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Immigration Ethics and the Context of Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2017

Linda Bosniak
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Extract

By now one might hope that the robust body of theoretical work recently published on immigration ethics would have taken general political philosophy a long way from the prevailing Rawlsian-style insularity premise, according to which society is “a closed system isolated from other societies” into which persons “enter only by birth and exit only by death.” But there are still a great many political theorists whose focus is unreflectively endogenous and who assume away questions of states’ constitutive scope and boundaries. One of the signal merits of David Miller's new book, Strangers in Our Midst, is that it lucidly demonstrates why ignoring state boundary constitution is untenable for political theory. Miller shows that foundational debates in political philosophy are inescapably related, both as premise and entailment, to many normative immigration questions.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , Spring 2017 , pp. 93 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2017 

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References

NOTES

1 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 8, 135–36Google Scholar.

2 Shue, Henry, Basic Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

3 Miller's summary of his position is perhaps more pointed in his 2015 article “Justice in Immigration”: “(Legitimate) states have a general right to control their borders and decide who to admit as future citizens,” subject to some human rights constraints. Miller, David, “Justice In Immigration,” European Journal of Political Theory 14, no. 4 (2015), p. 391 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For an extensive discussion, see Miller, David, Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

5 This commitment distinguishes Miller's normative work on immigration from that of many theorists who address the subject in squarely moral terms. See, for example, the arguments developed in Wellman, Christopher Heath and Cole, Phillip, Debating the Ethics of Immigration: Is There a Right to Exclude? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Ibid., p. 29.

7 Ibid., generally.

8 Ibid., p. 45.

9 Ibid., p. 44.

10 Ibid., p. 41.

11 Shklar, Judith N., The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 15–50 Google Scholar.

12 Miller, Justice for Earthlings, pp. 31, 34.

13 For example, Miller, David, “A Response,” in Bell, Daniel A. and de-Shalit, Avner, eds., Forms of Justice: Critical Perspectives on David Miller's Political Philosophy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 351 Google Scholar: “The question what justice is cannot be radically separated from the question what people in general take justice to be.”

14 See Bosniak, Linda, “Being Here: Ethical Territoriality and the Rights of Immigrants,” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8, no. 2 (2007), pp. 389–410 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors. This legislation was introduced in the U.S. Congress several times between 2001 and 2011, ultimately without success.

16 Beltrán, Cristina, “‘Undocumented, Unafraid, and Unapologetic’: DREAM Activists, Immigrant Politics, and the Queering of Democracy,” in Allen, Danielle and Light, Jennifer S., eds., From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

17 Editorial: “Dream Time,” New York Times, September 19, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/opinion/20mon2.html. (“The Dream Act opens the door to military service and higher education for young people whose parents brought them to this country as children without proper documentation . . . . Those who might qualify . . . are blameless for their illegal status.”)

18 Nyers, Peter, “No One is Illegal Between City and Nation,” Studies in Social Justice 4, no. 2 (2010), pp. 127–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 I address these issues in Bosniak, Linda, “Wrongs, Rights and Regularization,” Moral Philosophy and Politics 3, no. 2 (2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.