The final chapter begins with the “welcoming culture” toward Syrian refugees in 2015 and asks where this groundswell of positive attitudes – and real solidarity, as in helping children with homework or charity donations, making it the largest social movement in German postwar history – towards migrants came from. It shows that what mattered most here were the interlocked processes of civil society initiatives since the middle of the 1980s and a grassroots, unified refugee movement since the late 1990s. Time and again backlashes – Kohl’s conservative government in the 1980s, Thilo Sarrazin’s book Germany Abolishes Itself in 2010, right-wing populism, the NSU Nazi terror group’s murders of nine persons with migration background between 2000 and 2009 – led to resistance, self-organization, and ultimately and painfully, positive change. Legally, the coalition government of the Social Democrats and Greens (1998–2005) engendered the final shift away from an ethnobiological understanding of German nationhood. The chapter closes with an evaluation of the Left’s debate between restricted migration (Paul Collier et al.) and open borders, arguing in favor of the latter.

This chapter makes the standard economic case for free immigration. It outlines the massive global gains in output that eliminating immigration restrictions could create. It reviews the increased earnings and productivity of people based on place-specific productivity. It also reviews the evidence of the impact of immigration on jobs, wages, and fiscal deficits in destination countries.

Chapter 9 addresses two important questions: How open should states be to more migrants? What responsibilities do states and citizens have in connection with reducing migration injustices It also addresses key objections to the account of migration justice and its core recommendations. A legitimate state system must include rights to a fair process for determining migrants’ rights, especially concerning rights to admission and to remain. While this would generally lead to an opening of borders, important constraints on such opening would still remain, e.g., those relevant to respecting, protecting, and fulfilling the human rights of those already residing on the territory. The position offered is a human-rights oriented middle ground between the positions of those who argue for open borders and their critics. The chapter also returns to the issue of whether our state system can currently be regarded as legitimate. As matters stand, the state system cannot yet pass a basic legitimacy test, but Brock highlights what we must do if we aspire to a legitimate state system capable of supporting justice for people on the move.

This chapter breaks from standard views on the right of free movement to argue that illegal migration is a form of impure infrapolitical resistance to global poverty. The argument hinges on a comparison with fugitive slaves. If these people did nothing wrong by escaping from slavery, then illegal socioeconomic migrants cannot be said to be acting wrongly. Both cases are characterised by individuals being subjected to extreme domination that they have no reasonable chance of overturning.

It then considers objections: that this is a case of someone acting on the right of necessity, but this is not convincing because it fails to consider the relationship between poverty and unjust social institutions; this does not describe the actual thought process of migrants, but this is not an ethnography of illegal immigrants so the objection is irrelevant and, moreover, it does describe the thoughts of some illegal immigrants; finally, there is an objection that the state must have the right to exclude illegal migrants otherwise institutions that people have reason to value would be jeopardised. This privileges the desires of the perpetrators and beneficiaries of injustice over the victims.