Abstract
The suppression of trade barriers and liberalization of financial flows inherent to the expansive dynamic of globalization have not extended to international flows of workers. To impede the free movement of workers, restrictive migratory policies have been implemented, and borders have been fortified with walls and fences. In the face of this widespread phenomenon, this chapter presents an alternative consisting of three steps. First, it is noted that in the current migratory context, borders play a key role in reproducing inequalities between countries. Next, it is argued that given the incompatibility of this function with global justice, it is necessary to seek some remedy to put an end to the suffering caused by this structural injustice, a suffering that is endured by an immense number of people unlucky enough to have been born on the wrong side of a border. After presenting a conception of borders that, unlike walls, would enable the movements of people, finally, a scenario is proposed in which the rights of political membership would be reassigned in a cosmopolitan manner and in which borders would usually remain open. Although this does not entail a radical suppression of the aforementioned injustice, its implementation would contribute to not only its reduction but also to the compensation of victims.
Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own.
Hobsbawn (2002: 418)
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Notes
- 1.
Nature knows no political borders: neither winds nor desert sands nor birds stop for them, nor do toxic clouds such as those that drifted from Chernobyl (Ukraine) across the Iron Curtain toward the countries of Central Europe.
- 2.
On this point, appropriate references include not only article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which establishes the right to an adequate standard of living) but also article 28 of this declaration: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized”. Based on this article, human rights would be a valid criterion for the formation and implementation of both national and international institutions (Pogge 2002: 124).
- 3.
For a convincing explanation of why in the field of population mobility “the language of humanitarianism” does not end inequality problems but, to a certain extent, even reproduces them, see Ticktin (2016). It is not a matter of excluding the language of moral emotions but of channeling them so that they promote political actions aimed at addressing the structural causes of the wounds suffered by a large part of humanity.
- 4.
This proposal has clear similarities with Pogge’s (2002). Four theses of his would be essential for framing the debate on the issue: first, that the problem of poverty is not a problem of humanitarian assistance or solidarity but of justice; second, that said problem is thus not an individual issue but an institutional one; third, that it is a problem of the violation of human rights that has its origins in an unjust institutional order; and fourth, that the question that must be asked has to do with the available alternatives to the current unjust order.
- 5.
It is not possible to “naturalize” persistent inequality because such inequality is a social product placed at the service of certain interests: “Durable inequality among categories arises because people who control access to value-producing resources solve pressing organizational problems by means of categorical distinctions. Inadvertently or otherwise, those people set up systems of social closure, exclusion, and control” (Tilly 1998: 7–8).
- 6.
North-South relations –taking both terms not in their geographic sense but as political-social configurations– are crystallized in formidable disparities regarding economic prosperity, social conditions, security and human rights, with the South commonly worse off (IOM 2013: 41–44).
- 7.
The attribution of moral significance to the distinction between choices and circumstances constitutes one of the basic intuitions of so-called Luck Egalitarianism (Dworkin 2003; Arneson 2004). Characteristic of this theoretical current is its attempt to develop criteria of justice that neutralize the distributive impact of luck in people’s lives. Hence its desire to also articulate modes of compensating people for factors of inequality that are not the result of their own decisions nor depend on their good or bad management, for example, social origin, genetic inheritance or nationality .
- 8.
Among the various mechanisms, we can cite a widespread practice, protected by the World Trade Organization, that forces the poorest countries to suddenly open up their markets, while the more prosperous countries can shield their markets from products coming from developing countries through market shares or internal subsidies; as is known, agricultural products and labor-intensive goods “are precisely those that the majority of developing countries can really export” (De la Dehesa 2003: 16). For their part, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund provide financial assistance to developing countries that is conditioned by the adoption of structural adjustment programs that imply, depending on the case, the privatization of basic public services or increases in excise taxes. The foreign debt of developing countries has also become an instrument of policy control. The externalization of the most difficult phases of productive processes by multinational corporations to Third World countries under deplorable social and work conditions also shows the level of exploitation frequently suffered by the inhabitants of such countries (Young 2011: 125–134).
- 9.
The notion of structural injustice refers not so much to the interpersonal dimension of justice, which would value the behavior of particular agents, but rather its institutional dimension, that which is highlighted when judging the functioning of the rules, practices and institutional arrangements through which collective ends are sought. With this notion, rather than attributing direct responsibility to individual agents, it would seek to place the moral responsibility of individuals in institutional schemes. This type of conceptual strategy, which with certain fluctuations is followed by Iris M. Young (2011) , for example, and is clearly indebted to Rawls’s ideas , only privileges justice understood as a virtue of institutions over justice as a moral virtue of individuals. In any case, a valuable contribution by this author is her articulation of a model of responsibility – based on a causal connection – with which to justify the extension of the global sphere of responsibilities for justice. On the extension of the notion of responsibility, both interpersonal and structural, to the global context, see also Beck 2016: chap. 4.
- 10.
The assumption of such duties is inseparable from a previous cognitive process: “But, since we see no causal link between global factors and the incidence of oppression, corruption, and poverty , we do not even ask whether those who shape global institutions and, more generally, the global context in which the poorer countries are placed have a negative moral responsibility for world poverty” (Pogge 2002: 141).
- 11.
Moral responsibility has an unconditional nature, and in the case of migrants and refugees that go to the world’s wealthiest countries, it is common to try and unload that weight by denying the humanity of its potential recipients or smearing or defaming their image in order to see them as unworthy of consideration and respect (Bauman 2016: Chap. 4). Dehumanizing those that arrive is a way of delegitimizing them as deserving of our attention.
- 12.
Of course, and given that borders are historically constructed, the affirmation expressed above is only valid for perhaps the last two centuries, and even then, not everywhere. Previously, in pre-national States, “borders were porous and indistinct” (Anderson 2006: 19). If anything is true of borders, it is that they have nothing resembling an essence that is valid across all places and times (Balibar 1996).
- 13.
It is not evident, however, that from a consistent democratic ideology there exists a legitimate unilateral right to control state borders (Abizadeh 2008).
- 14.
In this context, the imbalance between publicly proclaimed objectives and the practical consequences of the policies implemented is enormous. The truly verifiable effect of the tightening of border control policies is not at all the cessation of illegal immigration but rather the supplying of the economic system with cheap and submissive labor (De Genova 2002).
- 15.
Regarding the particular weight this approach has in the specific arena of migrations and the difficulties it generates, see Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002).
- 16.
On a planet whose size remains constant and whose habitable territories have been shrinking for a long time due to climate change, the predictable increase in the world population in the coming decades – which is also more accentuated in less prosperous regions – will drive many to abandon their own territories. As has begun to be noticed, massive displacements of people caused by this change will grow very considerably throughout the twenty-first century and further accentuate inequalities between the different parts of the planet (Welzer 2012). These are really forced displacements to the extent that there are no other options for people living in a country where it does not rain, temperatures are unbearable or the most fertile land has been flooded due to sea level rise and it is impossible to grow food.
- 17.
The accentuated socio-economic inequalities between countries are behind massive movements of people. Although flows of people tend to have their origin in situations of emergency (for example, famines, wars, natural disasters), a considerable part of migrations have a defined direction that goes from the poorest areas to the richest areas and that is largely the result of an unjust structural situation and an unequal distribution of wealth, natural resources, or so-called human capital.
- 18.
Based on the assumptions of luck egalitarianism , it is worth asking if it would not be justified to extend to voluntary migrants – who are therefore responsible for their choices – a less complete set of rights than those enjoyed by the receiving society. Against this idea, it can be argued, in line with Holtug (2017), that the voluntariness of many migrants – as is the case with so many poor and low-skilled migrants from developing countries – is fairly relative in as much as their choice is made in a scenario of limited real options.
- 19.
Pogge (1997) does not properly value the economic significance of the remittances immigrants send to family members residing in their countries of origin, and yet the relevance of this direct form of redistribution is evident if it is compared with two other magnitudes: overall, not only is it twice as large as the contributions of so-called humanitarian assistance, but it also exceeds foreign direct investment in such countries (Cheneval 2013). Regarding the practical effects of a liberal migration policy, Oberman (2015) believes sufficient evidence is available to affirm that its adoption by rich countries is effective in reducing poverty if combined with selective restrictions on brain drain. However, according to that author, the problem would be empirical, not normative.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been supported by the R&D project Human rights and global justice in the context of international migrations (FFI2013-42521-P). I am grateful to many friends and colleagues for their careful reading and constructive suggestions, in particular to Francisco Brotons, MariaCaterina La Barbera, Isabel Turégano, Federico Arcos, Daniel Loewe and Astrid Wagner.
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Velasco, J.C. (2019). Healing the Scars of History: Borders, Migration, and the Reproduction of Structural Injustice. In: Velasco, J., La Barbera, M. (eds) Challenging the Borders of Justice in the Age of Migrations. Studies in Global Justice, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05590-5_2
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