The Ethics and Politics of Immigration

Core Issues and Emerging Trends

Alex Sager

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783486120
• eBook ISBN: 9781783486144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The Ethics and Politics of Immigration provides an overview of the central topics in the ethics of immigration with contributions from scholars who have shaped the terms of debate and who are moving the discussion forward in exciting directions. This book is unique in providing an overview of how the field has developed over the last twenty years in political philosophy and political theory.

The essays in this book cover issues to do with open borders, admissions policies, refugee protection and the regulation of labor migration. The book also includes coverage of matters concerning integration, inclusion, and legalization. It goes on to explore human trafficking and smuggling and the immigrant detention. The book concludes with four topics that promise to move immigration ethics in new directions: philosophical objections to states giving preference to skilled laborers; the implications of gender and care ethics; the incorporation of the philosophy of race; and how the cognitive bias of methodological nationalism affects the discussion.

Chapter One

An Introduction to the Ethics of Migration

Alex Sager

On 2 September 2015, the drowned body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi briefly galvanized discussion around refugee flows. Kurdi’s family had fled their home to escape the Syrian civil war, finding temporary refuge in Turkey before attempting to reach Greece with the hope of eventually joining family in Vancouver, Canada. Though Turkey opened its borders to Syrian refugees, it only gave refugee status to those with passports. Since the Syrian government had denied passports to much of its Kurdish population, the Kurdi family found itself living irregularly in Turkey, unable to obtain exit visas. Alan’s aunt in Canada, Tima Kurdi, had tried to sponsor the family, but failed due to financial constraints, the family’s lack of formal refugee status, and the red tape of the Canadian immigration system.

According to the International Organization for Migration, 3,771 migrants drowned in the Mediterranean in 2015. Thousands more children have perished in the Syrian civil war and well more than a million survive as refugees. In response, European governments have fortified their borders against migration flows and signed an agreement to detain refugees in Greece to return them to Turkey. Though Europeans have repeatedly labelled the approximately million people who have crossed the Mediterranean to seek asylum in Europe the ‘European migration crisis’, far more refugees subsist in Turkey (2.6 million), Lebanon (1 million), Jordan (630,000), Iraq (245,000), and Egypt (117,000).¹

Alan’s death touches on many of the moral questions surrounding migration raised by the authors of this collection. What do individuals, states, and the international community owe to people fleeing violence and persecution? How should the burdens of protection for today’s 19.5 million refugees be distributed? Indeed, should we accept the common understanding of ‘refugee’? Under article 1 of the 1951 Refugee Convention, a refugee is described as someone with ‘a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country’. Or should we extend the definition to anyone in dire need or who suffers human rights violations?²

Moving away from questions of defining refugees, measures such as carrier sanctions prevent people from boarding an airplane without a visa, forcing people like Alan’s family seeking asylum to resort to smugglers. How should we view smuggling—an act that is often criminalized and conflated with human trafficking?³ Are measures to prevent and regulate unauthorized migration such as deportations and detention morally defensible?⁴

More radically, is it possible to morally justify border controls at all? As authors such as Joseph Carens and Ayelet Shachar have pointed out, border controls in the contemporary state system instantiate something analogous to the birthright privilege of the feudal system: since most of the world’s population is deprived of legal means to immigrate in search of better wages and opportunities, where one is born largely determines one’s life chances (Carens 1987; Shachar 2009). What moral grounds—if any—do citizens of wealthy states have for using force to prevent people from poorer regions working and settling in their territories?⁵

If we reject the idea that states should open their borders not only to refugees, but to migrants more generally, how do we design a just immigration system? How can we distinguish between presumably unjust reasons for discrimination such as racial prejudice from possibly just reasons such as the admitted immigrant possessing valuable skills?⁶ Should citizens have a right for family members to join them that takes priority over other (often poorer) people who wish to migrate?⁷ When reflecting on the justice of migration policy, do we need to take into account the effects in sending states such as the fear that out-migration leaves vulnerable regions without skilled professionals?⁸ How should we assess temporary labour migration programs which are often proclaimed to be a feasible alternative to utopian proposals for open borders, promising ‘win-win-win’ solutions that benefit migrants as well as sending and receiving states?⁹ What about temporary labour programs that attract primarily women from abroad to perform care work?¹⁰ Once immigrants and refugees settle, how should they be integrated into the rest of society?¹¹ Also, how should states treat people within their borders who lack legal status? Does justice require creating mechanisms that allow them to regularize their status?¹²

The purpose of this collection is to orient ethical reflection and to propose and to defend positions on these sorts of questions. An estimated 232 million people live outside of the country of their birth; around 740 million people have migrated internally (International Organization for Migration 2015). The history of humanity is a history of mobility, but political philosophy has often operated under the assumption of stasis in which migration is ignored or treated as pathological and exceptional. This is unfortunate as any normative theory that attempts to provide guidance for today’s world needs to take migration into account. Migration is fundamental to debates on nationalism, multiculturalism, and citizenship. It is also a key component of debates on state sovereignty, transnationalism, and movements towards global governance. The economic benefits of migration (Clemens 2011) and the fact that migration accompanies economic development make it a central part of any robust theory of distributive justice (de Haas 2012). Migration not only has enormous human costs and consequences, it is a constitutive part of many of the processes that sustain and transform our social, political, and economic institutions.

Foundational Work on the Ethics of Migration

Unlike many topics in contemporary political philosophy where there are clear historical precedents to draw on (though always at the risk of anachronism) the ethical debates over migration in contemporary political philosophy have few direct parallels. Nonetheless, a brief survey of historical debates helps to orient our thought.

The European discovery and colonialization of the New World towards the end of the fifteenth century led to debates about European migration, commerce, and settlement. Even theologians such as Bartolomé de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria who were highly critical of Spanish colonial practices supported the right to immigrate. In On the American Indians (1532) (Question 3, Article 1), Vitoria concludes that ‘Spaniards have the right to travel and dwell in those countries, so long as they do no harm to the barbarians, and cannot be prevented by them from doing so’ (Vitoria 1991, 278). He gives fourteen proofs, drawing on the law of nations (ius gentium) (which he views as either part of or derived from natural law) and on Scripture. He states that it would be unlawful for the French and Spaniards to prevent each other from travelling in or living in each other’s territories as long as it caused no harm and extends the analogy to the Americas. He also notes that ‘Amongst all nations it is considered inhuman to treat strangers and travelers badly without some special cause, humane and dutiful to behave hospitably to strangers’ (Vitoria 1991, 278).

These debates continued through the seventeenth to nineteen centuries. More than two hundred years later, Diderot in his Histoire des Deux Indes (1770) allows for colonization of unoccupied territory and partially occupied territory (if all of the territory is not necessary for survival), but only for settlers who live peaceably alongside the natives—something he did not believe occurred in European colonization (Muthu 2003, 74–76). In Perpetual Peace, Kant argues for a right to hospitality which gives foreigners a right to visit and to not be treated with hostility as long as they behave peaceably. This right to visit provides the conditions necessary to seek commerce, but does not give visitors a right to become guests—i.e., to become at least temporary members of a household (Kant 1999). Visitors can be turned away as long as it does not lead to their destruction. In contrast, John Stuart Mill provided an unabashedly imperialist apology for colonialism on behalf of what he deemed the ‘collective economical interests of the human race’ (Mill 1907, V.11.50, cited in Bell 2009, 43) (though he placed particular emphasis on the benefits for the British working class) and for its civilizing effect on native ‘savages’ (Mehta 1999).

In these debates, the question was about the moral legitimacy of European commerce and settlement with no consideration of the possibility of migration from these colonies to Europe. Not until Sidgwick in the Elements of Politics (1897), do we arrive at a position that has some resonance with contemporary (in this case restrictionist) positions on migration. He bases migration on a principle of mutual non-interference between states that permits them to exercise broad discretion over emigration and immigration policy:

But on the principle that limits strict duty to non-interference, it must be competent for a State to prohibit this infusion [of immigrants in its territory] totally or partially: and if (as is the common view) we regard its rights over its territory as only limited by the duty of avoiding mischief to other States—according to the analogy of private rights of property—it must be competent for it to exclude inhabitants of other States altogether from its territory, without violation of duty. (247)

Sidgwick also argues that since states have no obligation to admit foreigners, it may impose ‘any conditions on entrance or any tolls on transit, and subjecting them to any legal restrictions or disabilities that it may deem expedient’ (248). He further asserts that ‘as [the state] may legitimately exclude them altogether, it must have a right to treat them in any way it thinks fit, after due warning given and due time allowed for withdrawal’ (248).

Contemporary political philosophers largely turned away from examining migration as an ethical topic after the collapse of imperialist empires and their colonies during the first half of the twentieth century. Many political philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition have laboured under the shadow of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice (Rawls 1999) that analysed justice against the background assumption of a closed society ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. An Introduction to the Ethics of Migration
• Part I: Admissions
• Part II: Enforcement and Its Effects
• Part III: Integration and Inclusion
• Part IV: New Directions for the Philosophy of Immigration
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors