According to David Miller, immigration is not a human right. Conversely, Kieran Oberman makes a case for immigration as a human right. We agree with the latter view, but we show that its starting point is mistaken. Indeed, both Miller and Oberman discuss the right to immigration within the liberal paradigm: it is a right or not depending on the correct balance between the interests of the citizens of a given national state and the interests of the immigrants. Instead, we (...) claim that public justification can underpin immigration as a human right. That said, the public justification of the right to immigration has several counterarguments to rebut. Before we deal with that issue, relying on Jürgen Habermas’s social theory, we examine the legal structures that could support the right to immigration in practice. To be sure, this does not provide the normative justification needed, instead it shows the framework that allows the institutional realization of this right. Then, through a combination of civic and cosmopolitan forms of solidarity, the article discusses the formation of a public sphere, which could provide the justification of the right to immigration. (shrink)

Despite the prevalence of externalization, much work in the ethics of immigration continues to assume that the admission of immigrants is determined by state immigration officials who decide whether to admit travelers at official crossings. This assumption neglects how decisions about entrance have been increasingly relocated abroad – to international waters, consular offices, airports, or foreign territories – often with non-governmental or private actors, as well as foreign governments functioning as intermediaries. Externalization poses a fundamental challenge to achieving just migration (...) policies. It reliably harms vulnerable people, prevents refugees from receiving protection, leads to human rights abuses, and dissipates blame and accountability, creating a serious lacuna in assigning moral responsibility. (shrink)

In this short paper I hope to use some ideas drawn from the theory and practice of civil disobedience to address one of the most difficult questions in immigration theory, one rarely addressed by philosophers or other theorists working on the topic: How should we respond to people who violate immigration law? I will start with what I take to be the easiest case for my approach—that of so-called “Dreamers”—unauthorized immigrants in the US who were brought to this country while (...) still children (often as infants) and who have spent the majority of their lives in the US. Members of this group have engaged in wide-scale protests, making the civil disobedience paradigm all the more plausible. I will then move on to the case of unauthorized immigrants who have engaged in protests, but who do not fall into the “Dreamer” category. Finally, I will consider whether thinking about immigration law violations from the perspective of civil disobedience—and the proper response to that—can help us think about immigration enforcement more generally. (shrink)

This essay argues that we should find Crimmigration, which is the collapsing of immigration law with criminal law, morally problematic for three reasons. First, it denies those who are facing criminal penalties important constitutional protections. Second, it doubly punishes those who have already served their criminal sentence with an added punishment that should be considered cruel and unusual (i.e., indefinite imprisonment or exile). Third, when the tactics aimed at protecting and serving local communities get usurped by the federal government for (...) immigration enforcement purposes, they often undermine these original aims or get used in ways that conflict with the U.S. Constitution. These concerns should prompt us therefore either to reject the government’s plenary power over immigration or require the federal government to be more consistent about maintaining the separation between criminal law and immigration law. (shrink)