An Introduction to the Ethics of Migration

Alex Sager

On 2 September 2015, the drowned body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi briefly galvanized discussion around refugee flows. Kurdi's family had fled their home to escape the Syrian civil war, finding temporary refuge in Turkey before attempting to reach Greece with the hope of eventually joining family in Vancouver, Canada. Though Turkey opened its borders to Syrian refugees, it only gave refugee status to those with passports. Since the Syrian government had denied passports to much of its Kurdish population, the Kurdi family found itself living irregularly in Turkey, unable to obtain exit visas. Alan's aunt in Canada, Tima Kurdi, had tried to sponsor the family, but failed due to financial constraints, the family's lack of formal refugee status, and the red tape of the Canadian immigration system.

According to the International Organization for Migration, 3,771 migrants drowned in the Mediterranean in 2015. Thousands more children have perished in the Syrian civil war and well more than a million survive as refugees. In response, European governments have fortified their borders against migration flows and signed an agreement to detain refugees in Greece to return them to Turkey. Though Europeans have repeatedly labelled the approximately million people who have crossed the Mediterranean to seek asylum in Europe the 'European migration crisis', far more refugees subsist in Turkey (2.6 million), Lebanon (1 million), Jordan (630,000), Iraq (245,000), and Egypt (117,000).'

Alan's death touches on many of the moral questions surrounding migration raised by the authors of this collection. What do individuals, states, and the international community owe to people fleeing violence and persecution? How should the burdens of protection for today's 19.5 million refugees be distributed? Indeed, should we accept the common understanding of 'refugee'? Under article 1 of the 1951 Refugee Convention, a refugee is described as someone with 'a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country'. Or should we extend the definition to anyone in dire need or who suffers human rights violations?

Moving away from questions of defining refugees, measures such as carrier sanctions prevent people from boarding an airplane without a visa, forcing people like Alan's family seeking asylum to resort to smugglers. How should we view smuggling — an act that is often criminalized and conflated with human trafficking? Are measures to prevent and regulate unauthorized migration such as deportations and detention morally defensible?

More radically, is it possible to morally justify border controls at all? As authors such as Joseph Carens and Ayelet Shachar have pointed out, border controls in the contemporary state system instantiate something analogous to the birthright privilege of the feudal system: since most of the world's population is deprived of legal means to immigrate in search of better wages and opportunities, where one is born largely determines one's life chances (Carens 1987; Shachar 2009). What moral grounds — if any — do citizens of wealthy states have for using force to prevent people from poorer regions working and settling in their territories?

If we reject the idea that states should open their borders not only to refugees, but to migrants more generally, how do we design a just immigration system? How can we distinguish between presumably unjust reasons for discrimination such as racial prejudice from possibly just reasons such as the admitted immigrant possessing valuable skills? Should citizens have a right for family members to join them that takes priority over other (often poorer) people who wish to migrate? When reflecting on the justice of migration policy, do we need to take into account the effects in sending states such as the fear that out-migration leaves vulnerable regions without skilled professionals? How should we assess temporary labour migration programs which are often proclaimed to be a feasible alternative to utopian proposals for open borders, promising 'win-win-win' solutions that benefit migrants as well as sending and receiving states? What about temporary labour programs that attract primarily women from abroad to perform care work? Once immigrants and refugees settle, how should they be integrated into the rest of society? Also, how should states treat people within their borders who lack legal status? Does justice require creating mechanisms that allow them to regularize their status?

The purpose of this collection is to orient ethical reflection and to propose and to defend positions on these sorts of questions. An estimated 232 million people live outside of the country of their birth; around 740 million people have migrated internally (International Organization for Migration 2015) . The history of humanity is a history of mobility, but political philosophy has often operated under the assumption of stasis in which migration is ignored or treated as pathological and exceptional. This is unfortunate as any normative theory that attempts to provide guidance for today's world needs to take migration into account. Migration is fundamental to debates on nationalism, multiculturalism, and citizenship. It is also a key component of debates on state sovereignty, transnationalism, and movements towards global governance. The economic benefits of migration (Clemens 2011) and the fact that migration accompanies economic development make it a central part of any robust theory of distributive justice (de Haas 2012). Migration not only has enormous human costs and consequences, it is a constitutive part of many of the processes that sustain and transform our social, political, and economic...