WEEK 11 READING - Carens and Song

Carens Fundamental questions

Carens is lookign at imigration as a quesiton of fundamental moral values centerd around 2 main questions (1) who belongs? (how to treat present immigrants) and (2) who should get in?

Four presuppositions - Carens

4 presuppositions that define scope and assumptions of his analysis

1. concerned with the Rich democratic states of Europe and North America

2. presupposes a commitment to democratic principles - euqla moral worth of all people, majority rule, individual rights etc

3. He accepts the conventional view that states have a mroal rightto exercise considerable discretionary control over immigration, though he challenges this at the end

4. It is meaningful to evealuate immigration fro ma normative/philosophical perspective → does not imply rejecting state sovereignty, moral criticism of a policy is dsitinct form claiming another state has the right to enforce that criticism

Who belongs? - Carens

• guiding principle → people who live in a society become members of that society overtime, regardless of how they arrive

• Access to citizenship - children born to settled immigrants should recieve citizenship at birth; for immigrants, citizenship is awarded based on time lived in the society

• Social and cultural inclusion - formal citizenship is not enough, immigrants shoudl be allowed equal access to social, political and eocnomic opportunities and shouldn’t have to abonded their cultural identities to be accepted

• Right of legal residents and temporary workers - temporry workers should enjoy most fo the same rights as residents , and those who have lived in society for years should gain permanent resident status

• Rights of irregular migrants - even irregular migrants, those who settled without state authorization, have basic civil, economic, and social rights; states can deport them but they cannot be called outlaws

  • Problem → fear of deportation restricts htem from using these rights

  • Carens solution -→ firewall between immigration law enforcement and the protection fo human rights: no information acquired in teh course of protecting human rights should be availabel to immigration authorities

• Also Carens argues taht irregular migrants have a moral right to remain over time

Who should get in? - Carens

• acccepting the states conventional right to control admissions, Caren poses that refual of admission based on race or religion is clearly unjust, and states msut admit immediate family members of itizens and residents

Refugees

• Carens traces this issue back tot e lack of acceptance of Jewish refugees post Nazi persecution in the 1930’s

• the states have later recognizes this as wrogn and the current international refugee regime is built on that recognition but rich states are still using things like visa controls and carrier sanctions to keep refugees from reaching their borders

• also the current refugee regime fails because neighbouring states are forced ot deal with resettlement much more than other states. Rich democratic states avoid their share of this responsibility and which neighbouring states can have a safe haven, long term settlement is a global responsibility

Open borders

• Carens → in principle, borders should generally be open and people should be able to leave their country of origin and settle wherever they want

• analogy on feudalism → citizenship in a wealthy western state is like having noble status. if feudal birthright privilege was unjust, why isn’t this

Song - the global distributive justice argument for open borders rests on two faulty assumptions

1. global distributive justice requires global equality of opportunity

2. that global distributive jutice requires open borders - instead we need controlled borders and open doors

The Global Distributive Justice Argument for Open Borders - Song

CARENS

• global equality of opportunity: because palce of birth really detrmintes your life, open borders are essential to providing equal access to opportunity

• equal levels of development across states, combined with free movement across borders

• a child in rural Mozambique shoudl be statistically as likely as a Swiss bankers child to attain an equivalent position

What is objectionable about Inequality and it’s relationship to injustice? - SONG

Song

1. it requires a universal metric for comparing opportuniteis across metrics

2. gives little weight to relationships and group memberships as sources of distributive obligations → song argues for. relational approach; political membership is a relationships grounded in shared subjection and collective self-governance, which generates special obligations beyond what we owe to all humans globally

3. Also lacks a global institutional agent to enforce it → equality of opportunity claims require governing institutions with the power to act on them, which don’t exist at the global level

Reasons why inequality might be objectionable

1. Historical injustice → if a contrys proverty result due to conquest, theft or colonial exploitation, the response is a targeted admissions policy not just open borders for everyone

2. Domination → open borders and neither necessary nor sufficient to reduce domestic power inequalities

3. Procedural unfairness → inequality is objectionable when it undermines the fairness of basic social and political processes by distorting the quality of starting places

4. Unequal benefit → when members fo group have euql claims to benefits produced by shared cooperation, fairness might require equal shares BUT song says this principle presupposes particiapiton in a shared scheme of social cooeperation, conditions that hold domestically but not globally → open borders doesnt help this

5. Unequal status → there is no clear globally shared understanding of social status that would ground this claim at the international level

6. Insufficiency → Song argues taht the deepest concern underlying open borders is not equality but sufficiency - raisign the worlds worst-off above a basic threshold of well-being - so then open borders is not the issue, but that the wealthiest countries borders should be open to the poorest people

7. The limits

The Limits of open borders as a response to global poverty - SONG

1. its not the poorest who migrate

2. brain drain harms those left behind

3. moving does not ensure employment

4. the scale of need vastly exceeds what migration can address - open borders are not a primary solution to poverty

Is there a right to free movement across borders? - SONG

three arguments that attempt to establish the right of international free movement as a matter of morality

1. freedom of movement is a fundamental human right in itself

2. the “cantilever” argument that international free movement is a logical extension of existing rights, specifically domestic free movement and the right to exit

3. the libertarian argument grounded in freedom of association and contract

• song argues that what is morally required is an approach that prioritizes those whose basic humna rights are at stake, not a universal right of migration

(1) A human right to migration - SONG

• Moellendorf, Carens, and Oberman → freedom fo movement is a fundamental human right in itself - to establish this, it must show that poeple have an interst in immigration fundamental to their well-bieng, and that this interest is enought o gorund a duty on others

• Song → doesn’t appear on any other standard list of basic human rights

• Oberman → people have an interest in the full range of life options, so people should be able to migrate internationally

• Song/Miller → people need adequacy, freedom to move within ones own country is usually enough to protect an adequate range of options - only refugees need this right

• Song → weakness in the adequacy account cuz it would restric domestic migration where someone is alr has an adequate range of options (bc to alberta)

• Carens → adequacy misses the fundamental interst at stake: freedom

• Song → freedom is too vague of a basis for human rights

(2) from domestic to international freedom of movement - SONG

1. first cantilever argument →the values underlying domestic free movement also support international free movement -

• Song → examiens the legal grounds of domestic free movement in Us law - 2 values: personal autonomy and social cohesion

  • Personal autonomy: two componentc: (1) the need for adequate range of potions, and (2) freedom for coercive state power

  • 1. this is limited cuz you can only migrate if your options are inadquate

  • 2. the right ot domestic free movemnt is the check on this abuse

  • song→ thinks there needs to be a justification on why there should be border patrol, but there are more important reasons for restricting migration internationally, rather than California from Nevada

  • Social cohesion → Walzer - if domestic migration hasn’t ruined social cohesion, why should domestic

    • song → different levels f cultural differences

2. second cantilever argument → the right to exit one’s country logically entails an unrestricted right of entry to another

• Song → liberal asymmetry: there is a structural difference between exit and entry: exit coerce poele into maintining an unwanted political relationship,

  • but even this is not unconstrained, temporary restrictions can be justified,like brain drain and criminals

(3) an instrumental argument from freedom of association and contract

• freemovemnt across bordersis required to respect individual freeodm of association and contract

• Song → achieveing global GDP gains would requrie billions of workers to move, it would also put a downward wage pressure on native low-skilled workers which creates distributive justice tensions