Deportation, harms, and human rights

Lukas Schmid

doi:10.1080/16544951.2021.1926083

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Justice for People on the Move, Gillian Brock constructs an elaborate normative framework, based on human rights practice, to assess how states must treat international migrants in order to legitimate exclusionary claims to self-determination. In this discussion piece, I argue that this framework cannot always satisfactorily explain when and why it is impermissible for legitimate states to remove irregular migrants from their territory (i.e. deport them). I show that Brock’s intuitions about at least one of her own paradigm cases – the removal of long-settled immigrants whose irregular immigration was tacitly approved at the time – are not accommodated by her own framework. However, Brock also acknowledges that deportation is often harmful to persons and that this is morally problematic. Although this concern with harm is not systematically elaborated in Brock’s discussion, I think it should be. I suggest that a purely harm-based framework is fully able to negotiate Brock’s moral worries about deportation and outline the cornerstones of such a framework, stressing that harm in deportation may count as permissible only if it satisfies the joint desiderata of necessity and proportionality. I conclude by giving a sense of how one of Brock’s paradigm cases – the tacit-approval case – could be assessed within this framework, arguing that such an analysis would likely bolster Brock’s intuitions about this case whilst satisfactorily explaining if and why exactly the deportation practice in question cannot permissibly be pursued by legitimate states.

Highlights

Gillian Brock’s Justice for People on the Move, a rich and resourceful book on the ethics of migration governance, pursues a large and immensely important question: How must individual states and the state system treat international migrants in order to justify state claims to legitimacy and self-determination? Brock’s answers are often convincing, taking well-argued stands on matters of both fundamental normativeETHICS & GLOBAL POLITICS principle and policy development, and cogently intertwining both levels of analysis
I suggest that a purely harm-based framework is fully able to negotiate Brock’s moral worries about deportation and outline the cornerstones of such a framework, stressing that harm in deportation may count as permissible only if it satisfies the joint desiderata of necessity and proportionality
The crux is that even though Brock acknowledges the harm deportation does to longsettled immigrants, she does not funnel the normative implications of such harm into a systematic framework, instead leaving all the normative work to her large-scale human rights framework for the assessment of state legitimacy

Summary

Introduction

Gillian Brock’s Justice for People on the Move, a rich and resourceful book on the ethics of migration governance, pursues a large and immensely important question: How must individual states and the state system treat international migrants in order to justify state claims to legitimacy and self-determination? Brock’s answers are often convincing, taking well-argued stands on matters of both fundamental normativeETHICS & GLOBAL POLITICS principle and policy development, and cogently intertwining both levels of analysis. In Justice for People on the Move, Gillian Brock constructs an elaborate normative framework, based on human rights practice, to assess how states must treat international migrants in order to legitimate exclusionary claims to self-determination.

Results

Conclusion