Do States Have the Right to Exclude Immigrants?

Christopher Bertram

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509521999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

States claim the right to choose who can come to their country. They put up barriers and expose migrants to deadly journeys. Those who survive are labelled 'illegal' and find themselves vulnerable and unrepresented. The international state system advantages the lucky few born in rich countries and locks others into poor and often repressive ones. In this book, Christopher Bertram skilfully weaves a lucid exposition of the debates in political philosophy with original insights to argue that migration controls must be justifiable to everyone, including would-be and actual immigrants. Until justice prevails, states have no credible right to exclude and no-one is obliged to obey their immigration rules. Bertram's analysis powerfully cuts through the fog of political rhetoric that obscures this controversial topic. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the politics and ethics of migration.

1
Migration Today and in History

Much popular and political thinking about immigration assumes that an international order based on dividing the world into nation states, in which places belong to peoples and each individual has their naturally allotted location, is the normal order of things. Not only is it ‘normal’, but it is also normative, a state of affairs from which deviations must be justified but which is not itself in need of justification. This distorts our thinking about human migration and mobility. Nation states are recent historical creations and the invention of a world order based around them is within living memory.

This chapter explains the normative assumptions about membership and place embedded in the global order and says something about the real effects that the enforcement of this order has. As a counterpoint to this ‘normality’, I first say some general things about the nature and history of migration before discussing the nation-state form and the way in which states distribute membership. I then enumerate some of the effects of doing things this way and discuss the refugee regime as an apparent anomaly. Setting out something of the reality of a world in which nation states have, with limited exceptions, discretionary control over migration provides a background to my later discussion of what a just system for the international regulation of migration might look like.

Who are the migrants?

If you ask the typical person in the United Kingdom or the United States about immigration, they may think of poor people crossing the Mediterranean Sea in flimsy overcrowded boats or of Mexicans trying to evade the barriers on the southern border of the United States. Other common images are of non-white people living in deprived urban areas, running small businesses or in low wage jobs. Often, citizens of wealthy countries will be concerned about such people coming ‘illegally’ and the threat that they could pose to jobs or public services. These images represent the immigrant as ‘other’, often Muslim, and a threat to ‘our’ way of life.

Of course, there are desperate people trying to make dangerous journeys, some are non-white and some are Muslim; but despite the visibility of particular representations of immigrants in tabloid newspapers or in television documentaries, such images are not representative of migration as a whole. Most migrants who move across borders do so to settle in ways authorized and even encouraged by states. They may be pursuing economic opportunities, moving to study, uniting with family members, seeking a place in the sun to retire to, and yes, in a minority of cases, fleeing from war or persecution. In other words, they are usually ordinary people, moving from one location to another, for ordinary human reasons. Many of the people thought of as ‘immigrants’ in the popular imagination are not even immigrants at all, but citizens or legal residents, born and raised in the country where they live.

The latest international figures indicate that in 2015 there were about 244 million international migrants in the world, that is to say, people living outside their country of origin.¹ Of these, just under half were women. The average migrant was 39 years old. Of the total migrant stock in the world, 51 per cent lived in ten countries, the most popular being the United States with an immigrant population of 46.6 million. The country with the largest diaspora was India, with 15.6 million of its nationals living outside its borders. Immigrants make up a much higher proportion of the population in some regions than in others. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the proportion is low, at around 1.5 per cent, but in Europe it is higher (10 per cent) rising to 17.5 per cent in Austria. Unsurprisingly, a settler state like Australia has a high proportion of foreign-born residents (28 per cent) but the numbers in the Gulf states, which include large numbers of temporary workers with few rights, are staggering, rising to 88.4 per cent of the population in the United Arab Emirates.

Migrant workers (150 million) make up the majority of the world’s stock of migrants. Refugees, at 21.3 million, are a much smaller proportion of the total, though they only constitute a minority of the world’s forcibly displaced persons, most of who remain within the boundaries of their states of origin. The International Organization for Migration estimates that around 50 million of the total are ‘irregular’ migrants, although given that much irregular migration is clandestine by its very nature, reliable figures are hard to come by. Though there is a widespread perception that migration has increased in recent years, this is true only in absolute terms as the proportion of migrants in the world population has not changed much over the past fifty years (it is currently 3.3 per cent). What has changed is the pattern of migration, with European countries, once a major source of emigration, turning into receiving countries and their populations becoming more diverse as a result.

Why do people migrate?

What makes people migrate? The folk theory that most ordinary people, journalists and politicians probably believe is an economic one. The idea is that people want to maximize their wealth and income and will move to a new place if they believe this will make them financially better off. This contains a kernel of common sense: where people can choose between alternatives that are similar in other respects, and one brings more money than the other, they will usually choose the one that pays better. Using this simple notion, and noticing the great inequalities between wealthy countries in Europe and North America and the global south, people often conclude that, given the opportunity, nearly everyone from a poor country would leave. Perhaps many people would. But we should be wary about endorsing some of the more apocalyptic scenarios, because money is not the only thing people care about.

In reality, people want a range of different things, many of which are tied to particular places and social networks such as family and relationships, religion and community, culture, language, cuisine, landscape and climate. A decision to migrate might bring someone more money, but it also risks severing them from many other things they value. Ironically, many people who worry about mass migration out of fear that immigrants will disrupt rooted communities and dilute local culture, often ascribe to hypothetical immigrants a set of purely financial motives which they think of as not applying to themselves.

We can see how ineffective economic motives are against the incentives to stay provided by family and culture by looking at states and groups of states within which relatively free movement coexists with large disparities in economic opportunity. People from the poorest places do not automatically uproot themselves and move to the richest ones. Within the United States, for example, there are large disparities between wealthy areas, particularly on the coasts, and poorer regions in the South and Appalachia. Yet most people remain within their state of origin, and this in a country with a shared language and culture where the costs of moving are fairly low. According to a 2009 report, 57 per cent of US residents have not lived in the US outside their current state and 37 per cent are still in their home town.² In the European Union, though there has been migration from poorer member states in the east to wealthier ones in the north and west of the continent, most people stay put, preferring the familiar to the new. In 2015, fewer than 3 per cent of residents were nationals of another EU member state.³ Over time, small movements can add up to much larger shifts in population, but the idea that discrepancies in wealth lead to immediate stampedes has little support.

What can make large numbers of people move in a short space of time is when conditions become intolerable where they are and they have little hope of maintaining their existing forms of work, life and family. The kinds of catastrophic events that cause such movements are hard to predict, but they include natural disasters, famine, war and persecution. The most recent such movements of which people in wealthy countries are aware were those following the Arab Spring and during the war in Syria. Such events usually happen in poor countries, which are often ill equipped to cope. Though the causes of many crises are linked to the past policies of wealthy states, most of the people who move end up in similarly poor countries in the same region.

Migration in history

Migration is a pervasive and normal part of the human experience. Our earliest ancestors, themselves migratory hunter-gatherers, left Africa and spread across the planet, and human beings, individually or in groups have been moving ever since. But perhaps the important recent watershed in human mobility comes in 1492, with the ‘discovery’ of the New World by Columbus. The destruction of the native populations of the Americas through warfare and disease meant that European colonists had to find new sources of labour to exploit their new territory and, through the Transatlantic slave trade, colonial powers imported whole new populations, mainly of black Africans, to work for them under terrible conditions.⁴ European colonists spread across the planet, seizing the lands of indigenous people and often destroying their societies or pressing them into servitude, and later founding new colonial-settler states like the United States, Australia and Argentina. In the nineteenth century European states, bolstered by ideologies of racial supremacy, conspired among themselves to divide up territories in Africa where no European had ever trod. Meanwhile, millions of poor Europeans, from places like Scandinavia, Ireland and Italy, were encouraged or driven by poverty and lack of opportunity at home to start new lives in the Americas or the Antipodes, a process that continued into the twentieth century.

In the period after the Second World War, things changed again. North-west European states underwent a rapid economic transformation, with a growing population, many of whom were still too young to work, and high levels of economic growth. As a result, these countries sucked in labour, initially often from their southern European neighbours, but in the case of colonial powers such as the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands, their overseas subjects. Many of these workers faced tough conditions and lived in poor housing with insecure rights to stay, but they eventually constituted a significant proportion of the workforce. In the UK, citizens of the Empire were initially free to enter without restriction, and some industries worked hard to recruit workers from places including the West Indies, but by the end of the 1950s there were signs of rising intolerance among the white population and nationality criteria and entry requirements were progressively revised from the 1960s onward. In addition to immigrants from the Caribbean, Britain’s population of South Asian origin also increased, particularly after Idi Amin expelled the Ugandan Asians after 1972. In France and the Netherlands, similar stories can be told of how members of subject colonial populations in places including West Africa, the Maghreb, the Antilles and Indonesia came to live, work and settle in the former colonial metropolis. As a result of these changes, many West European states shifted from being countries of emig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Migration Today and in History
• 2 Justifying a Migration Regime from an Impartial Perspective
• 3 Obligations of Individuals and States in an Unjust World
• Concluding Thoughts
• References
• End User License Agreement