This article compares the moral significance of two types of immigration, that which is based on the unification of citizens and non-citizens and that which is based on the skilled labor needs of the receiving society. I assess the interests of both citizens and non-citizens affected by each of these types of inflows and argue that unification admissions should be given priority over skilled workers but states retain a qualified moral permission to incentivize skilled worker migration.

Approaching the settlement of our Moon from a practical perspective, this book is well suited for space program planners. It addresses a variety of human factor topics involved in colonizing Earth's Moon, including: history, philosophy, science, engineering, agriculture, medicine, politics & policy, sociology, and anthropology. Each chapter identifies the complex, interdisciplinary issues of the human factor that arise in the early phases of settlement on the Moon. Besides practical issues, there is some emphasis placed on preserving, protecting, and experiencing the (...) lunar environment across a broad range of occupations, from scientists to soldiers and engineers to construction workers. The book identifies utilitarian and visionary factors that shape human lives on the Moon. It offers recommendations for program planners in the government and commercial sectors and serves as a helpful resource for academic researchers. Together, the coauthors ask and attempt to answer: “How will lunar society be different?”. (shrink)

I provide an alternative to the two prevailing accounts of justice in immigration policy, the free migration view and the state discretion view. Against the background of an internationalist conception of domestic and global justice that grounds special duties of justice between co-citizens in their shared participation in a distinctive scheme of social cooperation, I defend three principles of justice to guide labor immigration policy: the Difference Principle, the Duty of Beneficence, and the Duty of Assistance. I suggest how these (...) principles are to be applied in both ideal and nonideal circumstances. Finally, I argue that the potential conflict between these principles has often been overstated, and propose priority rules for genuine cases of conflict. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 344-361, Fall 2021.

Building upon recent work on epistemic varieties of liberalism, avant-garde political agency and the theory and practice of activism, I claim that a liberal defence of more open borders does not presuppose either indifference to the problem of the deep structural sources of poverty in poorer countries, or the absence of an account of those structures’ transformation. Rather, it is claimed that in addition to the remittance of money and other economic goods to alleviate the symptoms of poverty, more open (...) borders facilitate the remittance of norms and values in terms of which individuals and activist communities in poorer countries may transform the deep structures and institutions that are poverty’s sources. This liberal account of more open borders and deep structural transformation also makes possible the non-coercive discharge of obligations of global justice on the part of wealthier states to the world’s poor, when poorer nations are either unable or unwilling to discharge them themselves. (shrink)

Building upon recent work on epistemic varieties of liberalism, avant-garde political agency and the theory and practice of activism, I claim that a liberal defence of more open borders does not presuppose either indifference to the problem of the deep structural sources of poverty in poorer countries, or the absence of an account of those structures’ transformation. Rather, it is claimed that in addition to the remittance of money and other economic goods to alleviate the symptoms of poverty, more open (...) borders facilitate the remittance of norms and values in terms of which individuals and activist communities in poorer countries may transform the deep structures and institutions that are poverty’s sources. This liberal account of more open borders and deep structural transformation also makes possible the non-coercive discharge of obligations of global justice on the part of wealthier states to the world’s poor, when poorer nations are either unable or unwilling to discharge them themselves. (shrink)

In the last seven years, close to twenty thousand people have died trying to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Rescue missions by private actors and NGOs have increased because both national measures and measures by the EU’s border control agency, Frontex, are often deemed insufficient. However, such independent rescue missions face increasing persecution from national governments, Italy being one example. This raises the question of how potential migrants and dissenting citizens should act towards the EU border regime. In (...) contrast to the literature, which mainly addresses migration on the basis of justice requirements, this article focuses on the legitimate authority of the EU’s border regime. Focusing on the legitimacy criteria for states’ claims to regulate migration opens a fruitful normative perspective, given the pervasive disagreement over the content of justice in migration. What reasons for compliance and non-interference does legitimacy supply for potential immigrants and dissenting citizens? And what legitimacy standard may be appropriate for the power that individual states claim over potential immigrants? We argue that, even assuming a minimal legitimacy standard for the state-migrant relationship, the structure of the EU’s border regime exhibits unique features, which cause it to stand in tension with such a standard. By coordinating its Member States’ border regimes, especially through Frontex, the EU claims and exercises power over potential immigrants. However, the asymmetrical delegation of state powers to the EU means that the power involved in regulating European borders is, in core respects, unaccountable. This unaccountability, we argue, is significant for the legitimacy of the EU’s border regime. This article sheds new light on the morality of unauthorised rescue missions by assessing the permissibility of resistance to the EU’s border regime. (shrink)

The European Union is currently challenged by right-wing populism and economic stress. To understand the nature of these challenges, we need to take an interdisciplinary approach in which empirical studies of politics are combined with studies of the normative implications of European policy-making. To this end, I draw attention to the right to free movement, which is pivotal both for European politics and liberal political philosophy. I show that even though transnational rights, such as the free movement for people, products (...) and money, are normatively sound and desirable, enhancement of free movement may challenge the heterogeneity among the national models of rights and societal commitments. The risk is that the national institutions as a political arena face difficulties in coping with current political challenges such as right-wing radicalism, social inequality, environmental regulation, immigration and financial insecurity. On the other hand, I argue that we should be aware that the transnational rights might in some countries enhance human rights, which national parliaments have not been able to accommodate. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of empirical theories of migration for normative accounts of migration and distributive justice. It examines neo-classical economics, world-systems theory, dual labor market theory, and feminist approaches to migration and contends that neo-classical economic theory in isolation provides an inadequate understanding of migration. Other theories provide a fuller account of how national and global economic, political, and social institutions cause and shape migration flows by actively affecting people's opportunity sets in source countries and by admitting people (...) according to social categories such as class and gender. These empirical theories reveal the causal impact of institutions regulating migration and clarify moral obligations frequently overlooked by normative theorists. (shrink)

This article considers one seemingly compelling justification for immigration restrictions: that they help restrict the brain drain of skilled workers from poor states. For some poor states, brain drain is a severe problem, sapping their ability to provide basic services. Yet this article finds that justifying immigration restrictions on brain drain grounds is far from straightforward. For restrictions to be justified, a series of demanding conditions must be fulfilled. Brain drain does provide a successful argument for some immigration restrictions, but (...) it is an argument that fails to justify restrictions beyond a small minority of cases. (shrink)

Some proponents of global justice question that opening borders is an effective strategy to alleviate global poverty and reduce inequalities between countries. This article goes a step further and asks whether an open borders policy is compatible with the objectives of global distributive justice. The latter, it will be argued, entails the ordering of needs, the assignment of priorities and the preference or subordination of some interests over others. In other words, global justice requires the establishment of conditions and restrictions (...) on mobility. On the contrary, open borders claim an unrestricted and unconditional (not unqualified) freedom of movement, limited only by public health considerations, serious threats to national security or democratic institutions, but not by an aspiration for maximizing global redistributive utility. The main point is that not only would freedom of movement be instrumentalized, losing its presumptive moral force, but ultimately open borders as a remedy of global justice are an oxymoron. The article concludes with an alternative defence of freedom of international movement. (shrink)

Doctors, nurses and midwifes from developing countries migrate to affluent countries in large numbers, often leaving behind severely understaffed healthcare systems. One way to limit this ‘brain drain’ is to restrict the freedom of movement of healthcare workers. Yet this seems to give rise to a conflict of human rights: on the one hand rights to freedom of movement, on the other hand rights to health. By motivating its own account of human rights, this paper argues that the conflict is (...) not as acute as it seems, since rights to freedom of movement are in fact more limited than often acknowledged. Weak restrictions of the freedom to leave and strong restrictions of the freedom to enter are in principle compatible with the rights of healthcare workers. Hence, policies that involve restrictions of both kinds can be justified in order to secure the human right to health. (shrink)

Answers to the question of immigrant admissions have been debated extensively by political philosophers since the 1980s. A wide variety of normative approaches to the question have been taken, but very nearly zero have been expressly feminist. Generalizing from Alison Jaggar's articulation of a feminist methodological approach to the political morality of abortion, this article proposes a feminist methodological approach to immigrant admissions. This article does not defend a substantive view on what policies states ought to adopt, but it does (...) describe several features of our social world that are salient for a feminist methodological approach to the assessment of the justice of states’ immigrant admissions policies. (shrink)

In this paper I present two reasons why generalized skill-selection--a policy whereby skill, education, and economic independence are indefinitely prioritized in immigration decisions--is pro tanto unjust. First, such policies feed into existing biases, exacerbating status harms for low-SES citizens. The claim that we prefer the skilled to the unskilled, the educated to the uneducated, and the financially secure to the insecure is also heard by citizens. And there is considerable overlap between this message and the stereotypes and biases that set (...) their social status. Skill-selection can reinforce these biases, offering state support for the claim that they are less desirable as members of the society. -/- Second, the need for skilled immigrants ordinarily depends upon and reinforces failures of fair equality of opportunity (FEO). According to the dependency thesis, the need for skilled migrants stems from a failure to ensure domestic FEO. Many low-SES residents would desire to work, for example, as doctors or nurses. However, unequal education, as well as poverty and debt, have made such opportunities largely inaccessible. According to the reinforcement thesis, skill-selection disincentivizes the pursuit of FEO. A state that can meet domestic labor needs through less costly immigration policies will be disinclined to pursue programs designed to equalize opportunities for low-SES residents. -/- Generalized skill-selection in high-income countries like the US is, therefore, pro tanto unjust. However, this is not an argument for excluding the skilled. Skilled immigrants can be admitted through other policies—open borders, family-reunification, or a lottery—without the state signaling that the skilled are more desirable or perpetuating failures of FEO. And states can, responding to local emergencies, temporarily select for particular professions without contributing to these injustices. These concerns only arise when skill is generally and indefinitely prioritized. (shrink)

There is a broad consensus on the legitimacy of states to control immigration. However, this belief has recently been questioned, among other reasons, due to the contradiction with current practices in emigration and internal mobility. The principle of symmetry states that any restriction on immigration should also apply to emigration; or that, to the contrary, if there is a right to emigrate, there should be a corresponding right to immigrate. The principle of coherence posits that every reason one might have (...) for moving within a country also counts for moving between countries. This article proposes to extend the coherence principle from external to internal migration, arguing that the same reasons that justify restrictions on mobility across borders justify restrictions on mobility within borders too. Therefore, either freedom of movement is a fundamental right or the right of the political community to control mobility prevails. The interests at stake are in both cases the same, so asymmetry is not warranted. This leads us to an apagogical argument for open borders. (shrink)

The political theory of migration has largely occurred within a paradigm of methodological nationalism and this has led to the neglect of morally salient agents and causes. This article draws on research from the social sciences on the transnationalism, globalization and migration systems theory to show how methodological nationalist assumptions have affected the views of political theorists on membership, culture and distributive justice. In particular, it is contended that methodological nationalism has prevented political theorists of migration from addressing the roles (...) of non-state agents and of transnational economic, social and political structures. These agents and structures contribute to the asymmetrical distribution of goods and opportunities and thus have important implications for debates about migration and distributive justice. (shrink)

In an interdependent world of overlapping political memberships and identities, states and democratic citizens face difficult choices in responding to large-scale migration and the related question of who ought to have access to citizenship. In an influential attempt to provide a normative framework for a more just global order, The Law of Peoples , John Rawls is curiously silent regarding what his framework would mean for the politics of migration. In this piece, I consider the complications Rawls’s inattention to these (...) issues creates for his broader vision of global justice. Yet I also attempt to show how these aspects of Rawls’s theory emerge from an underlying tension which confronts all liberal democratic conceptions of justice, both in theory and in practice. In my conclusion, I sketch an alternative rooted in the insights of agonistic pluralism, which “breaks” the Rawlsian silence and actively theorizes the democratic legitimation of political borders. (shrink)

This study is devoted to the ways and means to justify a ‘more’ cosmopolitan realization of certain policy implications, in the case of immigration. The raison d’être of this study is the idea that the contemporary debate over open borders suffers from indeterminate discussions on whether liberal states are entitled to restrict immigration. On the other hand, most of the liberal cosmopolitan accounts neglect the detrimental consequences of their open borders argument – which take it as a means to compensate (...) people in need –, such as brain drain and the effects of brain drain on the opportunity sets of members of sending countries. Therefore I offer a moral cosmopolitan account of immigration which takes the interests of would-be immigrants, the residents in receiving, along with the residents in sending countries in respect to their opportunity sets because of the way arbitrary border control represents the inequality of opportunity. I do not provide a well-formed immigration policy here, yet I believe the account provided here is more feasible in considering phenomena such as brain drain. (shrink)

Since 1987, the Brazilian government has implemented a no-contact policy, which prevents contact between isolated indigenous tribes in the Amazon and members of the general public, including state officials. The government justifies this policy on the grounds that contact would expose members of isolated tribes to dangerous illnesses as well as violate their right to determine their own life processes. In this essay, I bring liberal theory to bear on the question of whether Brazil's treatment of isolated indigenous tribes is (...) justified. I argue that the current policy actually fails to treat isolated indigenous persons as free and equal. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that even when they appear to help, restrictions on migration are usually only an impediment, not an aid, to cosmopolitan justice. Even though some egalitarian cosmopolitans are well intentioned in their support of migration restrictions, I argue that migration restrictions are (i) not truly cosmopolitan and (ii) will not have the kinds of consequences they expect. My argument in defense of this claim begins, in section 1, by outlining a defense of migration restrictions based on (...) egalitarian cosmopolitan grounds. Then in sections two and three, I reply to the harms this position associates with open borders and provide some reasons as to why restrictions on migration are incompatible with cosmopolitan justice. (shrink)