The Ethics of Migration

An Introduction

Adam Hosein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429639289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

In The Ethics of Migration: An Introduction, Adam Hosein systematically and comprehensively examines the ethical issues surrounding the concept of immigration. The book addresses important questions, such as:

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• Can states claim a right to control their borders and, if so, to what extent?
• Is detention ever a justifiable means of border enforcement?
• Which criteria may states use to determine who should be admitted into their territory and how do these criteria interact with existing hierarchies of race and gender?
• Who should be considered a refugee?
• Which rights are migrants who are present in a territory entitled to?
• Is there an acceptable way to design a temporary worker program?
• When, if ever, are amnesties for unauthorized migrants appropriate?

Featuring case studies throughout, this textbook provides a philosophical introduction to an incredibly topical issue studied by students within the fields of political philosophy, applied ethics, global studies, politics, law, sociology, and public policy.

Part I

The regulation of borders

In this part of the book, we will look at the “open borders debate”: the debate over whether it is permissible at all for states to restrict people’s movement into their territory. Along the way we’ll also look at arguments for increasing (and restricting) immigration in a more incremental fashion.

1 Arguments for opening borders

States are territorially bounded: Just look at any standard map to see how current borders carve the world into distinct political units. And they generally regulate and guard those borders. Try to enter most countries, especially in the developed world, and you will be confronted with border security and immigration officers whose job is to ensure that only certain people – as determined by the states’ policies – are able to enter. Many, probably most, people take for granted that at least some such border regulation is a normal and morally acceptable feature of a world with more than one state.

But some philosophers ask us to stand back from these assumptions. They point out that border regulation is not an inevitable feature of the world, even a world of multiple states. Distinct states could exercise control over distinct geographical areas, even while movement between these areas is completely unrestricted. For instance, the European Union is made up of distinct states – Italy, Finland, Slovakia, etc. – that make laws governing their territories, and this is compatible with the absence of restrictions on movement between, say, Italy and Finland (as is in fact the case, if we consider only EU citizens). This approach could be generalized so that Finland admits not just Italian immigrants but all who wish to enter its territory. In several parts of Africa, borders go virtually unguarded, enabling significant movement. And even the border between the United States and Mexico – currently monitored by more than 21,000 guards, plus drones and cameras, at an expense of about $18 billion (Economist 2013) – was more porous until the late nineteenth century, allowing most individuals to travel back and forth freely without documents or questions (Ngai 2014, 2–3). In this chapter, we will examine arguments for abandoning all restrictions on movement between territories: for open borders.

The open borders vision is clearly a very radical one. Is it even worth considering? The sheer fact that it challenges conventional understanding doesn’t mean it should be dismissed out of hand: the idea that women should be allowed to vote was once radical.

A more practical concern is that individual policy makers are generally faced with a different choice than just whether to create a world of open borders or not. Current immigration levels are likely far lower than they would be in a world of fully open borders (at present, about 3 percent of people globally live in countries that they were not born in). The question for most policy makers (and voters, activists, and so on) is whether to aim to increase (or decrease) the number of migrants admitted, even if their state is not going to have completely open borders and even if their policies will not be part of a global trend (one that includes all states) toward more open borders. As we proceed, we’ll consider how an ideal of open borders might bear on these more immediate policy choices and whether there are arguments for allowing greater (or lesser) migration that don’t appeal directly to whether open borders would be the ideal.¹

A. Efficiency and utility

One common argument for open borders focuses on the economic benefits of free movement of people (Clemens 2011). If borders are open, then companies can hire whichever workers will be most productive: able to produce greater output at a lower cost. The workers themselves will earn higher wages. Economists differ in their estimates of what exactly (more) open borders would achieve, but there is generally significant optimism about the net economic impact of substantially increased migration. According to a report by the World Bank (2018a, 2), a young unskilled worker moving to the United States gains about $14,000 a year. The report finds that “if we were to double the number of immigrants in high-income countries by moving 100 million young people from developing countries, the annual income gain would be $1.4 trillion” (World Bank 2018a, 1).

“Sending” countries can also benefit from emigration (though we’ll look later at some potential costs of emigration in the form of “brain drain”). Emigration can reduce employment pressures in countries that have significant unemployment rates, and emigrants often send back “remittances” – payments to individuals, typically family members, in their countries of origin – which are sometimes relatively substantial inputs to the local economy: Remittances have exceeded 10 percent of the national budget in, for instance, El Salvador, Jamaica, and Jordan.

Now, maximizing wealth itself cannot be an imperative of morality: Money is important only because of its impact on more fundamental values. Amassing a large amount of money is not important in and of itself – imagine a large pile of dollar bills just sitting in someone’s closet! It is a means of getting other things that matter, such as health care or a car. Utilitarians suggest that what matters ultimately is people’s happiness: The money buys someone health care, the health care allows that person to live pain free, and this makes them happier. They buy a car, which allows them to see their friends more often, and this matters insofar as it brings them happiness. Utilitarians propose that what we ought to do, morally speaking, is maximize the amount of happiness in the world as a whole: Pick actions and policies that produce the greatest sum of happiness (or “utility”) overall.

Utilitarianism is attractive (in part) because it seems to respect each person’s equality as a human being (in fact, utilitarians are also able to include the happiness of other sentient beings). It takes into account the effects of policies on every person in the world, giving each person’s interests equal weight. As J.S. Mill put it,

Every man to count for one and no one to count for more than one.

(Mill 1863)

Thus, while the sheer economic output produced by immigration doesn’t matter in itself, it might be an important way to increase the total amount of happiness in the world. Immigration can also improve people’s lives in ways that go beyond its economic impact. It allows them to see new and different practices and thereby stimulates them to think carefully about how best to live. “It is hardly possible to overrate the value … of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves,” Mill wrote (1848), because of its tendency to generate social progress.² Immigration creates just such contact.

Despite its initial attraction, there are some familiar reasons to question whether utilitarianism is the right moral theory. One standard concern about utilitarianism is that it prevents people from giving any special weight to their personal projects. It requires people to be wholly impartial – looking only at the total amount of happiness in the world and counting their own interests as just one input to that overall calculation. But this standard, objectors insist, is far too demanding. It might require someone to spend their whole life looking out for the interests of society at the expense of their personal projects (except, that is, insofar as pursuing their own projects is in fact a good way of promoting overall utility or provides them with the respite and motivation to keep maximizing utility elsewhere in their life). We do, of course, expect people to engage in some charitable work, look out for the good of their neighborhoods, and so on, but, the objection goes, surely morality permits people to take some time for themselves – writing their novels, playing their instruments, or enjoying television – even though it doesn’t work for the good of the whole. Applied to the context of immigration, one might ask whether, just as individual people are permitted to show some partiality toward themselves, whole countries are also allowed to pursue their own projects, such as preserving a societal culture, at the expense of more open immigration and more overall happiness in the world.

A second common concern about utilitarianism is that in its overwhelming focus on the total happiness in the world, it gives no weight to fairness. Many of us care about not just how much wealth or happiness a policy produces overall but also how these are distributed. For example, it might matter whether the benefits of economic growth in a country are widely dispersed or, instead, as has been true in the United States over the last 50 years, captured mainly by people in the top 1 percent with little effect on the median wage. Now, utilitarians can say that there is some reason to prefer more equal distributions of wealth and income, even on their view, because, generally speaking, people who start out with less money benefit more from having additional income than people who start out with more money. Just imagine the impact on Bill Gates’s life of having an extra $2,000 a year, with the impact of that money on the life of a poor person who is now able to cover their rent more easily. This is a reason to favor a more equitable distribution of goods across the globe. But some people will insist that what really matters morally is how equitable the distribution of goods is within particular societies. They may complain that immigration would damage the wages of the least well off in a society, making it less equal overall. Let’s now turn to some debates about fairness.

B. Fairness and equality

A second argument for open borders focuses on the relationship between migration and fairness in the distribution of global wealth, income, and advantage generally (Carens 2013, chap. 11). Consider first advantages in life that people have simply because they are, say, white or male. Defenders of the equality argument say that these forms of advantage are unfair because they constitute inherited privileges: benefits that people hold on to just because they happen to be born a particular race or gender. It is one thing to have less, they say, because you made some very reckless choices in life, and it is quite another to have less simply because of bad luck: inequalities of the latter kind are unfair. These unfair inequalities are unjust and ought to be corrected.

One’s chances in life are also heavily affected by where one happens to be born: The likely lifetime income of a child born in Bangladesh is much lower than that of a child born in Switzerland. To be born in a poorer country is often plain bad luck with respect to certain economic metrics. So, the argument goes, this is another crucial form of inherited, and thus unfair, privilege. Border restrictions are one important mechanism that keeps this unfair privilege in place. Closed borders prevent the less well off from taking advantage of opportunities elsewhere by physically excluding them from the jobs and so on that would benefit them. Within individual societies, people born into poorer families are often stuck in disadvantaged neighborhoods – with fewer job opportunities, more pollution, worse sanitation – marked by, for instance, lack of public transportation. Border controls are even more obviously unjust than this, the equality argument says: They are like a fence erected directly to keep the poor away from the better-served parts of town. They arbitrarily exclude the poor from the advantages others are able to access.

Is this argument successful? It might be worth distinguishing here between two different ways of thinking about fairness and unfairness. On one conception of unfairness – what we might call “cosmic unfairness” – it is unfair in and of itself for someone to have more than someone else simply because of their better luck. It is this notion of fairness that we have in mind when we say that it is just not fair that, say, some people are simply born with sunnier dispositions than others and thus find it easier to walk around in gaiety. On a second conception of unfairness – “unfair treatment,” let’s call it – what matters fundamentally is how people are treated by other individuals or institutions. For instance, we might say that it is unfair if one employee gets a raise before another equally productive one: The company is treating the less-favored employee unfairly. What matters here is that they each have similar claims to get a raise and yet are being treated dissimilarly.

The equality argument trades on an appeal to cosmic fairness: It’s just unfair in itself that some people came to life under worse conditions than others, and we ought to act in order to correct this unfairness. The situation is unfair even though no one (excepting, perhaps, a God) decided where each of us would be born.

In response to the equality argument, some theorists invoke requirements of fair treatment. They say that what matters is for people to be treated fairly, and especially that they be treated fairly by their own governments. There are various reasons why people might be owed fair treatment by their governments. One is that governments make a very special demand of their subjects: They make rules (laws) that constrain many aspects of subjects’ lives and demand absolute obedience to those rules.³ That demand, according to one important line of thought in political philosophy, means that governments must be able to justify their activities to each of their subjects, and thus must favor each equally. Another potential source of a demand of fairness is cooperative reciprocity: the requirement that people be fairly compensated for their contributions to cooperative schemes (Sangiovanni 2007). People contribute to their societies through working, paying taxes, and helping to maintain their institutions, and so governments may have to ensure that each individual is fairly compensated for their contributions.

Ordinary discussion invokes each of the two notions of fairness: People complain both about the unfairness of life – why am I stuck with a troublesome family?! – and also about the unfairness of their local city council – why are our parks less maintained than the people down the roads’?! And we might ask which of the two notions is the most relevant to justice: Does justice mainly require that we correct cosmic unfairness or that we prevent and redress instances of unfair treatment? This is a deep question that we can’t fully address here, but we can provide a few pointers.

Against emphasizing cosmic fairness as the key requirement of justice, it might be said that even if there is always some reason to correct all inequalities caused by bad luck, still people must to some extent accept the sheer unfairness of life. Take again the person who happens to be born with a less sunny disposition than others (I don’t mean clinical depression, which might bring with it special considerations, just quotidian being bummed out more than others). If we suddenly had some manna from heaven to give out, there would surely be some reason to give it to these people over others. But is there really a very strong duty – a requirement of justice – to compensate people for bad luck? If not, then we might ask whether the more fortunate must compensate the less fortunate when they would otherwise spend the money on their kids or on projects that they care deeply about.

I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: The regulation of borders
• 1. Arguments for opening borders
• 2. Arguments for border controls
• 3. Enforcement
• PART II: Selection procedures
• 4. Selection for admission
• 5. Refugees
• PART III: Theories of migrant rights
• 6. General theories of immigrant rights
• 7. Temporary workers
• 8. Unauthorized migrants
• Index