance of the timing of migratory decisions and (3) the locus of coercion in the migration experience.
Rethinking the global distributive justice challenge to immigration control
When Carens’ seminal article appeared, among the most compelling images was that of poor Haitians, in leaky boats, approaching the American shore, asking for admission. Carens had his readers envision the justification we might legitimately offer these poor migrants, for hoarding our goods to ourselves, and moreover, for pointing guns at them to prevent them from entering and thus from sharing these goods. This image helped to fuel his claim that the global state structure, which protects nation-state borders alongside the right of these nation-states to make admission and exclusion decisions with near impunity, was best understood as an analogy to feudal times: ‘citizenship in Western liberal democracies is the modern equivalent of feudal privilege – an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances’ (Carens 1987, p. 252). His readers were intended to take away this lesson: in a world riddled with inequalities, the justifications for excluding the poor from wealthy states carry little weight. Rather, the right to migrate across borders ought, under these profoundly unequal conditions, to be protected from wealthy states’ desire to restrict entry, even where the attempt to restrict entry is defended for its contribution to protecting egalitarian resource distribution in the domestic state. For at least some thinkers, where the welfare state is at risk as a result of an influx of migrants, so much the worse for the welfare state (Kukathas 2005). The wealth disparities between the poorest and wealthiest of citizens may have lessened slightly since Carens’ proposal to think of migration as (at least) a second-best mechanism by which to enable at least some redistribution of wealth, but remedying global poverty remains a profound and seemingly intractable challenge. Thus, although Blake asks what we learn about the right to exclude from considering a more or less equal world, several of the contributions take for granted the wealth inequalities that propel and constrain migration in the current global environment, and consider how we should treat the right to migrate within this context. They avoid the philosophically consistent, but practically unhelpful, proposal that wealthy states can in principle avoid admitting poor migrants, since after all they could discharge their duties to those who are less well-off by, for example, ‘exporting’ political or economic justice.1
The setting for Alex Sager’s assessment of the normative challenges allegedly posed by the ‘brain drain’, as well as Tiziana Torresi and Valeria Ottonelli’s evaluation of the goals of temporary labour migrants, is the international order that prioritizes, and indeed upholds, national institutions, and thereby, the right to exclude. This international order must be understood as framing migratory decisions, since it in effect is responsible for generating and sustaining migration policies that disadvantage those who are poorest and most vulnerable. It is in that context that we must evaluate the alleged benefits and burdens of brain drain, the ‘loss’ of skilled workers across a range of sectors from developing states, who migrate to developed states in pursuit of better economic opportunities and working conditions. The standard objection is that brain drain is an insidious way in which developing nations subsidize developed nations, who enjoy the benefits of migrants’ skills without having to shoulder the costs of producing skilled citizens. But, says Sager, the evidence to support the claim that the exodus of skilled migrants has a negative distributional effect is weak to non-existent; rather, he says, there is considerable evidence to the contrary, which suggests it has neutral and perhaps even positive distributional consequences. In light of this evidence, Sager argues, the claim that exit restrictions can legitimately be imposed on skilled migrants loses much of its force. Even those that are restricted in time – those that require, for example, that migrants labour in their field of study to ‘repay’ the state for the cost of their education – cannot be adequately justified. Fundamentally, they serve simply to prevent migrants from migrating at the moment they prefer, and thus hamper their freedom to make choices about how their lives will proceed.
Migration in time
Political theory of immigration has tended to treat migration as a single decision, which occurs at a single moment in time. We are led to imagine the simple situation, of a migrant who arrives at the border, asking to be admitted – representatives of the political community wait there, to adjudicate the case, and admit or exclude. But several of the pieces in this special issue question this understanding of migratory decision-making. Not only are migration decisions made in non-discrete moments in time, but rather over a period of time, it is also the case that the actions of the receiving states have significant effects on the ‘time dimension’ of migration, in particular of identifying the moment at which migrants can be said to have, effectively, migrated.
Joseph Carens offers a clear account of the role that time should play in extending citizenship status to migrants. He argues that the longer the stay of migrants (legal or illegal), the stronger the claim to remain becomes. This well-known argument, explored in our issue in relation to a range of migrant categories, emphasizes that the moral claims imposed simply by the passage of time must be taken seriously. Over time, migrants form relations with others around them, often with citizens and they form expectations about how their lives will proceed. As a result, injustice is done to migrants by forcing them into retaining an irregular status over an extended period or by requiring that they return after a lengthy stay. Avoiding this injustice demands extending them citizenship, or at least the right to apply for citizenship in time. The democratic claim – that those who reside in a gi...
