Philosophy & The Refugee Crisis: What Are The Hard Questions?

Philosophy & The Refugee Crisis

What Are The Hard Questions?

By Professor Michael Blake (University of Washington)

January 6, 2016         Picture: IFRC, Stephen Ryan/Flickr.


This article is part of The Critique’s And Who Is My Neighbour? Exclusive


There are some questions of political ethics that can benefit from the tools of philosophy. I’m honestly not sure how many; it seems arrogant to say that a philosopher is always needed – professional philosophers are sometimes useful, but perhaps not as often as we think. (When you are a hammer, after all, it’s often tempting to see the world as full of nails.) There are other questions of political ethics, though, that don’t really require political philosophers to get involved. The answers are clear, or at least clear enough, and the difficulties we have are practical, rather than conceptual. Philosophers can make concepts less confused – or, at least, help with that process – but they cannot make people do what they don’t want to do.

So: what is it that a philosopher can say, given the facts of the refugee crisis now unfolding in Europe? What sorts of questions are facing us, given the dramatic images we see coming from Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere? I believe there are genuine philosophical complexities that are likely to emerge from this event – but perhaps not as many as we might think. In this essay, I’m going to try to discuss two things: first, my belief that there is a widespread agreement (among philosophers, at least) that those people fleeing Syria have a powerful moral claim against the rest of the world: to be provided the circumstances within which they can have decent lives. Even those philosophical views best positioned to justify closing borders, I’ll argue, are unable to justify closing borders against these people. If we need a philosopher, in other words, we don’t need it in this particular context; what we need, instead, is the practical will to mobilize in defense of the refugees’ rights. The second part of the essay, though, will discuss five questions over which I think there is likely to be genuine philosophical disagreement, and therefore some interesting work for philosophers to do. I won’t try to accomplish that work myself – although I’ll try to indicate, along the way, what I believe the most justified answer is likely to be. I will, instead, try to give some sense of what those questions are about which philosophers might actually have something interesting to say.

“Even those philosophical views best positioned to justify closing borders are unable to justify closing borders against these people. If we need a philosopher, in other words, we don’t need it in this particular context; what we need, instead, is the practical will to mobilize in defense of the refugees’ rights”

Refugees and Exclusion: Where Philosophers Don’t Need to Tread

I want to start, then, by justifying this claim: that we don’t actually need philosophers to examine the question of whether or not people fleeing Syria have a right to resettle in some other state. I’m going to justify this by making two assumptions, one philosophical, and the other empirical. The philosophical assumption is that philosophers are really only needed when there is serious disagreement, at the level of concept or principle. You don’t need a philosopher, for example, to explain that it’s wrong to punch strangers in the head. No-one (or, at least, no-one who’s thought about the subject) thinks it’s morally right to punch strangers in the head; you could write a theory about why it’s wrong to punch strangers, but there’s no real audience for that theory – there’s no substantive disagreement, and so no real opportunity for the theory to be useful, through engagement with competing theories. Philosophical reasoning, I believe, is most useful when there are plausible reasons on either side of the issue, and the chance for philosophical argument to help us understand how we ought to decide between those reasons.

The empirical assumption involves the nature of the refugee crisis itself. I’m going to assume – not, I think, unfairly – that the people risking death in the flight from Syria are fleeing circumstances that are morally objectionable. In particular, I will assume that these people are fleeing institutions and practices that pay radically insufficient respect to their bodies, their lives, and their relationships with other people. Some people will disagree at the level of individual cases, and if the case can be made that a particular individual is not in fact facing such awful circumstances, then what I say here won’t apply to that person. Some people, finally, will disagree at the wholesale level, and will assert that people don’t have the right to be free from what the Syrian refugees are facing. This position, of course, is tantamount to moral nihilism – if we don’t have human rights to be free from what’s going on in Syria, how can we have human rights to anything? – and while it’s coherent, it’s not a view I find plausible.

“Some people will assert that people don’t have the right to be free from what the Syrian refugees are facing. This position, of course, is tantamount to moral nihilism – if we don’t have human rights to be free from what’s going on in Syria, how can we have human rights to anything?”

With these assumptions on the table, we can examine what sorts of reasons have been given in the literature to justify excluding people from entering into a given country. The exclusion, we should remember, is a coercive action of a state; the borders have guns, and barbed wire, and what states do when they stop people from entering is to threaten violence against those who refuse to comply. Coercion, though, stands in need of justification; you have to find a reason to give to explain to people facing it why this sort of practice is morally acceptable. Traditionally, of course, the explanation was simple: it was enough to say – you’re not from here, and we don’t care about folks like you, and if you try to enter, we’ll kill you. This sort of justification, though, tends not to work as a political principle, at least if we’re trying to explain why borders in general are permissible; liberal political philosophy describes itself as being about the equality of all persons, not just all citizens, and it has tried to come up with some way of explaining why the practice of closed borders is compatible with this claimed egalitarianism. What sort of justification can we give, to those we propose to forcibly exclude?

Some people, of course, claim that the answer is: none – the borders must be opened to all comers. I don’t find this view persuasive, myself, but that’s not important in the present context. I don’t want to defend the idea that borders might sometimes be closed; instead, I want to show that, even if borders can be closed, they can’t be closed against migrants of the sort coming from Syria. If all borders must be opened, then the Syrian refugees have a right to cross them – as do tourists, economic migrants, curious visitors, and everyone else. My discussion here begins with the three arguments I take to be most plausible against this sort of global conclusion, and shows the implications these arguments have for the refugee crisis.

The first of these arguments begins with a cluster of related ideas. We can talk about solidarity, or community, or cultural preservation, or social trust, or other concepts – all of which have a common core: the idea that what is presently found around here, in this country, is morally significant and worth defending. Precisely why it is worth defending is, of course, going to vary depending upon which theorist we’re discussing. David Miller emphasizes the importance of community in the very development of moral language; if the world were open to migration, on his view, then there would be pressure against the possibility of communities within which the possibility of moral development and moral criticism might be made possible.[1] Michael Walzer, in contrast, emphasizes the importance of the lived community for the self-understanding of its members. The idea of self-determination, on his analysis, goes to the heart of the discussion of migration; we need self-determining communities, which really means we need communities capable of preserving their identity in a world of difference.[2] These are not the only thinkers who have defended these ideas; something like them, I think, is the often-unstated principle behind standard American political discussions of migration, in which the first question is generally how different migration policies would affect the political or social self-understanding of the United States.

Josh Zakary/Flickr
Josh Zakary/Flickr

These ideas, though, cannot readily be used to justify excluding those fleeing rights-violations abroad. (Nor, I should emphasize, do thinkers like Miller and Walzer want to justify that sort of exclusion.) Recall, as above, that we want to justify the exclusion of outsiders with reference to the inherent moral equality of all people, not just insiders. We could perhaps justify, on these principles, keeping out someone who comes from a form of life genuinely hostile to the principles on which we understand our political community to be grounded. There are philosophical debates we might have about that exclusion, of course, but the exclusion could at least be potentially justified on a universal theory that took all lives as alike in moral value.

How, though, could we justify excluding someone whose life is under direct assault in her own society? The only way to do this, I think, is to suggest that our own distinctiveness – our own self-conception as a particular sort of place – is more important than someone else’s very existence. That, of course, is going to be very difficult to do. Thinkers like Miller and Walzer give us reason to think that social solidarity, for example, is exceptionally useful for political self-government, as well as the individual lives that develop within a given society. They have not demonstrated, though, that this solidarity is any more than useful. Having less of something useful for individual lives, though, seems less morally significant than the outright annihilation of individual lives abroad. If we were facing outright societal breakdown – if we thought, perhaps, that the refugee flows were so significant that we might actually face the breakdown of social order – then perhaps things would be different; we might be facing a genuinely tragic choice, in which we cannot attain those things we need at the same time. It is, of course, up to those seeking to exclude refugees to make the case that we are actually facing such circumstances, and I’m doubtful that such a case can actually be made. More often, in fact, such appeals are more likely to reflect local prejudice and hostility to difference. Madison Grant, in the early twentieth century, decried Catholic and Jewish migrants as “unassimilable,” and his work paved the way for the racial exclusion codified in the Immigration Act of 1924.[3] In retrospect, we see these ideas as simple racism, rather than anything more complex or noble. Even if integration is a difficult process – and we have reason to believe it is often difficult because of racism in the existing citizens, rather than because of any defects in newcomers – that process seems morally obligatory, when the alternative is the literal destruction of human lives.

“Even if integration is a difficult process that process seems morally obligatory, when the alternative is the literal destruction of human lives”.

A second argument in defense of closed borders also begins with the idea of self-determination, but takes this idea in a slightly different direction. Christopher Heath Wellman’s analysis of migration argues that self-determination includes the right of a collective to determine those individuals with whom it will choose to associate. On this analysis, the right of a state to exclude outsiders is substantively akin to my right to contract a marriage with a like-minded other person. If both parties to the relationship want to undertake that relationship, it may begin – but I have no right to marry someone who has no interest in marrying me. To say otherwise would be to override one of the most fundamental rights we have, which is our rights to freely choose who to associate with – and who it is we will choose to avoid associating with.[4] The migrant who wants to come to my country, then, is substantively akin to the one who wants to propose marriage to someone. If the marriage is not desired by the other party, it is wrong – and fundamentally illiberal – for the relationship to be forced upon the unwilling party.

I think there are criticisms that might be fairly made against Wellman’s view; after all, it’s not clear how much the relationship between fellow citizens is really that much like the relationship between spouses. Here, though, I don’t want to focus on that – instead, I want to ask whether Wellman’s view can actually justify excluding refugees. I don’t think it can, although Wellman himself disagrees. I think it can’t be used to justify excluding the refugee population because I don’t take the right of freedom of association to be quite as powerful as Wellman thinks it is. In domestic law, after all, we force people into unwanted association all the time, when the stakes are high enough. The Jaycees had to admit women, because the integration of women into business was an important part of the project of equalizing opportunity for men and women.[5] Similarly, those who want to associate only with members of one race in their businesses are denied their associational preferences, for what I take to be good reasons. In 1964, Moreton Rolleston complained to the Supreme Court that he had a first amendment right to exclude African Americans from his Heart of Atlanta Motel; the Supreme Court found that the importance of integration was sufficient to override his associational preferences.[6] If this is true domestically, though, I’m not sure why it shouldn’t also be true internationally. If my associational preferences to be free from people of Syrian descent has moral importance – and, here, I’m not sure it should – it seems to have dramatically less importance than the Syrian person’s right to be free from bodily destruction. If associational freedom is at the heart of the right to exclude, then it seems that it is limited in how and in who it can exclude.

Wellman, as I said, disagrees; his argument is that there is a limit on the amount to which a state can be asked to contribute to the global burden of pursuing justice. Thus, a state that has done more than its share of working for global justice – perhaps through development work, perhaps through humanitarian intervention – would acquire the right to be free from unwanted refugees. I share Wellman’s worries about fairness in the distribution of refugees – but I don’t think he’s right that a state can purchase, as it were, the right to exclude. The question, for me, is always the same: can the state rightly use coercion to keep someone from entering into a society? When the exclusion would force someone back into circumstances that they have a right to be free from, it’s hard to know how this exclusion could be justified. It would, after all, look like saying to an individual facing death: we could help you, but we’ve done enough for the world. That might be a good enough explanation to the world, but it’s hardly enough when said to the person facing death. One would have to identify fairly strongly with the world, to take this sort of justification as motivating.

With that in mind, we can look at the last of the three theories of how the right to exclude might be justified; this is my own view, which can be called the jurisdictional theory. On this view, the question of migration is fundamentally a question over who has the right to enter into a given legal jurisdiction. When I cross the border, after all, I am passing from one jurisdiction into another – which means that I am changing the identity of the polity that has a moral obligation to defend my rights. If I am assaulted in Detroit, after all, a legal system organized under the Constitution of the United States is obligated to mobilize to defend and vindicate my rights. If the same assault happens after I walk over the bridge into Canada, the identity of the institutional set charged with defending my rights has changed. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms will set the limits of legal responses to my situation; individual Canadians, rather than individual citizens of the United States, will have to serve on juries, act as policemen, and so forth. The reason all this matters, though, is that this paves the way for some right to prevent my moving across that bridge.[7] If the Canadian polity has no particular interest in acquiring these moral duties, it has the right to prevent my crossing. It cannot do everything it might do to prevent that crossing – it can’t simply shoot me when I approach the bridge, for instance – but it is justified in insisting that I not cross that bridge, and in using some forms of coercion to prevent this crossing from taking place.

This view has its difficulties, of course, but I still believe that something like it might be our best story of justified exclusion.[8] What I want to highlight, though, is that the theory is explicitly set up so that it cannot justify excluding those coming from non-rights-respecting circumstances. If the only way to justify keeping someone out is with reference to the burdens involved in caring for their rights, then you have to make sure – before you exclude – that those rights are, in fact, being cared for elsewhere. Otherwise, there’s simply no justification available for the coercive force you propose to use to keep people from crossing the bridge. If there is adequate rights-protection in the country of origin, then the exclusion is justified; I tend to regard my own migration – from Canada to the United States – as a good example of the sort of thing that states are morally permitted to prevent. (I am, of course, enormously grateful they chose not to do so.) But Syria, to put it mildly, is not Canada, and there’s no way we can rely upon similar ideas to justify this exclusion. The Syrian refugees have the right to have their rights protected. If these rights are not protected in Syria – and they are not – then they have the right to enter into some country that does offer them that protection, and with it the possibility of decent lives.

“It would look like saying to an individual facing death: we could help you, but we’ve done enough for the world. That might be a good enough explanation to the world, but it’s hardly enough when said to the person facing death”.

With that in mind, we can look at the last of the three theories of how the right to exclude might be justified; this is my own view, which can be called the jurisdictional theory. On this view, the question of migration is fundamentally a question over who has the right to enter into a given legal jurisdiction. When I cross the border, after all, I am passing from one jurisdiction into another – which means that I am changing the identity of the polity that has a moral obligation to defend my rights. If I am assaulted in Detroit, after all, a legal system organized under the Constitution of the United States is obligated to mobilize to defend and vindicate my rights. If the same assault happens after I walk over the bridge into Canada, the identity of the institutional set charged with defending my rights has changed. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms will set the limits of legal responses to my situation; individual Canadians, rather than individual citizens of the United States, will have to serve on juries, act as policemen, and so forth. The reason all this matters, though, is that this paves the way for some right to prevent my moving across that bridge.[7] If the Canadian polity has no particular interest in acquiring these moral duties, it has the right to prevent my crossing. It cannot do everything it might do to prevent that crossing – it can’t simply shoot me when I approach the bridge, for instance – but it is justified in insisting that I not cross that bridge, and in using some forms of coercion to prevent this crossing from taking place.

This view has its difficulties, of course, but I still believe that something like it might be our best story of justified exclusion.[8] What I want to highlight, though, is that the theory is explicitly set up so that it cannot justify excluding those coming from non-rights-respecting circumstances. If the only way to justify keeping someone out is with reference to the burdens involved in caring for their rights, then you have to make sure – before you exclude – that those rights are, in fact, being cared for elsewhere. Otherwise, there’s simply no justification available for the coercive force you propose to use to keep people from crossing the bridge. If there is adequate rights-protection in the country of origin, then the exclusion is justified; I tend to regard my own migration – from Canada to the United States – as a good example of the sort of thing that states are morally permitted to prevent. (I am, of course, enormously grateful they chose not to do so.) But Syria, to put it mildly, is not Canada, and there’s no way we can rely upon similar ideas to justify this exclusion. The Syrian refugees have the right to have their rights protected. If these rights are not protected in Syria – and they are not – then they have the right to enter into some country that does offer them that protection, and with it the possibility of decent lives.

“If the only way to justify keeping someone out is with reference to the burdens involved in caring for their rights, then you have to make sure – before you exclude – that those rights are, in fact, being cared for elsewhere”

So much, then, for the easy part. What I mean, of course, is that the case is philosophically easy – it is, I think, very hard to dispute the idea that those people coming from Syria have the right to enter into some rights-protecting country. The case is, of course, politically quite far from easy – it is, indeed, one of the most difficult questions we face. But the difficulty is one of living up to what is morally rightful, rather than a question about what moral right demands.

These easy questions, though, are not the only ones we might ask. In what follows, I want to discuss five difficult questions – by which, again, I mean questions about which philosophers are likely to have disagreements, and in which there are at least some plausible reasons available on either side. What, then, are the hard questions?

 

[1] Refugees and Exclusion: Where Philosophical Work is Needed

I’m going to discuss five questions, and introduce them more with an eye towards demonstrating how hard they are, rather than trying to solve them. Of course, as I’ve said, I do have my own views, and I’ll indicate those. These questions, though, are sufficiently hard that I’m honestly not confident even in my own current conclusions. The questions I want to discuss are, in order: the problem of definition, of distribution, of deterrence, of integration and of solidarity.

 

[1] The Problem of Definition. 

In all the above, I’ve been assuming that the people fleeing Syria are fleeing things that are violations of their moral rights. I believe that is a good assumption – people don’t do what these refugees have done, unless there are threats on the line that are morally significant. There is, though, a question of how we ought to draw the line, between those people who are fleeing for their lives, and those who are merely fleeing for betterlivesThis is a problem even at the level of ethics; is it true that we have a moral right to be free from undemocratic government that does not engage in atrocity? I believe we do; many other people do not. What, then, should we say to migrants coming here not from Syria, but from Jordan, or Saudi Arabia? On my view, as described above, it will be difficult to come up with reasons for exclusion; using coercion to force someone back into a political relationship with Saudi Arabia, after all, is going to involve forcing someone into (what I take to be) an unjust form of political life, in which some important liberties are radically curtailed. But this is a tough pill for many to swallow, since the number of people with a moral right to migrate will now seem to increase rather sharply. The question gets harder, moreover, when we start looking not at moral definitions, but at legal ones. Refugees right now are defined with reference to persecution – a fact that reflects the origins of the modern concept of refugees with the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi state, and a widespread failure of the world to adequately address that persecution through immigration policy [See Gibney on rethinking the refugee system here]. Not all forms of evil, though, can be understood through the lens of persecution. We can be persecuted until our lives cease to be morally adequate; but we can also be ignored, starved, tyrannized, or otherwise simply treated as less than fully human. Are all these forms of evil equally important, so that our law ought to recognize them? Is there inevitably a compromise between ethics and what the law demands? These questions are important, and difficult, and they deserve more attention from philosophers.[9]

 

[2] The Problem of Distribution.

Many of the Syrian migrants want to go to Germany, rather than staying in the Eastern European states into which they have entered. This raises a question of distributive justice between Germany and the other states of the world, in which the thing to be distributed is the refugees themselves. This feels rather distasteful; people are not goods to be distributed, and still less are they burdens to be shared – but political reality demands that we recognize that sometimes they must be understood as such, for purposes of political discussion. (If the example in Germany does not adequately make this point, we can note that many refugees in previous conflicts tended to cluster in nearby states, leaving more distant states with excess capacity to integrate migrants; the nearby states, understandably, thought this was at least potentially a form of distributive injustice.) How, though, are we to adequately understand the moral principles on which the distribution of people to places should be undertaken? One simple principle, of course, is voluntary choice; the migrants themselves should choose where they go. This is appealing – but it is not clear that it is morally mandated. If what you have a right to is country in which your rights are respected, does it follow that you must also have a choice ofwhich country it will be in which your rights are respected? I am not convinced that this does, in fact, follow; while states are not permitted to send refugees back to their countries of origin, they might not be similarly prohibited from insisting upon the redistribution of migrants. Germany, for example, might be within its rights to insist at a certain point that other states – including, perhaps, Hungary and Serbia – must accept some greater share of the burden of accommodating the flow of refugees. There are moral risks here, of course – we are not permitted to deport individuals who have made lives within a given community, even if we are overly “burdened” with such migrants, and even if some other country might take those migrants and treat them justly – but these risks do not, I think, overcome the general principle that some principles of distributive justice might have applicability in this context.

 

[3] The Problem of Deterrence.

It is one thing to say that the state cannot coercively exclude those who are not adequately protected in their countries of origin. It is quite another to ensure that those individuals are, in fact, able to physically move to the rights-protecting state. One, very abstract, way of looking at this is to think of positive versus negative liberties; if we are convinced that we have no right to exclude migrants from Syria, must we also engage in actions designed to ensure that many people are in fact able to leave Syria? Must we provide boats, or airplanes, to assist in evacuation? John Rawls, in one of his only discussions of migration, imagines a program of positive support for emigration – and it is a sad thought that very few people, in philosophy or in politics, have followed this thought up.[10] A more practical version of this question looks towards the controversial practice of carrier sanction, on which transport companies who carry individuals without adequate travel documentation can be fined by the state to which those persons are brought. The result of these carrier sanctions, of course, is to make it exceptionally difficult for those people fleeing atrocity – who are unlikely to have adequate documentation – to actually make the trip from their home to a rights-protecting society. (The result of this is that a trip which can be made for $19 with a passport will cost $1000 – and be radically more dangerous – for those without documentation.[11]) There are at least two ways of looking at carrier sanctions, which are intended (and function) as deterrents to prospective refugees. The first is that they merely reflect the distinction given above: we are not permitted to exclude a given refugee, but neither are we under any obligation to maximize their number, nor to assist those within a given society by providing the means by which they might make their exit. The second is that they are simply, and radically, immoral. They are immoral, first, in that they force individuals into situations in which they must make the choice between remaining in an unbearable situation, or making an unbearable trip. The state issuing the sanction might say that they are not, in fact, doing anything of the sort – they are simply removing one way in which individuals might otherwise be able to make the trip, and they are under no obligation to maximize the ease with which such trips are made. The response to this, perhaps, might look to the thought that removing an avenue to justice is a worse thing than failing to install one where it is absent. We might, instead, argue that the immorality here is political: the carrier is deputized as an agent of enforcement, and given the power to preclude people entry into a given society – without accepting the burdens which rightly accrue to those who exercise state power. This argument, too, might be criticized – does the airline, after all, exercise state power, or merely refuse access to the airline’s property? – and I am genuinely uncertain as to whether or not the argument ultimately works. I will say, once again, that we need more philosophical attention on the topic – a tepid conclusion, to be sure, but one I mean quite sincerely. [12]

CAFOD/Flickr
CAFOD/Flickr

[4] The Problem of Integration.

The academic world has a long-standing debate about the nature, and appeal, of multiculturalism. On the one side are those who appeal to the need for some forms of widely shared social identity as a prerequisite for effective, and stable, political societies. On the other are those who regard the process of acculturation into these shared ideas as something like the process of assimilation – a process which, it is often felt, is deeply disrespectful to those communities and forms of life that are subject to being assimilated. This debate is unlikely to be ended any time soon, and it is an especially vigorous debate when applied to the issue of immigration. On the one side, there are those who argue that some form of integration is necessary, and that those who arrive in a new country are obligated to remake their identities so as to more closely resemble those already here. (A particularly stark vision of this comes from Bobby Jindal, whose campaign now uses the slogan “immigration without assimilation is invasion.”[13]) On the other side are those who argue that there is no moral right for any existing community to demand that newcomers adapt; at best, the process should be a two-way process of mutual accommodation. The problem is made even more difficult, of course, when we reflect on the reasons why the newcomers are present in a given community. Will Kymlicka has defended the principle that those who migrate to a community are entitled to fewer multicultural accommodations than those who are members of indigenous groups; the former, after all, crossed the border voluntarily, while the latter simply had the border cross them.[14] These ideas are powerful; but how should we think of what is owed to – and by – groups who crossed the border, but largely because of violence and atrocity in their countries of origin? Is it fair to insist upon cultural alteration from those who are newcomers to a society, when the reason for their presence in that society is not rightly regarded as voluntary, but instead as circumstances against which they are claiming refuge? These questions are exceptionally difficult, and not likely to be answered easily. It is true, inevitably, that large-scale migration changes both those who are newcomers and those who are already present within the country of refuge. Understanding exactly how much each sort of person must adapt, though, requires a great deal more philosophical attention than can be provided here.

 

[5] The Problem of Solidarity.

I want, in this final problem, to go back to the above discussion, of thinkers like Miller and Walzer. I there discussed the idea that the local community, and its value for individual members, must be weighed in value against the literal lives of individual persons seeking refuge; unless the community itself was in danger of ceasing to exist as an ordered political community, I argued, we would be unable to justify excluding those facing rights-violation in their countries of origin. What I have to ask now, though, is the following: what might we say, when precisely this is a possibility? I do not, of course, argue that it is especially likely, in many political communities as we know them. But we have an obligation to notice these facts: political communities require a great deal of voluntary participation, in order to function adequately; no government has been able to create effective rule through force alone. Solidarity, then – a willingness to obey the government, even when one might disobey and get away with it – seems to be an important part of stable governance. What happens, though, when a large part of the populace simply refuses to play the game of politics with the newcomers? Imagine, for example, that a large part of a given society is virulently, irrationally Islamophobic; they simply refuse to cooperate with any government that proposes to increase the number of Muslims that enter that society. If there are enough of these individuals, it seems possible that the decision to allow the widespread immigration of a large number of Muslims might tend to undermine the possibility of just governance within that society – not because the migration of the Muslims was unjust, but because some bigots simply refuse to do what justice demands once the migration has occurred. What, though, should the justified polity do under these circumstances? There are, I think, several options, none of them appealing. The political society might simply insist upon rightful migration policy, at the cost of the stability of its own political processes; it might hope, or do its hardest to make sure, that the bigotry displayed by its citizens disappear. This is, of course, an heroic option, but it is also a risky one. The state might, instead, bow to its Islamophobic citizens, at the cost of giving up on the moral principles animating liberalism. Neither of these options seems quite justifiable to me. I do not share Miller and Walzer’s thought that the local community is inherently a valuable thing; I would rather like it if we cared less about the local than we already do. I am not, though, convinced that the world is likely to be populated by tolerant cosmopolitans any time soon. In a world in which there are virulent bigots, then, should the state give in to their power?   This is, I think, a difficult question – and, despite my belief that the existing liberal democracies of the world are not likely to collapse any time soon, I suspect it is a question whose importance is likely to increase in the years to come.

These five questions, then, are ones that I think are genuinely hard – and to which philosophical attention must be paid. I would like to end with a grand conclusion; I’m afraid, though, that I don’t have one to offer. What I have, instead, is a simple plea: we have need for more philosophy, and perhaps more philosophers, to deal with these five questions. What we need even more, though, is for the will to do what we know to be right, in face of the easier question of whether or not the Syrian refugees have the right to assistance. Doing what is right, though, requires moral courage, not theoretical sophistication. In this, as in so much else, philosophy can offer clarity; it cannot make us into the people we know we ought to be.


Footnotes & References

[1] See David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Miller, “Immigration: The Case for Limits,” in Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics, 2d. ed., A. Cohen and C Wellman, eds. (Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, 2004).

[2] Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

[3] Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or, the Racial Basis of European History, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921).

[4] See Christopher Heath Wellman and Phillip Cole, Debating the Ethics of Immigration: Is There a Right to Exclude? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[5] Michael Blake, “Immigration, Association, and Antidiscrimination,” 122(4)Ethics (July 2012) 748-762. .

[6] Heart of Atlanta Motel Inc. v. United States, 379 U.S. 241 (1964).

[7] Michael Blake, “Immigration, Jurisdiction, and Exclusion,” 41(2) Philosophy and Public Affairs (Spring 2013) 103-130.

[8] But see Michael Kates and Ryan Pevnick, “Immigration, Jurisdiction, and History,” 42(2) Philosophy and Public Affairs (Spring 2014) 179-194; Javier Hidalgo, “Immigration Restriction and the Right to Avoid Unwanted Obligations,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (August 2014).

[9] But see Matthew Lister, “Who Are Refugees?” 32(5) Law and Philosophy(2013) 645-671.

[10] John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) 74 n. 15.

[11] See “No good deed goes unclaimed,” The Economist, October 3, 2015.

[12] See, for some welcome contributions to this debate, the arguments of Tilman Rodenhäuser, “Another Brick in the Wall: Carrier Sanctions and the Privatization of Immigration Control,” 26(2) International Journal of Refugee Law(2014) 223-247.

[13] The slogan can be found on Jindal’s website, most prominently athttps://www.bobbyjindal.com/immigration-without-assimilation-is-invasion-083115/

[14] Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Michael Blake
Michael Blake
Michael Blake is Professor of Philosophy and Public Affairs, and Director of the Program on Values in Society, at the University of Washington. He received his bachelor’s degree in Economics and Philosophy from the University of Toronto, and a Doctorate in Philosophy from Stanford University. He writes on global justice and migration. His most recent book, co-written with Gillian Brock, is Debating Brain Drains: May Governments Restrict Emigration? (Oxford University Press, 2015).
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