Would-be Immigrants Research Articles

Discrimination in immigration policy

There is growing interest among political theorists in the ways in which states select which would-be immigrants to admit and which to exclude. Sahar Akhtar's book Immigration and Discrimination and Désirée Lim's book Immigration and Social Equality are both important contributions to this topic. This review contextualises and summarises both books and critically assesses the arguments in each book. In response to Akhtar's book, I raise some questions about the possibility of global status and whether the arguments for this hold. In response to Lim's book, I ask whether her account of the importance of social equality applies to the immigration context and, if so, how demanding it is. I end by considering how Akhtar's focus on the global context and Lim's focus on the domestic context raises the interesting question of which context matters more in our evaluation of immigrant selection policy.

Is Legitimate Exclusion Incompatible with the Sovereign Right to Exclude?

Scholars of international law have been increasingly troubled by states’ vast powers and practices of migrant exclusion. There is no doubt that much of this uneasiness is catalyzed by a keen sense of the demands of a basic liberalism at the international legal order's core. Indeed, the increased construction of border walls,1 the continuously widespread use of deportation as a migration control tool,2 and new digital bordering technologies3 have all come under scrutiny precisely because of the challenges they pose to the notion of supposedly universal entitlements, both substantive and procedural, that often appear disabled or overridden when it comes to the treatment of different sorts of migrants. My goal in this contribution is not to add to such legal critiques, but rather to provide the contours of a broader normative argument to rebuke—or at least complicate—what is often called the state's “right to exclude” all or most would-be immigrants. This right is not just standardly assumed in legal and political practice—indeed, standardly viewed as the linchpin of sovereignty—but has also enjoyed sophisticated defense by liberal political theorists.4 The main goal of my argument is to suggest that anyone with basic liberal inclinations—including political theorists, lawyers, and practitioners of politics—should be able to agree that, under current circumstances, granting states a potent “right to exclude” entails deep tensions with basic moral standards of legitimate authority. This is because the deeply entrenched characteristics and historical background conditions of immigration control today tend structurally to push states to violate the appropriate moral conditions of their legitimate authority to enforce immigration restrictions.5 While moving above and beyond legal argumentation, my hope is that the argument may underscore and give further analytical expression to some of the animating concerns of contemporary legal contestations of states’ exclusive powers and practices.

Colonial injustice, legitimate authority, and immigration control

There is lively debate on the question if states have legitimate authority to enforce the exclusion of (would-be) immigrants. Against common belief, I argue that even non-cosmopolitan liberals have strong reason to be sceptical of much contemporary border authority. To do so, I first establish that for liberals, broadly defined, a state can only hold legitimate authority over persons whose moral equality it is not engaged in undermining. I then reconstruct empirical cases from the sphere of international relations in which what I call ‘colonial norms’ continue to play significant structuring roles. I argue that it is sometimes only by unveiling these colonial norms and the roles they play that we can understand how some states today culpably contribute to undermining the moral equality of persons over whom they will come to claim immigration-related authority. I thus contend that paying attention to colonial norms distinctly enables us to reveal a set of instances in which all liberals should agree that states forfeit legitimate authority over would-be immigrants.

Discriminating Borders: Nationality, Racial Ordering, and the Right to Exclude

State borders allocate access to basic goods, opportunities, rights, and protections along lines of nationality, race, and gender. However, the discriminatory effects of state borders rarely appear as an issue in the self-understanding of liberal-democratic societies and their political theorizing. In this paper, I explore how the category of nationality has been and continues to be used to exclude people who have been negatively racialized by European colonialism. I draw on a number of studies that reconstruct the colonial history of states' claims to authority over people's movements and over the composition of their populations. The idea of territorial nationalities allowed nation-states, in particular those emerging from the settler colonies and metropoles of European empires, to continue practices of racial ordering without using explicit racial categories. With the help of these studies, I criticize liberal nationalists such as David Miller for appealing to the value of national identities to support a right of states to exclude would-be immigrants. I suggest that using genealogical and phenomenological methods allows us to undermine the default authority that is often accorded to the category of nationality.

Immigration Ethics: Sacred and Secular

The U.S. and other nation-states regularly impose horrific harm on immigrants, would-be immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers: ‘migrants’, for short. Migrants are regularly separated from their spouses and children, detained for long periods under brutal and dehumanizing conditions, forced to live in squalid camps, threatened with state-sanctioned violence, deported to foreign lands in which they have little social connection or means of support, forcibly prevented from fleeing violence and poverty, and more. The vast majority of migrants subject to such treatment are non-criminal people looking for honest work, hoping to make a better life for themselves and their children. In this paper, we will argue that the plausibility of the usual justifications for such harms to migrants depends importantly on the metaphysical framework from which one approaches the ethics of immigration. We will argue that, from within a secular framework, in which God plays no role in matters moral, there is at least a surface-level plausibility to some of the standard justifications for harms to migrants in service of border control, but that given a theistic framework of the sort at the heart of Judaism and Christianity, the usual justifications for such harms fall flat: none are even remotely plausible. The upshot of this, we shall urge, is that denizens of those religious traditions should support a policy of nearly open borders.

Ghostlight by Kenneth Oppel

Reviewed by: Ghostlight by Kenneth Oppel Wesley Jacques Oppel, Kenneth Ghostlight. Knopf, 2022 [400p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780593487938 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593487952 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 9-12 Gabe Vasilakis spins great ghost stories as a tour guide at the old Gibraltar Point Lighthouse in Toronto Harbour, but it's not like he believes them. His skepticism is put to the test, however, when he meets the spirit of Rebecca Strand, the teenaged daughter of a nineteenth-century lighthouse keeper. She and her father died under suspicious circumstances, and she claims that her father's spirit was consumed by an evil creature. Gabe's best friend and amateur machinist Yuri as well as aspiring journalist of the paranormal Callie (both living) round out the team, and the four teens-turned-investigators quickly uncover an elaborate and centuries-old history of a particularly fiendish and power-hungry ghost named Nicholas Viker. The ghostly elements are familiar, as the spirits of the dead linger due to unresolved trauma and it usually takes special lighting (perhaps the beam from a lighthouse) or a direct connection to see them. Viker, however, is a monstrously novel villain as he constantly exploits and consumes ghosts and humans alike to bolster his own power. An added layer of unease permeates the entire adventure as Oppel incorporates North American ghost lore and alludes to the slaughtering of Indigenous peoples and the watery deaths of would-be immigrants. Even as a battle between good and evil looms and is rather easily resolved, this novel offers a timely nod to the utility of ghost stories in healing. [End Page 57] Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Do self-determining states have a conditional right to exclude would-be immigrants?

Why should (or should not) we have a system of different states that each claim both internal and external sovereignty? How can the state gain its legitimate authority to rule? What is the problem with the ideal of the ‘global citizen’? How should states respond to different groups’ secession claims? To what extent should states have the right to control their borders? If one finds such questions intriguing, one should read Anna Stilz’s book Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration. Stilz argues that a system of territorial states serves to protect important values – occupancy, basic justice and collective self-determination – which are key to living an autonomous life. I focus on the theory’s implication for the debates on border control. I contend that Stilz’s arguments still have difficulties grounding the state’s right to exclude would-be immigrants. That said, the book has done a great job in providing a liberal theoretical framework for us to reflect upon citizenship, immigration, succession claims, cosmopolitan ideals, the colonial legacy and disputes over borders and resources.

A Domestic Reign of Terror

Family Separation has the dubious distinction of being the most odious measure amongst Donald Trump’s draconian anti-immigrant immigration policies. The policy was introduced by the Trump administration as a way to broadly deter would-be immigrants and asylum seekers by inspiring in them the fear of being separated from their children. After its implementation, thousands of immigrant children were taken away from their parents and sent to detention centers where they spent months alone and afraid, being physically and sometimes sexually abused, and in some highly publicized cases, dying while in custody. This article details the legal implementation of the policy, its moral failings, and its political ramifications. The authors argue that Trump’s Family Separation policy is not only immoral, but essentially un-American, and ought to be firmly rejected by those that defend human rights, the welfare of children, and the most basic norms of decency.

Ethics, sustainability and the challenge of digital curation for a real-time archive

As immigration became a divisive topic in the USA, Allies to End Detention, a group of dedicated community activists, began writing to would-be immigrants held in detention centres. Understanding the importance of the information in the letters, the Allies asked the San Diego State University Library to archive the growing collection and to make the redacted letters accessible online. They hoped the letters would influence public opinion and possibly impact government policies. This paper outlines the issues with real-time sensitive archives, the complex workflow and the reasons why the collection was eventually removed from public access.

Responsibility and Climate-induced Displacement

This paper addresses the phenomenon of climate-induced displacement. I argue that there is scope for an account of asylum as compensation owed to those displaced by the impacts of climate change which needs only to appeal to minimal normative commitments about the requirements of global justice. I demonstrate the possibility of such an approach through an examination of the work of David Miller. Miller is taken as an exemplar of a broadly ‘international libertarian’ approach to global justice, and his work is a useful vehicle for this project because he has an established view about both responsibility for climate change and about the state’s right to exclude would-be immigrants. In the course of the argument, I set out the relevant aspects of Miller’s views, reconstruct an account of responsibility for the harms faced by climate migrants which is consistent with Miller’s views, and demonstrate why such an account yields an obligation to provide asylum as a form of compensation to ‘climate migrants.’

Legitimate Exclusion of Would-Be Immigrants: A View from Global Ethics and the Ethics of International Relations

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.

DNA Testing for Family Reunification and the Limits of Biological Truth

As nation-states make greater efforts to regulate the flow of people on the move—refugees, economic migrants, and international travelers alike—advocates of DNA profiling technologies claim DNA testing provides a reliable and objective way of revealing a person’s true identity for immigration procedures. This article examines the use of DNA testing for family reunification in immigration cases in Finland, Germany, and the United States—the first transatlantic analysis of such cases—to explore the relationship between technology, the meaning of family, and immigration. Drawing on our analyses of archival records, government documents, and interviews with immigration stakeholders, we argue that DNA testing is not conclusive about the meaning of family. While the technology may facilitate decision making for both would-be immigrants and state officials, our study shows hesitancy among the latter to let DNA testing make the final determination. We introduce the concept of social validity—whether the interpretation of test results matches social or political meanings in a given local context—in order to make sense of the complexities and challenges of DNA testing in practice. We show that DNA testing is not just a technology of belonging or a way to claim citizenship rights. It may also enable exclusion and denial of rights.

Immigration Policy and Public Health

Federal law and immigration policy create distinctions between citizens and non-citizens that threaten public health in the US. We rely on local health departments to prevent and contain the spread of contagious disease among the US population. But recent policy initiatives, including the attempt to redefine “public charge,” make the job of local health departments harder. In this article, I show how previous administrations protected the public health interests of state and local governments following welfare reform in the 1990s, compared with a new “public charge” doctrine that experience has shown produces “negative public health consequences” and, as DHS admits, could lead to “increased prevalence of communicable diseases, including among members of the U.S. citizen population.” In implementing a policy to discourage would-be immigrants who are poor, the federal government has lost sight of “population” health that is the domain of the local public health department.

WhichBorders?

AbstractThe best arguments for a nation-state’s right to exclude unwanted outsiders actually condemn nation-level regimes of restriction. Two argumentative steps lead to this conclusion. The first points out that the best arguments for exclusion generalize: if they show that nation-states have the right to exclude, they perform the same service for a great many towns, cities, subnational states, and provinces. The second step constructs a dilemma. The right to exclude is important enough to justify the suffering of would-be immigrants, or it is not. If it is, the right to exclude is very important indeed–would-be immigrants often suffer grievously. But nation-level regimes would then be a serious moral problem: they would deprive a great many municipalities of a right that matters a great deal. Turning to the dilemma’s second horn, if the right to exclude is not important enough to justify the suffering of would-be immigrants, nation-level regimes are straightforwardly immoral. Either way, we arrive at this paper’s central thesis: the best arguments for a nation-states right to exclude actually condemn nation-level regimes of exclusion.

A Bundle of Bundles of Rights – International Treaties Regarding Migration in the Light of the Theory of Property Rights

A growing body of literature has recently discussed the access of migrants to property rights over assets as a requirement for the protection of their human rights and basic interests. Little attention has been paid, however, to the fact that the right to decide over an individual’s migration to a given place is itself a property right. This paper aims to close this gap by describing international treaties regarding migration as mechanisms to transfer bundles of such property rights. This approach embarks to compare the distributional effects of different treaties regarding migration. It also aims to demonstrate that such treaties often do not limit themselves to transactions of property rights among States, but are capable of transferring property rights from States to individuals. A property rights approach highlights that the exclusion of would-be immigrants from would-be receiving countries means to impose a (negative) external effect on them and their country of origin. A review of different types of treaties demonstrates the tendency in all of these treaties to internalise such external effects. The paper thus predicts that the prevention of migration will get more expensive as the external effects of this activity will have to be internalised to a growing degree.

Cooperatives Instead of Migration Partnerships

Abstract Large-scale migration is one of the most topical issues of our time. There are two main problems. First, millions of persons will enter Europe in the short and middle run in spite of the firewalls we have built. When the income levels in the development countries raises, the migration pressure will even become stronger for a long time. Second, the present integration policy in most European countries is deficient. In contrast to common knowledge, strong social benefits for migrants, multicultural policies and fast naturalization do not further integration. To address these two problems we propose a procedure that takes into account that most migrants react to incentives in a rational way. Migrants in our countries are joining a cooperative and take advantage of many collective goods and social institutions the citizen of the immigration countries have provided. Migrants therefore should pay an entry fee to join the cooperative. This proposal has positive consequences for both the countries of immigration and of origin, as well as for actual and would-be immigrants. It has many advantages compared to other schemes.

The Marketization of Citizenship in an Age of Restrictionism

AbstractIn today's age of restrictionism, a growing number of countries are closing their gates of admission to most categories of would-be immigrants with one important exception. Governments increasingly seek to lure and attract “high value” migrants, especially those with access to large sums of capital. These individuals are offered golden visa programs that lead to fast-tracked naturalization in exchange for a hefty investment, in some cases without inhabiting or even setting foot in the passport-issuing country to which they now officially belong. In the U.S. context, the contrast between the “Dreamers” and “Parachuters” helps to draw out this distinction between civic ties and credit lines as competing bases for membership acquisition. Drawing attention to these seldom-discussed citizenship-for-sale practices, this essay highlights their global surge and critically evaluates the legal, normative, and distributional quandaries they raise. I further argue that purchased membership goods cannot replicate or substitute the meaningful links to a political community that make citizenship valuable and worth upholding in the first place.

Uncovering a Tension

It is common to assume (a) that democracy is intrinsically valuable, and (b) that nation-states have the authority to exclude would-be immigrants from their territory. Are (a) and (b) in tension? This paper argues that they are. Every account of democracy’s intrinsic value suggests that nation-states lack the authority to exclude would-be immigrants. In fact, reflection on democratic values suggests an even more heterodox conclusion: nation-states should not be the privileged sites of decision-making that we often take them to be.

The multiplicity of transit: the waiting and onward mobility of African migrants in the European Union

Many African would-be immigrants perceive 'Destination Europe' as one integrated space in which they can easily move to places that meet their aspirations. However, for those who have managed to enter the European Union (EU), reality often appears to be harsher than expected. Using a 'trajectory ethnography' that aims to follow migrants through time-space, this research explores the interplay between the diverse mobility processes of African migrants and EU's mobility regimes that produce what I call the 'multiplicity of transit'. This notion moves away from the idea that migrants may have well-weighted plans and concrete destinations in their mind as they travel. It questions the linearity of so-called transit migration, as the in-between phase between departure and arrival. By following their aspirations and im/mobilities, we notice that African migrants truly 'live Europe', looking beyond state borders to improve their socio-economic position.

Aus dem schwäbischen Pfarrhaus nach Amerika: Reiseschilderungen (1860): Louise Weil’s America as Experience and Fiction

In her autobiographical travelogue, Aus dem schwäbischen Pfarrhaus nach Amerika: Reiseschilderungen(“From the Swabian Parsonage to America: Travel Descriptions,” 1860), Louise Weil recounts her experiences of living, teaching, and traveling in the United States for nearly five years, beginning in 1854. Responding to the flood of German immigration to America in 1852-54, Weil’s declared aim is to rectify idyllic images of America put forth to would-be immigrants by presenting a realistic assessment of American life and institutions.Far from idealizing the United States, Weil condemns slavery and capitalist greed, two phenomena that exemplify America’s failure to live up to its founding ideals of equality and freedom.