In Moving Europeans, historian Leslie Page Moch recounts the trajectory of Joseph Mayett who

left his parents’ Buckingham cottage northwest of London in 1795 at age 12, when his father, a farm laborer, hired him out to be “in service.” The young man ate, slept, and resided with his masters since service was paid in room, board, and a wage. … Both Mayett and his parents tacitly expected him to be a farm servant, to be hired by the year, and to move annually. Neither party anticipated that he would again live at home, and he did not, except for one short period when he was forced to take work as a farm laborer and find shelter with his parents. Mayett took 11 positions as a farmhand in eight years, sometimes returning to a former master, and never once living more than 23 kilometers from his parents’ cottage . (Moch 1992: 22)

Against the myth of a sedentary pre-industrial Europe where peasants put deep roots into national soils, Moch demonstrates that Mayett was in no way atypical: mobility was the norm for the seventeenth century in which “about 65 percent of men and women departed their home parish” (Moch 1992: 23).

Moch’s history of mobility in Europe is important and fascinating, but not surprising. Humans are a mobile species—our ancestors moved out of Africa to Eurasia and Australia over 40,000 years ago and have not stopped moving. As the demographer Massimo Livi Bacci states, “territorial movement is a human prerogative and an integral part of human capital; it is one of many ways that the human species has sought to improve its living conditions” (2012: viii). Though the word “migrant” is not always used, the history of the world is very much a history of people moving due to climate change, conquest, slavery, economic opportunity, and wanderlust. Migrants have been a source of goods, ideas, and customs. Despite the best efforts of nationalists to deny the multicultural fabric of their lives, the history of the world is cosmopolitan.

Mobility today is ubiquitous. Today there are an estimated 244 million international migrants (2015 figures) (IOM 2016) and possibly 740 million internal migrants (2009 figures) (UNDP 2009). In 2015, 1186 million international tourists supported a $US 1260 billion industry (UNWTO 2016). Mobility is integral to economies and communities, as well as to the lives of individuals and families. At the same time, it is often stigmatized and the freedom to travel is unevenly distributed. Some people move with ease, while others are forced to remain or to move clandestinely. In many cases, mobility restrictions are accomplished through blunt and violent means such as armed border guards and barbed wire fences. But even more frequently, mobility is shaped in more subtle, insidious ways such as when some groups are extended housing loans with generous terms while others are denied access to credit (Massey 2007) or when gentrification drives populations out of neighborhoods they have occupied for decades. Barriers to mobility can be physical (e.g., walls and jail cells), legal (e.g., prohibitions against migration, against trespassing, or wearing headscarves in public places), and economic (e.g., social policies that make many parts of cities inaccessible to much of the population). They can also be cognitive or symbolic (e.g., people do not know how to access resources or believe [perhaps rightly] that they are not welcome). They can also be unofficial and even illegal, as when members of minorities are treated with suspicion or hostility or given pretexts (e.g., rental requirements that give landlords leeway to refuse to rent to members of some groups) to prevent them from moving into some neighborhoods.

This book is a philosophical investigation of the categories and presuppositions that influence how we think about mobility and migration. My goal is to provide tools for thinking ethically about when enclosure and exclusion have moral warrant and when they should be resisted. This requires a diagnosis of the cognitive biases and schema that shape how we think about mobility, affecting when we notice it (e.g., immigration of the global poor), when it is mostly invisible (e.g., internal mobility between cities in the same national territory), when it is welcomed (e.g., highly skilled workers or “expats” from privileged states), and when it is treated as pathological (e.g., racialized minorities fleeing persecution).

Conceptual analysis of categories and presuppositions helps dispel common misconceptions about migration that misinform political debates and much of the normative literature, especially in political philosophy and political theory. In particular, theorists have analyzed migration from the perspective of the nation-state—and in most of these cases, from the perspective of developed, Western nation-states. This perspective is heavily influenced by the cognitive bias of methodological nationalism (Sager 2016).¹

Methodological nationalism connects to a sedentarian bias in which movement is ignored or treated as abnormal. Much state-funded social science asks why people move with the implicit or explicit agenda of figuring out how to prevent them from moving—at least into wealthy states. Movement is conceived as a problem; if many people move, it is deemed a crisis. As Nicholas De Genova puts it:

The Migration Question thus gets transposed into the Migrant Question, and it is indeed around this “problem” that much of the academic research on migration has itself been fundamentally constituted. The very categories of thought that commonly frame discourses of migration, including scholarly discourses, tend to present migrant mobility as a definite sort of “problem” that implicitly threatens the presumed normative good of “social cohesion” and commands various formulae for enhancing the processes for the “inclusion” of Migrant “outsiders”, or perhaps for compelling those “foreigners” to figure out how to appropriately “integrate” themselves. (De Genova 2016: 345)

The sedentarian bias thus treats migration as an unfortunate response to poverty or to violence that should be prevented if possible. Governments have erected walls, intercepted ships, built detention centers, restricted criteria for asylum, and partnered with foreign governments to keep people in their place (De Genova and Peutz 2010). These approaches frame migration as a security issue threatening the well-being, values, and physical security of affluent communities (Feldman 2012). More subtly, the sedentarian bias has supported misguided policy proposals such as coupling development aid with stricter border controls aimed at keeping people at home. Immobility, on these proposals, is achieved by addressing the “root cause” of migration, thought to be largely poverty. This ignores how development and migration are not substitutes, but rather interact: international migration—at least over the short run—increases with development (OECD 2016: 115–122).

Attempting to think about migration without the biases of methodological nationalism and sedentarism can be disorienting. It becomes much harder to determine the nature and location of borders since they cannot be treated as synonymous with proclaimed national borders. Also, it introduces complexity to the categorization of migrants which cannot uncritically follow taxonomies imposed by states. Dichotomies imposed by nation-states such as “internal vs. international,” “permanent vs. temporary,” “legal vs. illegal,” “voluntary vs. involuntary” become blurred and less important for empirical and normative thought (King 2002: 92–94).

In recent decades, scholars have begun to overcome the bias of methodological nationalism and to show how mobility is integral to our social, economic, and cultural lives....