Exit and the duty to admit

Abstract

Conventionally, it is presumed that while citizens have the right to exit the state in which they are located, no particular state (except a citizen's home state) is required to admit them. Yet, this convention has produced, and continues to produce, injustice; to understand why, I focus on defining and protecting a right to exit, as distinct from the right to move in general. This analysis leads me to propose that whereas the political theoretic literature appears to have converged on a commitment to decisive asymmetry (in favor of accepting a state's right to exclude), I propose that only a weak asymmetry is justified. I argue that receiving states are duty-bound to act in ways that enable migrants to exercise their right to exit. In particular, I argue that receiving states have a perfect duty to collectivize the process by which needy migrants can exercise the right to exit.