Immigration
Summary | Immigration began to receive attention as a major topic in applied ethics and applied social and in political philosophy in the mid-1980s. Much of the early work concentrated on questions surrounding states’ use of coercion to prevent people from immigrating, especially in a world of vast inequalities between territories. The initial debates opposed freedom of movement and freedom of opportunity against communities’ right to self-determination, shared culture, and security. Perhaps surprisingly, theorists of both open and closed-borders presented interpretations of distributive justice to support their positions. As the debate has evolved, theorists have given more attention to the obligations towards special classes of immigrants such as refugees, temporary workers, family-class immigrants, and undocumented residents. They have also turned their attention to topics such as the economics of skilled migration, human smuggling and trafficking, immigrant detention and deportation, and sustainability. Recent work has examined the implications of racism and sexism for migration, the moral significance of globalization and transnationalism, and the challenges that critical scholarship on borders and mobility poses for normative theory. |
Key works | Joseph Carens played a major role in defining discussions of immigration in philosophy with his seminal article "Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders" (1987). Carens synthesizes many of his contributions in The Ethics of Immigration (2013) which includes subtle discussions of temporary migration, refugee policy, irregular migration, citizenship and much else. Two other important interventions advocating open borders are Phillip Cole’s Philosophies of Exclusion (2000) and Abizadeh 2008. Influential justifications for border controls include Walzer 1984 and Miller 2005. Hosein 2019 provides a valuable overview of the debates to date. Gibney 2004 is a sophisticated and comprehensive account of the ethics of refugee policy and Morgan 2020, Owen 2020, and Parekh 2016 push the discussion in new directions. Lenard & Straehle 2012 and Ruhs 2015 explore the justice of temporary labor migration programs. Brock & Blake 2014 examines the “brain drain” debate – the question of whether states can restrict the migration of skilled workers for reasons of distributive justice. Mendoza 2014 grapples with questions of race and Wilcox 2005 explores how gender affects the justice of admissions. Bauböck 1994 is an important early exploration of the implications of transnationalism for immigration and citizenship. Recent scholarship that develops insights about shifting borders, externalized migration controls, overlapping jurisdictions, and mobility and nomadism includes Longo 2017, Nail 2015, Sager 2018, and Shachar 2020. |
Introductions | Bertram 2018 Higgins 2013 Hosein 2019 Mendoza 2016 Wilcox 2009 |
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