Abstract
The debate about justice in immigration seems somehow stagnated given that it seems justice requires both further exclusion and more porous borders. In the face of this, I propose to take a step back and to realize that the general problem of borders—to determine what kind of borders liberal democracies ought to have—gives rise to two particular problems: first, to justify exclusive control over the administration of borders (the problem of legitimacy of borders) and, second, to specify how this control ought to be exercised (the problem of justice of borders). The literature has explored the second but ignored the first. Therefore, I propose a different approach to the ethics of immigration by focusing on concerns of legitimacy in a three-step framework: first, identifying the kind of authority or power that immigration controls exercise; second, redefining borders as international and domestic institutions that issue that kind of power; and finally, considering supranational institutions that redistribute the right to exclude among legitimate borders.
Highlights
For some exclusionist liberal political theorists, the conception of social justice among residents and citizens provides reasons for excluding would-be immigrants, so borders should remain closed until we have enough reason to admit someone (Miller 2016; Wellman and Cole 2011)
We can see more clearly that these approaches—rights-statism, obligations-statism, and unbounded-demos thesis—all fail to offer a justification of immigration controls grounded in an explanatory and justificatory argument that shows the normative connection between groups of citizens and residents with the land they occupy
Inclusionism, on the other hand, turns the problem on its head: whereas exclusionism tries to determine what justice requires from border restrictions, inclusionism seeks to determine what kind of political justice is required for a world without borders that requires the distribution of land and the redrawing of borders
Summary
For some exclusionist liberal political theorists, the conception of social justice among residents and citizens provides reasons for excluding would-be immigrants, so borders should remain closed until we have enough reason to admit someone (Miller 2016; Wellman and Cole 2011). Once we draw the contours of the legitimate use of border authority, we can again ask whether it is appropriate to distribute the right to exclude immigrants according to standards of distributive international justice by means of an international border institution This approach has the potential to deflate the tension between inclusionists and exclusionists because the three stages may identify the kind of stances of border authority we typically use to protect relationships of justice between citizens and residents that are morally impermissible from the point of view of international legitimacy and that, should be avoided.
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