Unjust Borders: Individuals and the Ethics of Immigration
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Unjust Borders: Individuals and the Ethics of Immigration Frontmatter Unjust Borders: Individuals and the Ethics of Immigration States restrict immigration on a massive scale. Governments fortify their borders with walls and fences, authorize border patrols, imprison migrants in detention centers, and deport large numbers of foreigners. Unjust Borders: Individuals and the Ethics of Immigration argues that immigration restrictions are systematically unjust and examines how individual actors should respond to this injustice. Javier Hidalgo maintains that individuals can rightfully resist immigration restrictions and often have strong moral reasons to subvert these laws. This book makes the case that unauthorized migrants can permissibly evade, deceive, and use defensive force against immigration agents, that smugglers can aid migrants in crossing borders, and that citizens should disobey laws that compel them to harm immigrants. Unjust Borders is a meditation on how individuals should act in the midst of pervasive injustice. Biography: Javier Hidalgo is an Associate Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. His work has appeared in venues such as The Journal of Political Philosophy, The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy and The Journal of Moral Philosophy. 1 Dedication For my parents. 2 Table of Contents: Introduction 0.1 A Story 0.2 From Public Policy to the Individual Ethics of Immigration 0.3 A Comment on Moral Methodology 0.4 Terminology 0.5 An Outline of the Book Chapter 1: The Case Against Exclusion 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Freedom and Movement 1.3 The Presumption Against Immigration Restrictions 1.4 Immigration Restrictions Cause Deprivation 1.5 Conclusion Chapter 2: Challenges to Freedom of Movement 2.1 Introduction 2.2 National Partiality 2.3 Collective Self-Determination 2.4 Conclusion Chapter 3: Actual Immigration Restrictions Are Unjust 3.1 Introduction 3.2 When Are Immigration Restrictions Justified? 3.3 States Can Be Wrong 3.4 Biases Against Immigration and Political Decision-Making 3.5 The Bias Argument 3.6 What I Really Think 3.7 Equal Citizenship 3.8 Conclusion Chapter 4: Are More Open Borders Feasible? Does It Matter? 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Why States Restrict Immigration 4.3 Possible Solutions 4.4 Entrenched Injustices and Individual Ethics 4.5 Conclusion Chapter 5: Resistance at the Border 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Defensive Rights and Permissible Resistance 5.3 External Legitimacy 5.4 Political Obligations 5.5 Non-Interference and Self-Determination 5.6 Civil Disobedience? 3 5.7 The Unfairness Argument 5.8 Conclusion Chapter 6: People Smuggling 6.1 Introduction 6.2 The Case for People Smuggling 6.3 Exploitation 6.4 Defective Motives 6.5 Deaths 6.6 Law-Breaking 6.7 Why People Smugglers Are Praiseworthy Chapter 7: Complicity and the Duty to Resist 7.1 Introduction 7.2 The Moral Responsibilities of Ordinary Citizens 7.3 State Officials 7.4 Personal Risks and Costs 7.5 Political Obligations (Again) and Role Responsibilities 7.6 Conclusion Chapter 8: Promoting More Open Borders 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Background Assumptions 8.3 Public Opinion 8.4 Elite Opinion 8.5 Policy 8.6 Encouraging Disobedience 8.7 The Effective Altruist Case Against Pro-Immigration Advocacy 8.8 The Future 4 Acknowledgements: I owe a debt of gratitude to many people who have helped me along the way. For reading drafts of chapters and providing helpful comments, I’d like to thank Ryan Davis, Chris Freiman, David Lefkowitz, Richard Dagger, and Terry Price, and Candice Delmas, and two anonymous referees. I owe a debt to Elizabeth DeBusk-Maslanka for reading an entire draft of the manuscript and suggesting corrections. I also benefited from feedback from the audiences at the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University, Brown University, the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, the University of Birmingham, Princeton University, and the Ethics Working Group at the University of Richmond. I’d also like to thank Chuck Beitz, Alan Patten, Stephen Macedo, Melissa Lane, Annie Stilz, and John Tomasi for feedback on a much earlier and inchoate version of this project. I owe much to Peter Steinberger, Margaret Scharle, David Mandel, and other professors at Reed College for encouraging me to pursue a career as a political philosopher. I’m grateful to Jason Brennan and Andrew Weckenmann for their encouragement and guidance, and to my colleagues at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies for their support. Thanks to Bryan Caplan and Michael Clemens for discussing the issues in this book with me and for their inspiring and pathbreaking work on immigration. Finally, my greatest debt is to Jessica Flanigan for her patience, advice, and kindness. I would never have finished this book—and much else—without her help and support. To a large extent, this book is a synthesis of my work on the ethics of immigration. Portions of this book draw on “The Ethics of People Smuggling,” Journal of Global Ethics 12.3 (2016): 311-326, “The Duty to Disobey Immigration Law,” Moral Philosophy and Politics 3.2 (2016): 165-186, “Resistance to Unjust Immigration Restrictions,” Journal of Political Philosophy 23.4 (2015): 450-470, “The Case for the International Governance of Immigration,” International Theory 8.1 (2016): 140-170, and “Liberalism or Immigration Restrictions, But Not Both,” with Christopher Freiman, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 10.2 (2016): 1-22. 5 Introduction 1. A Story I’m going to start with a true story. This story will illustrate themes in this book. During the 1980s, there was a refugee crisis on the United States’ southern border. Tens of thousands of refugees were trying to cross. They were fleeing civil war in Guatemala and El Salvador. The despotic governments of Guatemalan and El Salvador had launched military campaigns against citizens who opposed their rule. These campaigns were brutal. Paramilitary death squads in El Salvador and the military in Guatemala targeted human rights activists, union leaders, students, indigenous populations, and the members of other opposition groups.1 Over one hundred thousand people were killed in these conflicts. A priest in El Salvador described the horrific violence: “People were not just killed by death squads…they are decapitated and their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape… It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones while parents are forced to watch.”2 The priest tells the story of a women he knows, Tonita, who returned to her home one day to find her young children along with her mother and sister butchered by soldiers for no apparent reason. Many citizens of El Salvador and Guatemala decided to escape the violence by fleeing their countries. Some of them showed up at the United States-Mexico border. With the aid of smugglers, a large number of refugees crossed the border without permission from the United States government. Yet the United States government refused to recognize these people as refugees. Why? The reasons are complex. This was the 1980s. The United States government wanted to prevent the spread of communism in the Americas. Many of the opposition groups in El Salvador and Guatemala were leftist. Government officials feared that they would align with the Soviet Union 1 and communist Cuba if they toppled the right-wing governments of El Salvador and Nicaragua. So, the Carter and the Reagan administrations provided military aid to these governments. American officials thought that these governments were reliable allies in the fight against communism. But there was a problem. Congress prohibited foreign aid to countries that violated human rights. If the United States granted asylum to fleeing refugees who were the victims of government violence, this would be acknowledging that the Salvadorian and Nicaraguan governments were engaged in systematic human rights violations. So, American officials argued that the people from El Salvador and Nicaragua were economic migrants, not refugees. The government thus barred most of them from asylum and deported them. The deported people often met a grisly fate. For example, one refugee, Santana Chirino Amaya, was deported from Texas and found decapitated in El Salvador two months later. Perhaps 5 to 10 percent of these refugees were killed upon their return.3 Some American citizens were outraged by this policy toward Central American refugees. One of them was Jim Corbett. Corbett was a Quaker and he had once taught philosophy at Cochise College. He later became a goat herder in Arizona. Corbett had a strong anti- authoritarian streak. He’d been an opponent of the Vietnam war and had helped organized efforts against it, and he was dismissed from his philosophy job for protesting the college’s censorship of an instructor’s syllabus and the work of a visiting artist. Corbett was an advocate of a kind of nomadic pastoralism. He wanted to escape modern society and live in the wilderness with his goats, which he occasionally did. By chance, Corbett learned about the plight of Salvadorian and Nicaraguan refugees. After realizing how unjust their treatment was, Corbett decided to help them. 2 In a letter to his fellow Quakers, Corbett wrote: Speaking only for myself, I can see that if Central American refugees’ rights to political asylum are decisively rejected by the U.S. government or if the U.S. legal system insists on ransom that exceeds our ability to pay, active resistance will be the only alternative to abandoning the refugees to their fate. The creation of a network of actively concerned, mutually supportive people in the U.S. and Mexico may be the best preparation for an adequate response.4 Corbett was serious. He began to smuggle refugees across the border and housed two dozen of them in his home.