The aim of this paper is to offer a broad characterization of the kind of account that I believe cannot plausibly face conclusively the problem of the ethics of immigration restrictions in a non-ideal world at the level of the constitutional essentials. I argue that justice-based accounts of immigration controls fail to normatively evaluate what immigration controls do to outsiders subjected to them in non-ideal conditions, so judgments of justice by themselves tend to be overall bad for the interest of (...) immigrants. I explain this by insisting that a prior question about the legitimacy of immigration controls have been overlooked by familiar accounts. A full account of the ethics of immigration suitable for guiding constitutional essentials should be able to connect distinct kinds of justice-based evaluations in order to ask both, what legitimacy requires from territorial institutional control as well as what justice requires from immigration policy. (shrink)

The debate about justice in immigration seems somehow stagnated given that it seems justice requires both further exclusion and more porous borders. In the face of this, I propose to take a step back and to realize that the general problem of borders—to determine what kind of borders liberal democracies ought to have—gives rise to two particular problems: first, to justify exclusive control over the administration of borders (the problem of legitimacy of borders) and, second, to specify how this control (...) ought to be exercised (the problem of justice of borders). The literature has explored the second but ignored the first. Therefore, I propose a different approach to the ethics of immigration by focusing on concerns of legitimacy in a three-step framework: first, identifying the kind of authority or power that immigration controls exercise; second, redefining borders as international and domestic institutions that issue that kind of power; and finally, considering supranational institutions that redistribute the right to exclude among legitimate borders. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically examine an important premise in theories of global distributive justice that, despite its widespread influence, has remained largely unexamined. This is the claim that state borders are morally arbitrary with respect to a just distribution of goods. I examine two common arguments for this claim, the argument that state borders are historically unjust and therefore morally arbitrary; and the argument first made by Charles Beitz that the conditions of a fair, hypothetical social contract would not (...) include knowledge of one's location with respect to the distribution of natural resources between state borders. I argue that there are good reasons to reject both arguments. Beitz's immense contribution to international justice can be gauged by the fact that it is difficult to find a contemporary work on global justice that does not reference his arguments in Political Theory and International Relations . Although some authors find Beitz's cosmopolitan theory objectionable, no author has, to my knowledge, criticized Beitz's pivotal arguments that our placement in the distribution of natural resources is morally arbitrary. The aim of this paper is to do just that. (shrink)