The aim of this paper is to question, from the perspective of a principled theory of criminalization, the legitimacy of making irregular immigration a crime. In order to do this, I identify three main ways in which the political decision to introduce a crime of IM may be defended: according to the first, IM is a malum in se the wrongness of which resides in its being a violation of states’ territorial sovereignty; according to the second, IM is (...) a justified malum prohibitum the wrongness of which resides in its being a violation of a justified immigration regulation; according to the third, IM is a malum in se the wrongness of which resides in its harmful consequences for receiving states’ citizens. My thesis is that none of these arguments succeeds in providing us with sufficiently good reasons to justify the use of criminal punishment to enforce the closure of state borders. As regards the first, I argue that it relies on a misleading conception of what is entailed by states’ territorial sovereignty, and that therefore it is unsound as an argument for the state’s right to control immigration. With regard to the second, I argue that, be they legitimate or not, immigration regulations enacted by states cannot provide those would-be immigrants they aim to exclude with content-independent reasons to comply with them; and this is a necessary pre-condition to conclude that IM is a justified malum prohibitum. As regards harm-based approaches, I argue that the notions they rely on are completely unfit as criteria for criminalization. This leads me to the conclusion that, unless other more convincing arguments are provided for, IM should not be criminalized. (shrink)

This paper concerns the issue of the continual arrival of irregular immigrants in Malta and the problems that ensue. The view generally held is that we need to respond to the needs of irregular immigrants by providing services. However, with reference to some of Jacques Derrida's ideas, I argue in this paper that the other /immigrant is not there for us to respond to by creating services to cater for her needs. Through the presence of the irregular (...) immigrant, we are made to question who we are, and are faced with our own vulnerability. We become 'other' to ourselves. This paper uses Derrida's ideas of tensions, trembling, borders and limited and unlimited hospitality, to lay the way for some suggestions of how the education of children can be influenced. In a time when educational discourse rotates around performativity, this paper suggests that space should be made in education for astonishment, surprise and enigmatic experience. (shrink)

In recent years irregular immigration has attracted increasing scholarly attention. Current academic debate casts the irregular immigrant in the role of the new political subject who acts out a right to have rights and/or as the rightless victim who is subjected to violence and abuse. However, the conception of the irregular immigrant as harbinger of political change and/or victim reifies the persistent dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion. It ignores that irregular immigrants are not by definition (...) excluded from a normal life and that numerous immigrants live in the interstices between full legal inclusion and exclusion without democratic legal order being cast to ruin. The question that underlies this essay is: What concept of law can accommodate the unauthorized presence of immigrants without reducing them to bare life, struggling to survive and/or assigning them a political agency and without taking recourse to the use of force and violence in a zero-tolerance policy? To answer this question, this article draws on what Agamben has coined the potentiality of the law and unpacks Judith Shklar’s idea of different degrees of legalism. (shrink)

Irregular migrants are morally entitled to a wide range of legal rights, including basic human and civil rights. Therefore, states ought to create a firewall between those charged with protecting and enforcing these rights and those charged with enforcing immigration laws.

This paper advances a historical and philosophical explanation of the dynamics of irregular migration and the EU-external border policy in Africa. The refugee crisis in Europe has led to tougher security measures, including the EU’s externalization of its boundaries to transit countries with serious implication for human security and regional stability in Africa. In re-assessing the foundation of international migration policies through historical and philosophical lenses, this work brings to the fore the internal contradictions in EU-external border policy in (...) Africa. Whereas migration studies have drawn insights from political and applied moral philosophy, this approach is rare in the debate on irregular migration and informal transborder flows between the EU and Africa. The article particularly unveils the inter-relational complexity between globalization, migration, human rights and development. The approach is qualitative based on the critical analysis of ethnographic survey, government documents, mass media reports and existing literature. Underpinned by the philosophical tenets of the Hobbesian “collective right” and Lockean concept of “inalienable” human rights, as well as the discourse on the “priority thesis”, it concludes that the resolution of the migration dilemma lies in the ethical modification of the immigration laws in line with the universal notion of democratic values, the rule of law, human rights and the reality of global inter-connectivity. Keywords: Africa, External Border Control, European Union, Development, Human Rights, Irregular Migration; Priority Thesis. (shrink)

Both the USA and Europe limit access to care by undocumented immigrants. In the debate over what level of access to confer to IMs, there are various public policy rationales operating either explicitly, or below the surface, ranging from minimalist humanitarianism to full cosmopolitan equality, with several intermediate positions between these two poles. This article informs the international debate by providing a conceptual mapping of these underlying policy rationales. Each position is based on different lines of reasoning or bodies of (...) evidence, and each leads to somewhat different conclusions about the extent to which IMs should have access to different types of health care. It is unlikely that broad consensus will be achieved in this ongoing debate. However, by articulating the ethical, legal, pragmatic and conceptual reasons to support or oppose various positions, we hope to help determine where in the landscape of reasoned argument various positions lie, and how each position might be best supported or refuted. In particular, we see in this debate an illustration of Michael Walzer’s classic analysis of competing spheres of justice. Various positions depend to a considerable extent on whether their advocates approach this issue from the health policy sphere rather than the sphere of immigration policy, or whether they attempt to blend the two spheres. (shrink)

Whether or not to grant ‘amnesty’ has been a contentious policy issue in a wide range of settings, from human rights violations to draft avoidance to library fines. Recently, the idea of amnesty has come to structure many debates over irregular immigration. While amnesty’s meaning is usually treated as self-evident, the term in fact signifies in a variety of normative directions. This article employs amnesty as an optic to examine accountability questions that structure normative debates over irregular (...) immigration in liberal states. It distinguishes among conceptions of amnesty emphasizing forgiveness, erasure and vindication, and argues that developing a vindicatory account of amnesty is both particularly difficult and particularly necessary in the immigration setting. (shrink)

The gradual development of European Union (EU) immigration and asylum law has been characterized by two related, ongoing tensions: the conflict between EU competence in this field and national sovereignty, and the friction between immigration control and the protection of human rights. The EU's approach to resolving the two key tensions in this area are assessed by examining the four key subjects addressed by immigration law: visas and border controls, irregular migration, legal migration, and asylum. The (...) European Union has been more active in the fields of visas and border controls than in any other area of immigration and asylum law owing to the early development of a legal framework, originally in the form of the Schengen Convention. As for irregular migration, the European Union's initial piecemeal approach has been supplemented by the adoption of the fairly comprehensive Returns Directive. (shrink)

The Ethics of Immigration is a wonderfully comprehensive and insightful journey through all the major contemporary ethical issues concerning immigration. Through this outstandingly well-crafted work, Carens builds a compelling case for many important positions on how we should treat migrants. Nevertheless, I believe there are some tensions in his arguments that could do with more analysis. I present some of these issues in this article. These include some important problems with arguments for the right to education for children (...) of irregular migrants and those concerning admission, his general position on refugees, and his views about what is required in order to treat temporary workers fairly. (shrink)

Normative political theory over recent decades has focused mainly on what ought to be done as far as migration policies are concerned. It faces a basic challenge, which stems from two competing, yet equally fundamental, ideals underpinning liberal democratic societies: a commitment to moral universalism and the exclusionary requirement of democracy. The objective of this special issue, ‘New Challenges in Immigration Theory’, is to provide a conceptual overview of (some) immigration theories and to highlight the challenges new streams (...) of immigration pose for normative (political) theory and liberal democratic practice. The issue will consider how to reconcile state-based exclusion with a commitment to equal moral concern for all persons, by focusing on the non-standard immigration questions that have so far been ‘neglected’ by normative political theory. In line with this objective, the issue will discuss some of the inadequacies of the dominant political theories of immigration and show how such theories can be expanded to take account of new migration challenges such as brain drain, climate migration, detention of irregular migrants and asylum seekers, rights of labour migrants, transnational networks of movement, and so on. (shrink)

This article aims to show that Locke’s discussion of tacit consent and the right to punish aliens in the Second Treatise of Government has important bearings on the moral status of undocumented immigrants. It argues that Locke conceptualized both friendly and hostile aliens, counting the former as tacit consenters to whom host states owed rights and protection. Moreover, it highlights how his approach, unlike theorists before and after him, was one that saw individuals as capable of shaping their own relationship (...) with the host. The article also examines Locke’s discussion of the federative power of the state, which includes the power to vet aliens within the country. Seen through this Lockean lens, the article argues that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants can be understood as tacit consenters or potential citizens who should be judged by how they choose to relate to the host, and not by their country of origin. While noting that the Lockean approach is not incompatible with border control, the article also shows how it puts the onus on the host to justify the power it exercises and to engage in dialogue with undocumented immigrants about what their status should be in the country. (shrink)

I reinterpret the experiences and perceptions of child migrants through the lens of racialization and White Supremacy by advancing work by Cheryl Harris (1993) and Lisa Guenther (2019) on the critical phenomenology of “Whiteness as Property” (WaP) and the protection of “White Space.” WaP is “the collective investment in state violence” to protect the economic, territorial, and legal privileges of Whiteness, while White Space describes its two dimensions: “enclosure and territorial expansion” (Guenther 2019, 202). I build on this foundation by (...) examining the way WaP regulates sociogenic3 and emotive states in order to protect its accrued resources, resulting in an “economy” of racial identity where ownership produces and is produced by particular societal structures and relationships. I use these concepts to understand the framework that willfully misinterprets racialized children. I establish “the Child” as a sociogenic concept and symbol of national futurity and universalism, and therefore of the futurity and universalism of Whiteness; reiterating and interrogating the inconsistency that many immigration and child activists point to, that there is no such thing as an “illegal” or racialized child. Thus, the ICM either loses the privileges and protections afforded to children or must don the White Mask through a performance of victimhood. Through this framework, I undertake an examination of the ICMs as portrayed in the legal process using tools from legal sensorial studies and critical phenomenology, demonstrating the sociogenic shifts that occur for the ICM and how these shifts work to protect WaP. (shrink)

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act legislation has established the US as a global humanitarian leader on the issue of human trafficking. Through the use of formulaic victim narratives, appeals to masculinist protection, and invocations of slave abolitionism, legislators frame the law as a work of compassion and protection of migrant people. On the other hand, legislators often take a suspicious and unsympathetic approach to irregular migrants. This article describes the humanitarian posture adopted by the US in relation to anti-trafficking, (...) contrasting it with an anti-immigration sentiment, evidenced in two attempts to limit or rescind the benefits of anti-trafficking legislation for migrants. When considered together the humanitarian and anti-immigration focus of anti-trafficking law and policy make for an internally inconsistent approach to tackling trafficking. (shrink)

In Justice for People on the Move, Gillian Brock constructs an elaborate normative framework, based on human rights practice, to assess how states must treat international migrants in order to legitimate exclusionary claims to self-determination. In this discussion piece, I argue that this framework cannot always satisfactorily explain when and why it is impermissible for legitimate states to remove irregular migrants from their territory (i.e. deport them). I show that Brock’s intuitions about at least one of her own paradigm (...) cases – the removal of long-settled immigrants whose irregular immigration was tacitly approved at the time – are not accommodated by her own framework. However, Brock also acknowledges that deportation is often harmful to persons and that this is morally problematic. Although this concern with harm is not systematically elaborated in Brock’s discussion, I think it should be. I suggest that a purely harm-based framework is fully able to negotiate Brock’s moral worries about deportation and outline the cornerstones of such a framework, stressing that harm in deportation may count as permissible only if it satisfies the joint desiderata of necessity and proportionality. I conclude by giving a sense of how one of Brock’s paradigm cases – the tacit-approval case – could be assessed within this framework, arguing that such an analysis would likely bolster Brock’s intuitions about this case whilst satisfactorily explaining if and why exactly the deportation practice in question cannot permissibly be pursued by legitimate states. (shrink)

Residence of unauthorized immigrants is a stable feature of the Global North’s liberal democracies. This article asks how liberal-democratic policymakers should respond to this phenomenon, assuming both that states have incontrovertible rights and interests to assert control over immigration and that unauthorized residence is nevertheless an entrenched fact. It argues that a set of liberal-democratic commitments gives policymakers strong reason to implement both so-called ‘firewall’ and ‘regularization’ policies, thereby protecting unauthorized immigrants’ basic needs and interests and officially incorporating many (...) of them in society. It then explains that the background imperative of immigration control creates a dilemmatic tension between these policies, as regularization is envisaged alongside the removal of the ineligible, which is in turn hindered by the implementation of firewalls. This creates a dilemma between the pursuit of two policy goals that are both underwritten by the same value commitments. Though it cannot be entirely dissolved, I argue that the best way to mitigate this dilemma is to design regularization policy in a way that leaves only a small number of unauthorized immigrants subject to removal. (shrink)

"Territorial Presence As A Ground For Claims: Some Reflections" returns to political theory to assess the moral and legal position of those individuals who are inside the territory of liberal democratic states, but whose very presence has been unauthorised by the state. The author asks the question as to what their bodily presence means and does from a political perspective. The paper is part of a broader political phenomenology of territoriality in liberal national thought and puts emphasis on the idea (...) that it is migrants’ bodily presence within the state’s territory that lies at the analytical heart of the conversation about irregular immigrants. What is paradoxical about territorial presence of unauthorised migrants is that such presence is simultaneously the source of the offence states invoke as a justification for making them ‘illegal’; the basis for protections the migrants may claim against the state for basic fair treatment while present; and the ground for claims they make to remain present – i.e., to stay in the territory. Territorial presence is thus a fertile ground for the analysis of arbitrary law-making in migration. The author sets out to analyse some recent legal developments pertaining to the governance of irregular non-citizen immigrants in the United States. These developments bear on the project of theorising "immigrant justice" as resistance to the growing illiberalization of migration policy. In her view, the very existence of a class of people designated as irregular migrants within state polities presupposes that such polities maintain formal exclusionary border regimes and that in such regimes, some persons are predesignated as ineligible for entry. And even though those exclusion rules do not function to fully preclude entry and presence of such persons, states do not treat their arrival as an automatic basis for full membership either. Hence, irregular immigrants are territorially present in a state that purports to eschew that presence. The author then explores how the idea of “sanctuary” relates to the kinds of claims that both liberal humanitarians and immigrant justice advocates have been making over the last few years. These are claims which ground protection in what exponents cite as the overriding ethical significance of immigrants’ territorial presence – their already-hereness – as the basis for recognition and rights. In particular, the author makes the case that even though "sanctuary" provides a logic of safe harbour, it fails to end the predicament of constitutive based in border exclusionism. For her, the political, social, but also philosophical, struggle for the idea of border abolitionism requires a figurative sword that must go beyond sanctuary so that borders are not just mitigated, but radically deconstructed and even destroyed. The author takes this to be the vital imperative that confronts all legal and political theorists who must engage the normative challenge of rethinking arbitrary law-making in view of the new inequalities that a global political order grounded on sovereign borders produces. (shrink)

Joseph Carens in his 2013 book Ethics of Immigration argues we should not criminalize undocumented migrants. Instead, we should view them as irregular immigrants who are entitled to some general human rights. This article focuses on Caren's discussion of criminalization in light of recent scholarship by John Marquez and Natalie Cisneros pertaining to the Latina/o border death toll, generalized violence, and discourses on undocumented pregnant migrante females as multiplying rats and anchor babies. This article argues that simply relying (...) on a democratic state model to understand the realities of border militarization is not sufficient because it does not perform some of the explanatory functions performed by other non-ideal theories. By synthesizing the views of Cisneros and Marquez, this article distinguishs thick and thin senses of excessive border enforcement and outlines a notion of the racial/sexual state of expendability as a way of making better sense of these violent realities. (shrink)

In this article, we explore why solidarity has not worked according to expectation in EU migration and asylum law and why it is unlikely to work in the future. First, we consider discourses of burden-sharing and solidarity in EU law from the 1990s up to the Lisbon Treaty in 2009 to identify emergent path dependencies. This period saw the introduction of primary law provisions on solidarity, such as Article 80 TFEU, as French and Dutch electorates had rejected a European constitution. (...) Second, we perform an analysis of Article 80 through the conceptual history of solidarity, in particular, the dominant Roman law tradition of obligation in solidum and the French tradition of solidarism. We submit that the term ‘solidarity’ is actually a misnomer: already on structural grounds, Article 80 should be read as an alliance clause, countering a threat of irregular immigration. Third, we find that the practice under Article 80 as it develops during the period between 2015 and the 2020 European Commission Pact on Migration and Asylum corroborates this finding. Overall, we find that the concept of solidarity in EU asylum and migration law engenders outcome expectations that it cannot deliver as the defence alliance it is. (shrink)

Family ties play a particular and distinctive role in immigration policy. Essentially every country allows ‘family-based immigration’ of some sorts, and family ties may have significant importance in many other areas of immigration policy as well, grounding ‘derivative’ rights to asylum, providing access to citizenship and other benefits at accelerated rates, and serving as a shield from the danger of removal or deportation. Furthermore, status as a child may provide certain benefits to irregular migrants or others (...) without proper immigration standing that is not available to adults. Despite the fact that these benefits are extremely widespread, the justification for them remains less than fully clear, and the extent of the benefits required by considerations of justice (as opposed to expediency or other policy considerations) is debated. While essentially all states recognize at least some of these rights, a significant number of them wish to reduce, rescind, or place significant conditions on them. The role of the family in immigration policy, then, stands in need of further clarification. In this paper I attempt to provide the needed clarification and justification. I discuss first questions about family unification or formation, focusing in particular on how broad a right must be provided by states wishing to have a just immigration policy, and on whether this right violates norms of liberal neutrality. I then discuss the family in relation to refugee and asylum policy, considering both when family ties should be given weight in refugee protection decision and when harm to a family member should, on its own, be able to be grounds for applying for refugee protection. I turn next to the question of when, and to what extent, family ties should be able to serve as a “shield” to removal or deportation, and finish with a discussion of the special rights of and obligations to children in immigration settings. (shrink)

The steep rise in small boat crossings across the English Channel is deeply worrying. Ever more lives are put at risk in making the 21-mile journey. Human trafficking gangs trade in human misery. The UK’s asylum system is put under additional strain and at ever higher cost to taxpayers. The public has lost trust in the Government to put this right. In order to address the problem, we must understand it and grasp its underlying causes. A key issue is that (...) the Government did not see the problem of small boat crossings as a consequence of its policy failures, most notably its failure to secure a post-Brexit returns arrangement with the EU. An effective plan to deal with small boat crossings is urgently needed to win back public confidence, to save lives, to improve our asylum system and help put illegal human traffickers out of business. This Report is an attempt to outline such a plan with over a dozen recommendations. (shrink)

My grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe who owned a small necktie factory on the outskirts of Montreal. While visiting them one weekend, I found my grandfather on the factory floor, cutting shapes out of irregular stacks of cloth with a fabric saw. He explained that by carving up the remnants that were left over when the neckties had been cut out and stitching them together in places that didn't show, he could get a few extra ties out of (...) each sheet of cloth. I asked him why he was doing this himself rather than leaving it to his employees. He shrugged, tapped his forehead, and said, "Goyishe kop," a term of condescension that literally means "gentile head.". (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show that refusing to legalize the status of undocumented immigrants who have been long-term residents is a serious violation of human rights. The "right to have rights" ­ a term coined by Hannah Arendt and developed by Sheila Benhabib ­ should be construed first and foremost as the right to a legal existence. We take issue with consequentialists who warn that legalizing the status of undocumented aliens will encourage further undesirable immigration, for (...) withholding legal status in order to deter illegal newcomers is neither efficacious nor just. We conclude that "selective" as opposed to "endured" immigration policies are ethically untenable. (shrink)

How to respond to unauthorized migration and migrants is one of the most difficult questions in relation to migration theory and policy. In this commentary on Gillian Brock’s discussion of “irregular” migration, I do not attempt to give a fully satisfactory account of how to respond to unauthorized migration, but rather, using Brock’s discussion, try to highlight what I see as the most important difficulties in crafting an acceptable account, and raise some problems with the approach that Brock takes. (...) In thinking about unauthorized migration, both while trying to craft positive policies and while critiquing existing practices, we need to ask if we are most interested in a general account of how to respond to unauthorized migration, one that would apply to the large majority of cases and provide us a default approach, or if we are better served by taking a piecemeal approach, looking at why certain people or certain groups should be exempt from removal, even if they would otherwise be liable to it. In this paper, I will focus primarily on this distinction, and argue that it is at least important to provide an account of the "generic unauthorized". (shrink)

Scholars have identified crimmigration – or the criminalization of “irregular” migration in law – as a key issue affecting migrant access to justice in contemporary immigrant-receiving societies. Yet the gendered and racialized implications of crimmigration for diverse migrant populations remains underdeveloped in this literature. This study advances a feminist intersectional approach to crimmigration and migrant justice in Canada. I add to recent research showing how punitive immigration controls disproportionately affect racialized men from the global south, constituting what Golash-Boza (...) and Hondagneu-Sotelo have called a “gendered racial removal program”. In my study, I shift analytical attention to consider the effects of the contemporary crimmigration system on migrant women survivors of gender-based violence. While such cases constitute a small sub-group within a larger population of migrants in detention, nevertheless scholarly attention to this group can expose the multiple axes along which state power is enacted – an analytical strategy that foundational scholars like Crenshaw used to theorize “structural intersectionality” in the US. In focusing on crimmigration in the Canadian context, I draw attention to the growing nexus between migration, security, and gender-based violence that has emerged alongside other processes of crimmigration. I then provide a case analysis of the 2013 death while in custody of Lucía Dominga Vega Jiménez, an “undocumented” migrant woman from Mexico. My analysis illustrates how migrant women’s strategies to survive gender-based violence are re-cast as grounds for their detention and removal, constituting what I argue is a criminalization of survivorship.The research overall demonstrates the centrality of gendered and racialized structural violence in crimmigration processes by challenging more universalist approaches to migrant justice. (shrink)

Dans l'opinion publique, la migration « irrégulière » est associée à l'entrée et au séjour non autorisés. Un nombre croissant d'études indiquent toutefois qu'elle résulte de la production de catégories légales de séjour autorisé. Le présent chapitre enrichit cette littérature, en montrant comment la construction de la catégorie légale de travail autorisé est productrice d'immigration « irrégulière ». En effet, la multiplication des conditions d'accès à l'autorisation de travail a pour effet de priver de droit au séjour des personnes (...) autrement en situation régulière. La France, située en tête de classement en matière d'obligations de quitter le territoire et en fin de classement en matière d'immigration professionnelle, représente un cas d'école parmi les pays de l'Union Européenne. (shrink)

Right-wing parties and governments in Europe have recently expressed greater hostility towards cultural pluralism, at times officially denunciating multiculturalism, and calling for the closure of borders and denial of rights to non-European nationals. Within this context, this article argues for rethinking Europe through radically transgressive and transnational understandings of cosmopolitanism as articulated by growing transnational populations within Europe such as immigrants, refugees, and irregular migrants. Transgressive forms of cosmopolitanism disrupt European notions of borders and identities in ways that challenge (...) both liberal multiculturalism and assimilationist positions. This article explores the limits of traditional cosmopolitan thinking while offering a vision of cosmopolitanism based on everyday negotiations with cultural differences, explained using two illustrative examples or snapshots. (shrink)

The major social, legal and judicial sensitization on the need to eradicate genderbased violence demands a suitable and effective response from all Public Institutions to safeguard the rights of the women. The principal aim of this article is to highlight the legislative solution given to this problem in relation with immigrant women (third-country nationals). Spanish and EC lawmakers have set out rules relating to gender-based violence for three groups of women: a) Married women or registered partners of European Union, EEE, (...) Swiss or Spanish citizens; b) Women married to third-country nationals; c) Women who are in Spain, married or not, in an irregular situation. The legislation analyzed in this paper regulates only the administrative situation to which women can accede when they are the victims of gender-based violence. That is to say, what types of authorizations can be granted and what possible “benefits” can be obtained, but only in the documentary area. Neither the penal or civil response to gender-based violence is analyzed. (shrink)

Este texto analiza las políticas de empleo para los trabajadores extranjeros en España, los de situación estable y los de tipo temporal. Se fija especialmente en el marco legal vigente, español y comunitario, y aporta los análisis críticos de otras perspectivas, como por ejemplo los sindicatos. Los datos demuestran que los flujos de inmigrantes tienen una creciente importancia en muchos sectores de la economía y, por tanto, la legislación debe actualizarse y abrir los ojos a la realidad para acabar con (...) las irregularidades y mejorar las condiciones contractuales de los trabajadores inmigrantes.This text analyzes the employment policies for the foreign workers in Spain, those of stable situation and those of temporary type. It is fixed specially in the legal in force, Spanish and community frame, and contributes the critical analyses of other perspectives, as for example the unions. The information demonstrates that the immigrants' flows have an increasing importance in many sectors of the economy and, therefore, the legislation must get up-to-date and open the eyes for the reality to finish with the irregularities and to improve the contractual conditions of the immigrant workers. (shrink)

Dans l’opinion publique, la migration « irrégulière » est associée à l’entrée et au séjour non autorisés. Un nombre croissant d’études indiquent toutefois qu’elle résulte de la production de catégories légales de séjour autorisé. Le présent chapitre enrichit cette littérature, en montrant comment la construction de la catégorie légale de travail autorisé est productrice d’immigration « irrégulière ». En effet, la multiplication des conditions d’accès à l’autorisation de travail a pour effet de priver de droit au séjour des personnes (...) autrement en situation régulière. La France, située en tête de classement en matière d’obligations de quitter le territoire et en fin de classement en matière d’immigration professionnelle, représente un cas d’école parmi les pays de l’Union Européenne. (shrink)

This article by David Miller is widely considered a standard defense of the (once) conventional view on immigration restrictionism, namely that (liberal) states generally have free authority to restrict immigration, save for a few exceptions.

Suggests that illegal immigrants should be offered a path to citizenship.

This chapter argues that people have a human right to immigrate to other states. People have essential interests in being able to make important personal decisions and engage in politics without state restrictions on the options available to them. It is these interests that other human rights, such as the human rights to internal freedom of movement, expression and association, protect. The human right to immigrate is not absolute. Like other human freedom rights , it can be restricted in certain (...) extreme circumstances. Outside these circumstances, however, immigration restrictions are unjust. Having presented the argument for a human right to immigrate, the chapter responds to objections from distributive justice, culture and scarcity. (shrink)

This article asks whether states have a right to close their borders because of their right to self-determination, as proposed recently by Christopher Wellman, Michael Walzer, and others. It asks the fundamental question whether self-determination can, in even its most unrestricted form, support the exclusion of immigrants. I argue that the answer is no. To show this, I construct three different ways in which one might use the idea of self-determination to justify immigration restrictions and show that each of (...) these arguments fails. My conclusion is that the nature and value of self-determination have to do with the conditions of genuine self-government, not membership of political society. Consequently, the demand for open borders is fully consistent with respect to self-determination. (shrink)

This paper makes the case for amnesty of irregular migrants by reflecting on the conditions under which a wrong that is done in the past can be considered superseded. It explores the relation between historical injustice and irregular migration and suggests that we should hold states to the same stringent standards of compliance with just norms that they apply to the assessment of the moral conduct of individual migrants. It concludes that those standards ought to orient migrants and (...) citizens’ moral assessment of how their states handle questions of irregular migration and to inform political initiatives compatible with these moral assessments. (shrink)

The author integrates, expands, and deepens his previous publications about irregular (or "metalinguistic") negations. A total of ten distinct negatives-several previously unclassified-are analyzed. The logically irregular negations deny different implicatures of their root. All are partially non-compositional but completely conventional. The author argues that two of the irregular negative meanings are implicatures. The others are semantically rather than pragmatically ambiguous. Since their ambiguity is neither lexical nor structural, direct irregular negatives satisfy the standard definition of idioms (...) as syntactically complex expressions whose meaning is non-compositional. Unlike stereotypical idioms, idiomatic negatives lack fixed syntactic forms and are highly compositional. The final chapter analyzes other "free form" idioms, including irregular interrogatives and comparatives, self-restricted verb phrases, numerical verb phrases, and transparent propositional attitude and speech act reports. (shrink)

Michael Dummett, philosopher and social critic, is also one of the sharpest and most prominent commentators and campaigners for the fair treatment of immigrants and refugees in Britain and Europe. This book insightfully draws together his thoughts on this major issue for the first time. Exploring the confused and often highly unjust thinking about immigration, Dummett then carefully questions the principles and justifications governing state policies, pointing out that they often conflict with the rights of refugees as laid down (...) by the Geneva Convention. With compelling and often moving examples, On Immigration and Refugees points a new way forward for humane thinking and practice about a problem we cannot afford to ignore. (shrink)

This book explores the constraints which justice imposes on immigration policy. Like liberal nationalists, Ryan Pevnick argues that citizens have special claims to the institutions of their states. However, the source of these special claims is located in the citizenry's ownership of state institutions rather than in a shared national identity. Citizens contribute to the construction and maintenance of institutions, and as a result they have special claims to these institutions and a limited right to exclude outsiders. Pevnick shows (...) that the resulting view justifies a set of policies - including support for certain types of guest worker programs - which is distinct from those supported by either liberal nationalists or advocates of open borders. His book provides a framework for considering a number of connected topics including issues related to self-determination, the scope of distributive justice and the significance of shared national identity. (shrink)

Approximately 47 million Latinos currently live in the United States, and nearly 25 percent of them are undocumented. The USA is a very different country from just a generation ago – culturally, socially, and demographically. Its presumed core values have been transformed largely by the changes wrought by immigration and ethnicity. A multicultural society has, in 2008, elected a multicultural president. This article examines immigration discourse, framed in terms of fear and security, and the evolution of the US (...) immigration policy. Latino immigration is presented as a force that has shaped the nation's past and continues to shape the economic, demographic, and cultural future of the United States. Psychological barriers to the social integration of immigrants are also explored. This article concludes that government policy makers should encourage a more tolerant, multicultural society by integrating Latino immigrants into the social, economic, and political fabric of the nation. (shrink)

Horn (1989) identified a number of irregular or marked negations that are not used in accordance with the standard rule of propositional logic. He concluded that negation was pragmatically ambiguous. Van der Sandt (1991) disputed Horn’s ambiguity claim, and proposed a uniform semantics for all negations. I will provide an informal explanation of van der Sandt’s theory, and develop a number of objections. I show that irregular negations are not anaphoric, as Van der Sandt believes, but compositional. I (...) argue for Geurts’s (1998) view that there are several different rules for irregular negations. I reject the implicature theory in favor of the semantic ambiguity thesis. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Political Equality and Moral Equality Cosmopolitanism and Open Borders Partiality and Restrictions on Immigration Conclusion.