Abstract
This chapter argues that governments have a duty to take reasonably effective and humane steps to minimize the occurrence of unauthorized migration and stay. While the effects of unauthorized migration on a country’s citizens and institutions have been vigorously debated, the literature has largely ignored duties of fairness to would-be immigrants. It is argued here that failing to take reasonable steps to prevent unauthorized migration and stay is deeply unfair to would-be immigrants who are not in a position to bypass visa regulations. Importantly, the argument here is orthogonal to the debate as to how much and what kinds of immigration ought to be allowed.
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Notes
- 1.
See International Monetary Fund (2017).
- 2.
- 3.
See for example, Vora (2013).
- 4.
For details of current US legal permanent residence policy, see USCIS (2017).
- 5.
The US has a visa waiver program for a select group of countries, but they are all developed. See U.S. Department of State (2017) for a full list. The reason these countries are all developed is that the chance that a citizen of one of them would use a tourist visa to enter the US and then choose to abandon residence is much smaller than for developing countries.
- 6.
Analysis done by Migration Policy Institute (2014) shows that as of 2014, 71% of undocumented immigrants in the US were from Mexico and Central America. Given the massive overrepresentation relative to population, it is reasonable to infer that the shared land border makes it easier to migrate to the US without the relevant authorization. See also PEW Research (2014) for a further breakdown of countries of origin.
- 7.
There is some dispute as to how much completed border fencing on the southern border would cost. The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that the construction of such fencing costs up to $3.9 million per mile—see Government Accountability Office (2009). Part of the 1933-mile border is already fenced, but even supposing the whole border had to be redone, the cost of doing so would be $7.54 billion, given the GAO estimate. This one-time cost would comprise 0.2% of the total yearly US Federal Budget of $3.76 trillion—see White House Office of Management and Budget (2015). A leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security, reported in Ainsley (2017), put the estimated cost much higher, at $21.6 billion. This is still less than 1% of the government’s yearly budget.
- 8.
See for instance Huemer (2004).
- 9.
This terminology was popularized by Parfit (1997), in which it is used in framing an objection to a certain type of egalitarianism.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jonathan Anomaly, Daniel Jacobson, and Eduardo Martinez for extremely useful comments on an earlier draft. Many thanks also to David Boonin for helpful feedback during the editing process.
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Joshi, H. (2018). Immigration Enforcement and Fairness to Would-Be Immigrants. In: Boonin, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93907-0_14
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