The Ethics of Immigration Detention

Abstract

This dissertation is comprised of five standalone papers, which, in different ways, explore the moral status of immigration detention. My motivation for writing these papers is two-fold. First: immigration detention is one of the most pervasive and most harmful forms of border enforcement that is currently administered across the liberal democratic world. Second: despite this, questions pertaining to the moral status of immigration detention have received very little attention from moral and political philosophers who are otherwise interested in exploring the ethics of migration and border enforcement. In its modest way, this dissertation is intended to help fill this research gap by enriching the way that we understand immigration detention, the ways that it can harm the immigrant detainees, and the circumstances under which the state is permitted to administer it. In writing each of these papers, I have made the conscious decision to remain neutral in regard to the more general open versus closed borders debate. This decision was made in order to highlight that the moral status of immigration detention cannot be fully subsumed under questions relating to whether a legitimate state is morally permitted to exclude would-be migrants from entering, settling, or remaining inside of its territory. If there is a main upshot of these papers, it is this: although most real-life immigration detention policies are gratuitously unjust due to the suffering of the immigrant detainees, there are conditions under which the practice of immigration detention can be morally justified. The catch, however, is that these conditions are not normally satisfied in the real-world. And the corollary of this, as I will go on to explain, is that the state has a moral reason to enforce its territorial borders with more benign forms of border enforcement, such as non-custodial measures. Show more