by Tim Sommers
Global migration has been remarkably stable for decades. Despite that, media coverage of immigration tends to give the opposite impression. In the US, for example, there’s always a “crisis at the border.” But if there is a real crisis it’s not about the number of immigrants coming into the US relative to population. The percentage of the US population born outside the US is on the rise now, but it has never gone below 5% or above that 15%. The US does have more immigrants than any other country “by a wide margin” – and the rate of immigration has been trending up since the 1970s. But the percentage of immigrants living in the US relative to population (14%) is similar to the number living in similar countries like Canada (20%) and Australia (33%). And then there’s this from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office: “In our projections, the deficit is…smaller than it was last year because economic output is greater, partly as a result of more people working. The labor force in 2033 is larger by 5.2 million people, mostly because of higher net immigration. As a result of those changes in the labor force, we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.”
In a recent book, “How Migration Really Works,” Dutch sociologist Hans de Haas argues that the real immigration crisis is political and arises from what he calls the “paradox of immigration.” The problem is that there are three demands always in play in immigration debates. (i) We can’t reduce people’s rights to work or settle at the risk of disrupting the smooth running of the economy. (ii) We have a moral obligation to respect the rights of immigrants, including officially unauthorized immigrants, to fair and humane treatment. (iii) We should respect, or at least can’t resist, the political will of the majority of citizens who oppose immigration. The problem is we can do any two of these, but not all three. Simultaneous pressure from both the left and the right has reduced the Western political approach to immigration to, Haas argues, “bold acts of political showmanship that conceal the true nature of immigration policies.” In the U.S., as Duncan Black puts it, immigration “is an issue completely untethered from whatever the reality of it is, and people mostly don’t care until conservative media/politicians are telling them to care and then they get enraged…They aren’t mad about immigration, they are mad about what they see on television.”
One small contribution that ethics might make to this political morass is to examine our moral obligation to allow immigration – or not. I won’t say anything about specific border policies or the treatment of immigrants – though I assume that all people have certain claims to respect and fair treatment under all circumstances. Nor will I examine any further empirical claims in any detail. I will simply lay out three types of arguments for three types of views: the conventional view, the open borders view, and the nonideal view.
The conventional view says from an ethical point of view nations have broad discretion in immigration policies. It’s morally permissible to admit or refuse whomever. Hence, people typically endorse admitting adult immigrants with useful skills or (more circumspectly) workers willing to work at more demanding jobs and/or for lower pay.
Michael Walzer is perhaps the most well-known defender of this view. To oversimply, he argues that like a club, a neighborhood, or a family, members of a state have a right to admit or refuse whomever they like.
I find the claim that, morally speaking, a club or a neighborhood can exclude anyone for any reason, morally dubious. And I don’t find the idea that a nation state as vast and varied as the US can profitably thought of as a family credible. Here’s a couple of arguments I think are better.
The state is justified by people tacitly consenting to it – and its function, therefore, is to act in the interest of its consenters. People from other states have not consented to, and are not covered by, the protections of the state to which they wish to immigrate.
Here’s a version of that argument specifically aimed at liberal democracies. In a free society the government has to justify its use of coercive power to citizens. The most basic way it does this is by ceding to everyone certain basic rights, liberties, and freedoms. One of those freedoms is freedom of movement, which means a liberal state has an obligation to allow its citizens to emigrate. But since it does not owe the same obligation to noncitizens it has no reciprocal duty to allow noncitizens to immigrate.
There’s also what philosophers call the special-obligations argument against more open borders. This argument says we have a special obligation to fellow citizens negatively impacted by the immigration of low-skilled workers that we don’t have to the immigrants. I won’t take this up since it is an empirical question (and the empirical basis for it appears to be mostly false).
The open borders approach is not an argument that there should be no limits on immigration under any circumstance, rather it is based on the claim that states have at least a prima facia duty to admit all immigrants unless and until it threatens the stability or prosperity of the state. Generically, the main argument is that whatever reason we give for why citizens have rights relative to their particular country of birth, there is a symmetrical reason that they are owed those rights by every country – including the right to emigrate.
For example, Joseph Carens makes an argument based on John Rawls’ theory that the correct principles of justice are the ones that people would agree to from an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance.” That veil excludes us from knowledge of our skills, talents, race, gender, religion, and social class and asks us what we would then agree to. The idea of the veil is to eliminate anything morally arbitrary that ought not to be a consideration in choosing principles of justice. Rawls, like all liberals (classical liberals, conservatives, New Deal liberals, and libertarians) argues the first principle of justice is the protection of basic liberties. But isn’t what country you are born in also morally arbitrary in pretty much the same way that gender, class, or race? Rawls developed his theory by considering a closed state and would not necessarily favor this argument. But Carens says that since societies aren’t closed, we should have the same rights wherever we are from, including the right to emigrate.
The nonideal approach is based on the idea that we need not appeal to basic principles of justice to justify immigration. Affluent, liberal democratic societies are morally obligated to admit needy immigrants as a response to global injustices, such as poverty, war, and human rights violations. Liberal states have much broader duties to admit immigrants than the conventional position implies, without needing to defend open borders per se, on the nonideal view. For example, individuals may have a right to move to some state where their basic rights can be secured, if not necessarily the specific state of their choice. Here are some other nonideal arguments.
The global poverty argument, contends that affluent states should maintain open borders because migration is an effective way of mitigating global poverty. This argument rests on two claims. One is that members of affluent societies have some obligation to mitigate global poverty and the other is that policies favoring open borders are a means for fulfilling these obligations, at least sometimes.
A second type of argument maintains that affluent societies are obligated to transfer some of their wealth to poor societies based on principles of global distributive justice. Some argue further that affluent societies are obligated to transfer some of their wealth to poorer societies because these affluent societies are at least partly responsible for that poverty. Finally, some argue, that while traditional aid is frequently wasted through inefficient administration or diverted by corrupt elites, opportunities for immigration would directly benefit those who do.
One big objection to all these nonideal arguments is that the number of needy persons in the world – 700 million (almost 10%) – far exceeds the number of immigrants that affluent countries could possibly absorb – and even open borders would leave much poverty unmitigated.
There’s a lot to consider here. And, as with so many practical ethical issues, there’s some chance that the ethical issues will simply be overwhelmed by the empirical ones. Hopefully though, at least thinking about the relevant kinds of reasoning can contribute to bringing some order to the ethical side of the debate.
Post Script on Terminology
Fair warning. There’s another meaning (other than de Haas’) sometimes given to the phrase the “paradox of immigration.” The other paradox is that recent immigrants often outperform more established immigrants on a number of health, education, and conduct or crime-related outcomes, despite the numerous barriers they face. There is some controversy about this, but the point is widely noted.