Global Justice: Migration Flashcards
What does Carens (2013) argue about immigration?
The democratic liberal values of freedom and equality entail a commitment to open borders, and it is only in a world of open borders that we can truly live up to these principles.
Three assumptions Carens uses to argue this:
- There is no natural social order
- We must start from the premise that all human beings are of equal moral worth when evaluating the moral status of alternative forms of political and social organisation
- Restrictions on the freedom of human beings require a moral justification
Given these three assumptions, Carens claims that state control over immigration limits freedom of movement, freedom of movement is essential for equality of opportunity, and a commitment to equal moral worth entails some commitment to economic, social, and political equality, both as a means of realising equal opportunity and as an end in itself
Refugees “have a moral right to a safe place to live, but they do not have a moral entitlement to choose where that will be”
What are Fine’s (2010) objections to Wellman’s argument?
Harm to others: Being excluded from a country could cause migrants harm which is substantial enough that outweighs groups rights to exclude them. Since migration tends to be accompanied by significant costs, such as separation from community and familiarity, financial costs of migration and often significant physical risks, it is reasonable to assume that those who are either willing to or forced to incur these costs have significant interest in settling in particular states and would be harmed by being unable to do this. Prohibiting outsiders from settling in and becoming members of a particular state hinders or prevents their pursuit of all the many familial, social, religious, cultural, political, or economic interests tied to residence and citizenship in that state, despite the fact that some, if not all, of their basic needs could be met elsewhere.
Distinctiveness of the state: Unlike marriage states are not an intimate relationship and unlike like golf clubs, exclusion from it is not innocuous; a state is also not a religion as it is not an expressive association of a point of view, as members of a liberal state are a diverse bunch most of whom did not choose to be members of the state.
Necessity to justify state’s territorial rights: As Wellman contends that citizens must enjoy not only a right to exclude would-be members from the political community but also would-be residents from the state’s territory, his position calls for a further justification of the state’s purported rights over that particular territory. Wellman’s position begs the question whether citizens and/or their states have the relevant rights over the territory from which they wish to exclude others and thus whether they are within their rights not just to control the rules of membership but also to control settlement within that territory.
What does Gibney (2018) argue regarding refugees?
Refugees should have a role in choosing where they will receive asylum, as they will know best where they can flourish, no state should morally close their borders.
Refugees are people who have been displaced from the communities, associations, relationships and cultural context that have shaped one’s identity and around which one’s life plan has hitherto been organised. Unsurprisingly, then, refugees often describe their experience as one of confusion, dispossession, and disempowerment. Refugees typically experience a loss of their entire social world. Particularly if we see that the provision of asylum as a kind of compensation for harm, this broader sense of what refugees have lost is relevant to obligations to refugees. As asylum is a form of compensation for the losses incurred because state malevolence, negligence or ineffectiveness, then, ideally, it should offer the refugee not only physical security and basic rights but, ultimately, a place where she can rebuild a meaningful social world. The plausibility of the claim that duties to refugees extend beyond a secure asylum becomes clear if we return to the idea of refugees as “orphans” of the international community.
Currently the vast majority of the world’s refugees are hosted by the poorest states, who tend to be geographically more closely related to the places the refugees are from
What, according to Hosein (2019) are some of the arguments for opening borders?
Efficiency and utility; economic benefits of the free movement of people, which might be an important way to increase the total amount of happiness in the world – appeals to utilitarianism.
People’s chances in life are heavily affected by where they are born so this may be a form of unfair privilege for some
Humanitarianism - so many people in the world live in conditions of extreme poverty – are not just poorer than others, but very deprived in absolute terms – allowing those people to move to wealthier countries is a useful way to alleviate their suffering.
A right to freedom of movement should be a fundamental right (Carens’ argument)
Freedom of Contract: Restriction on immigration prevents people from exercising this freedom of contract (if someone is hired by a firm in another state it is infringing on their liberties to prevent them going there)
Remedial Justice: One important argument for increased migration focuses on ways in which more developed countries (according to the argument) harm or exploit people in other countries.
What, according to Hosein (2019), are some of the arguments for border controls?
Public Finances, jobs, and fairness: immigrants will take advantage of these public goods, making them more expensive, and ultimately making it harder for states to provide the same quantity or quality of these goods to their own citizens
Culture: Miller argues the maintenance of public culture maintains social cohesion and they matter in themselves
Freedom of Association
Forced Obligation: The forced obligation argument is that states (and their citizens) can exclude immigrants in order to avoid taking on the obligations they have to people simply inside their territory. Problem is the cost of fulfilling these obligations.
Brain drain: A common concern with allowing substantial immigration, especially from poorer states, is that it will impose costs on the sending countries.
Security
What is Miller’s (2016) argument for limiting migration based on ethical particularism?
One of the grounds Miller advocates for permissibility of states limiting migration at their discretion is ethical particularism, that is, the belief that agents begin their ethical reasoning from the commitments to other agents, groups, or collectives that they are already encumbered with.
Miller argues that associative obligations arise between members of nation states because the members are involved in an inclusive scheme of cooperation by which they provide one another with the amenities of life through a division of tasks (goods and services, and systems of support through welfare), as well as because members relate to each other as citizens and as nationals, sharing a political and legal system and broadly the same cultural values.
These things are, according to Miller, valuable in a way that is sufficient to create associative obligations as they enable people to coexist on terms of justice and exercise some control over the future direction of their association.
It is therefore just, says Miller, to do less for would-be immigrants than we are required to do for citizens, so long as their human rights, which for Miller are “the rights that people must have if they are securely to have the opportunity to meet their basic needs”, are not being infringed upon.
Miller defends ethical particularism on the grounds that ethical particularism can make sense of the principle of humanity, but ethical universalism cannot justify the extraordinary value people attach to their relationships with their conationals; national relations, on Millers view, cannot have value on a universalistic perspective, but at universal human rights can be derived from ethical particularism, as at some basic level there will be convergence and agreement on a set of basic human rights that apply globally.
What does Miller (2016) say about responsibility to take up the slack?
Miller argues that “the obligation to protect human rights extends only to doing what a fair distribution of responsibility demands”.
Miller does not agree that there is a duty to take up the slack; according to him, whilst states can do more than their fair share out of humanitarian considerations, this is not a matter of justice. One of the reasons Miller argues this is that by attributing responsibility to someone to take up the slack, we are treating the noncompliers as not proper moral agents by assigning the responsibility that should be theirs to somebody else.
What is Wellman’s (2011) argument in defense of the right to exclude
Core premises of argument and conclusion:
- (1) legitimate states are entitled to political self-determination
- (2) freedom of association is an integral component of self-determination
- (3) freedom of association entitles one not to associate with others
- So legitimate states may choose not to associate with foreigners, including potential immigrants
The first premise derives not from the fact that a political state’s autonomy is an extension of the autonomy of its members but from the fact that interfering with political self-determination wrongly disrespects the members of the group
Since all long-term residents of a state should have the option of acquiring equal rights of membership, this includes migrants who settle in the country without citizenship.
In order to justify the right to exclude as part of self-determination and as a basis for states being able to restrict migration, even when this harms those being excluded, Wellman uses illustrations such as marriage, religion, and golf clubs. For example, in order to defend his premise that freedom of association, including the freedom not to associate with others, is an integral part of self-determination Wellman highlights the undeniable fact that one can only be fully self-determining if they can choose not to marry a potential partner, even if this would cause significant harm to the partner. Wellman argues that this also applies to social groups such as clubs being able to choose who to admit; whilst he is not positing an absolute right of all groups to refuse associates, he is in general committed to a presumption in favour of freedom of association. Just as an individual may permissibly choose whom (if anyone) to marry, and a golf club may choose whom (if anyone) to admit as new members, a group of fellow citizens is entitled to determine whom (if anyone) to admit into their country.
What does Wellman (2011) say about refugees and how does Cole (2011) respond?
Regarding refugees Wellman argues that whilst wealthy states are obligated to help refugees, they are not obligated to admit them into their country. Wellman claims that while persecuted refugees do have the right of protection, they do not have the right to be protected by any particular country.
Cole argues that rejecting refugees the right to enter and instead giving aid in another form is likely to put refugees at risk of harm, especially if they are in immediate need or danger
How does Cole (2011) argue for ethical universalism as a valid bases for open borders?
Ethical Particularism: the belief that agents begin their ethical reasoning from the commitments to other agents, groups, or collectives that they are already encumbered with
Ethical Universalism: the principle that all persons have equal moral value, so that moral principles apply to all equally in the absense of any morally relevant differences.
Cole and Wellman are both ethical universalists; Miller is an ethical particularist.
According to Cole ethical particularism has the problem of not being able to make sense of the principle that we owe fundamental moral duties to humanity in general.
In response to Miller’s claim that ethical particularism can make sense of the principle of humanity, but ethical universalism cannot justify the extraordinary value people attach to their relationships with their co-nationals, Cole argues that ethical particularism only justifies a very minimal level of human rights, and it does not seem right to say that one only has moral obligations to fellow humans because of their relationship with them and not because of their shared humanity, especially when analysing the relationship someone has with the rest of humanity is very difficult.
Why does Cole (2011) argue that commitment to ethical universalism makes immigration restriction problematic?
A serious commitment to ethical universalism makes any sort of immigration restriction highly problematic for liberal theory. This is because national boundaries are morally arbitrary in the sense of where they fall geographically, and which side of the border people are on. There is also a theme in liberal theories of social justice that argues that a person’s life prospects should not be determined by factors beyond one’s control, and national membership is, normally, this kind of factor. Altogether, the moral arbitrariness of national membership makes it an entirely unsuitable basis for the just distribution of resources and other values and makes the power of exclusion from membership just that— the exercise of power, not of right.
What is Wellman’s response to Cole’s claim that commitment to ethical universalism makes immigration restriction problematic?
Wellman’s reply: appeals to the moral arbitrariness of borders rests on a suspect theory of “luck egalitarianism”. Wellman accepts that “every human is equally deserving of moral consideration,” but appeals to Elizabeth S. Anderson’s influential critique of “luck” egalitarianism, concluding, with Anderson, that we are “fundamentally concerned with the relationships within which the goods are distributed, not only with the distribution of the goods themselves”
Cole’s response: this distinction cannot be made an ethical one through appeal to liberal values, because any attempt to provide an ethical justification for it will commit the basic logical error of “begging the question”—that is, assuming the validity of the distinction in the first place. In the case of the immigration debate, the question being asked is whether the distinction between members and nonmembers of a political community can be morally justified in the context of moral egalitarianism, such that members have the right to exclude nonmembers. The problem is that many attempts to show that members do have the right to exclude nonmembers assume the moral validity of the members/nonmember’s distinction, although they claim to establish it.
How does Cole (2011) criticise Wellman (2011) and how does Wellman respond?
Whilst it is true that people do have a strong right to freedom of association in their private lives, people’s roles in the public sphere and people’s roles as citizens have different rights and duties attached to them; for example, a teacher would not be able to refuse to associate with a particular student. In the same way, Cole argues, a state’s right to freedom of association may be constrained by their role as states. It may be the case that while states have the right to refuse association with other states and multistate organizations, they do not have the right to refuse to associate with specific individual migrants.
- Wellman’s response: Wellman argues that since we often ascribe rights of freedom of association against individuals to large-scale institutions, we should do the same for nation states, and that if nation states were unable to reject association with individuals, political states would lose a crucial portion of their self-determination as this can have the consequence of affecting a country’s culture, economy, and political arrangements, all of which citizens will care deeply about.
— Cole’s response: Both responses fail; the first because nation states are for many reasons not analogous to other large-scale institutions and the second because it is driven by consequentialist concerns, rather than the deontological right to exclude that Wellman claims he is arguing for.
Another objection Cole has for Wellman is related to Wellman’s argument that legitimate states have the right to self-determination, with legitimate states being those who respect and protect human rights, making freedom of association is conditional on human rights. One problem that arises here that Cole points out is that this requires conception of human rights; it is plausible to believe that freedom of international movement is a human right, though Wellman obviously does not consider it to be, but does not offer an explanation as to why. Another problem is that if legitimacy requires a minimum of respecting human rights, then legitimate states may choose not to engage with foreigners so long as this does not violate foreigners’ human rights; to move from this to a claim that states have the right to completely close their borders is to make the unrealistic assumption that this would not involve the violating or at least disrespecting of migrants human rights. So, when human rights are emphasised, as they are by Wellman in his definition of legitimacy, this makes it impermissible for states to entirely limit migration.
Why does Stemplowska argue for the duty to take up the slack (2016)?
There is a duty to take up the slack; we are under enforceable duty to help those in dire need at a reasonable cost to ourselves even when this involves taking on the additional burden left by those who did not fulfil their fair share of obligations.
This is because it is the dire need that gives rise to duties of aid, so when this dire need persists, so does the duty of aid, even if its persistence is a result of noncompliance. Duty is not defined simply with reference to one’s initial fair share but with reference to what remains to be done in light of the actions of others.
It does not need to be the case, as Miller argues, that by attributing responsibility to someone to take up the slack, we are treating the noncompliers as not proper moral agents by assigning the responsibility that should be theirs to somebody else, because we can assign responsibility to those who do not comply by recognising them as having the capacity to act responsibly and punishing them for not complying, whilst still recognising the responsibility to help those in dire need at reasonable cost.
This is to the extent that it is not at an unreasonable cost.
It is states who shelter [refugees]. For states to have the duty to take up the slack, they must have the permission to impose extra burdens on their citizens. In light of the argument so far, they may, since individuals have, under the right conditions, an enforceable duty to take up the slack and thus lack the general right against being coerced to perform it. It does not follow, of course, that any type of coercion can be used or that the coercion can be used by anyone. The state has an independent duty to distribute the burdens of its members’ enforceable duties. The state’s duty to take up the slack is the upshot of individual duties to take up the slack that have been coordinated in a way that is likely to increase the state’s overall capacity to take up the slack.
Those in a position to assist those in dire need have a duty of justice to step in and take up the slack left behind by others, even if they are themselves victims of noncompliance.
