The Ethics of Immigration 1

Th e Ethics of Immigration This page intentionally left blank Th e Ethics of Immigration JOSEPH H. CARENS 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Th ailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitt ed, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitt ed by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Joseph H. Carens Th e ethics of immigration / Joseph H. Carens. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–993383–9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. United States—Emigration and immigration— Government policy. 2. Illegal aliens—United States—Government policy. 3. Emigration and immigration—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. JV6477.C37 2013 172'.2—dc23 2013011943 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Jenny, Michael, and Daniel This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix 1. Introduction: Mapping the Ethics of Immigration 1 P A R T O N E W H O B E L O N G S ? 2. Birthright Citizenship 19 3. Naturalization 45 4. Beyond Legal Citizenship to Inclusion 62 5. Permanent Residents 88 6. Temporary Workers 110 7 . I r r e g u l a r M i g r a n t s 129 8 . Th e Th eory of Social Membership 158 P A R T T W O W H O S H O U L D G E T I N ? 9. Ordinary Admissions 173 10. Refugees 192 11. Th e Case for Open Borders 225 12. Th e Claims of Community 255 vii viii Contents 13. Conclusion 288 Appendix: Presuppositions and Political Th eory 297 N o t e s 315 R e f e r e n c e s 341 I n d e x 353 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is customary to save the dedication to the end of one’s acknowledgments, but I have over thirty years’ worth of people to thank, and I fear some readers might not make it to the end. So, I’ll begin with what is most important to me. I get great satisfaction from my work, but I have always known that my family mat- tered more. I have tried to live in accordance with that knowledge and not to sacrifi ce time with them to my work. For the most part, I have succeeded in that endeavor, and my life has been much the richer for it. I dedicate this book with love and gratitude to Jenny and Michael and Daniel. I fi rst started thinking about the ethics of immigration in 1980. I had been invited to participate in an APSA faculty seminar directed by Nan Keohane. Th e price of admission to the seminar was a commitment to write a paper on citizenship. While casting around for a topic, I found myself reading stories about Haitians trying to get to Florida to ask for asylum as refugees. I had no precon- ceptions about what Americans (or anyone else) should do about the Haitians, but I felt intuitively torn between the feeling that there was something wrong in excluding people in such obvious need and the worry that admitt ing every- one with comparable claims would be overwhelming and would be especially harmful to those already most disadvantaged in America. I wanted to look at the political theory literature on immigration to help me think about this topic, but I discovered, to my surprise, that there was no such literature. So, I decided to think about what the leading liberal theories of the day would entail if applied to this topic. Again I was surprised. I concluded that all of the theories I was considering (Rawls, Nozick, utilitarianism) should support open borders (with minor qualifi cations). For various reasons, I put the paper aside for a few years. By the time I returned to it, Michael Walzer had published his seminal piece on membership. In that essay Walzer argued that states are morally entitled to exercise discretionary control over immigration, at least for the most part. ix x Acknowledgments Engaging with Walzer’s essay clarifi ed my thinking, but it only served to confi rm my earlier view that liberal democratic principles entail a commitment to open borders. So, I added a critical discussion of Walzer, spent a long time polishing and refi ning my paper, and then sent it off . It was promptly—or, sometimes, not so promptly—turned down by three leading journals: American Political Science Review , Ethics , and Philosophy & Public Aff airs . I’ll admit to fi nding these rejec- tions discouraging. I persisted, however, and on my fourth try the paper found a home in Review of Politics . I thought that my open borders argument was gett ing at an important truth. At the same time, I recognized that it was not a practical proposal and that it did not provide much guidance for actual policy issues (like the question of how to respond to the Haitians). I was not quite sure how to go about pursuing the ethics of immigration further. Th en, in 1987, I was invited to a conference on comparative citizenship and naturalization policies organized by the German Marshall Fund. Th is conference involved administrators and policymakers from several European states along with academics who were mainly lawyers or empirical scholars. I was the only political theorist. I knew that this audience would not be much interested in an abstract philosophical discussion of Rawls, Nozick, and open borders. Th ey wanted to know what European states should do about the immigrants in their midst, people who had arrived as temporary workers but had sett led permanently. Fortunately, I had a political theorist to rely upon in addressing this issue: Michael Walzer. In the very same article in which he defended discretionary control over immigration, Walzer argued that if democratic states do admit immigrants, they have to put the immigrants on a path to citizenship. I found Walzer’s argument compelling and used it as the foundation for my own analysis in my contribution to the conference. My agreement with Walzer on access to citizenship did not change my views about our disagreement over admissions. Instead it set me to wondering about how to connect these two quite diff erent sorts of argument and how best to identify the moral issues raised by immigration. Some of these moral issues seemed to grow out of immediate, contingent circumstances. Others seemed more enduring and more tied to the central requirements of democratic principles. For some issues (like access to citizenship), what I thought justice required was already practiced by some democratic states and was not unimaginable in most of the others. For other issues (like open borders), what I thought justice required seemed far removed from anything feasible in the foreseeable future. And so I began to try to sort out these puzzles, hoping to provide an overview of the normative issues raised by immigration and to say something about the diff erent ways in which one might approach such a topic. I did not think that it would take me as long as it has to produce this book. By the early 1990s I had already writt en several papers on immigration. Indeed, Acknowledgments xi in 1993 Philippe van Parijs organized a workshop on my draft manuscript at Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. Th e workshop was helpful, but I felt that my manuscript did not fully hang together. I wanted to produce a sustained and coher- ent analysis, not just a collection of articles. In retrospect I can see that it was a mistake not to publish what I had then. Th at manuscript already advanced some of the key themes about social membership and open borders that are found in this book. Th e earlier version did not solve all of the problems, but then no book does, including this one. If I had published a book then, it would have advanced the conversation, and it certainly would have advanced my career. Still, one is fortunate indeed in life if one’s mistakes have such limited negative consequences as this mistake had for me. I did not keep my thoughts to myself but published them as articles. So, my ideas did reach a part of the scholarly community, if not the wider audience that a book can command. Moreover, I already had a secure position in a department that I regarded then (and still regard) as the best place in the world for a political theorist.

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