Morality in migration : duties of inclusion and exclusion

Abstract

My thesis focuses on two questions regarding the permanent movement of persons across international borders: (1) Do states have a right to grant or deny membership to prospective immigrants?; and (2) If states have this right, are there moral requirements regarding how they may exercise it? I begin by discussing and providing a critique of the work of theorists that have advocated open borders arrangements under which states would no longer enjoy rights to allocate membership. I argue that states should have a right to design their own immigration policies given the importance of freedom of association to their exercise of self-determination. Notwithstanding this right, however, I argue that states have positive and negative moral responsibilities to vulnerable people, and this can have implications for the immigration policies which they can permissibly adopt. In particular, I argue that states have a duty to include highly vulnerable people who can only be assisted through immigration so long as they can do so at moderate cost, and that they have a negative duty to exclude prospective immigrants if their departure would contribute to severe and foreseen deprivation in their country of origin. Show more