Abstract
Achieving justice in migration may appear to be an impossible task, but it is worth thinking forward to the mechanisms by which its demands can be met. In this chapter, I propose a set of considerations that should guide a World Migration Organization (WMO) which has, as its aim, to match migrants and states in ways that are satisfactory to both. Such an agency will need to consider the movement rights that individuals possess and the duties states have to admit migrants, as well as (perhaps more controversially) the preferences expressed by both migrants (to be admitted to a particular state) and states (to admit particular migrants). The purpose of this exercise is to offer a proposal for the unjust global order we are presently facing, much of which drives the demand to migrate, and much of which drives in particular developed states’ reluctance to admit migrants. In a more or less perfectly just world, it seems likely that migration would not pose the challenges it presently does.
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Notes
The expression ‘unfavourable conditions’ is taken from John Rawls (1999). Law of Peoples. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
See for example Phillip Cole (2000). Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Arash Abizadeh (2008). ‘Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders’, Political Theory 36(1): 37–65.
Thomas Nagel (2005). ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 33: 136.
Bimal Ghosh (2000). ‘Towards a New International Regime for Orderly Movements of People’, in Managing Migration: Time for a New International Regime? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Evidence of the risks that migrants will take to enter states illegally is staggering. See for example Luis Cabrera (2010). The Practice of Global Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hein De Haas (2005). ‘International migration, remittances and development: myths and facts’, Third World Quarterly 26(8): 1269–1284.
Pablo Gilabert (2012). From Global Poverty to Global Equality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gary S. Becker (2011). ‘The Challenge of Migration: A Radical Solution’. (London: Institute of Economic Affairs.
For a general argument of this type, see Debra Satz (2010). Why Some Things Should not be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
James Hathaway and Alexander Neve (1997). ‘Making International Refugee Law Relevant Again: A Proposal for Collectivized and Solution-Oriented Protection’, Harvard Human Rights Journal 10: 115–211.
Veit Bader (2012). ‘Moral, Ethical, and Realist Dilemmas of Transnational Governance of Migration’ American Behavioral Scientist 56(9): 1175.
Raffaele Marchetti (2008). ‘Toward a World Migratory Regime’, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 15(2): 478.
This is true even if, as my devoted friend Zofia Stemplowska — herself an immigrant — has argued, states have a duty to take up the slack and admit more than their fair share of refugees when others fail to do their fair share. For the general observation that institutions will serve to coordinate the assigning of imperfect duties, thereby making them perfect, see Onora O’Neill (1998). ‘Children’s Rights and Children’s Lives’, Ethics 98(3): 445–463.
As Ypi outlines, there are costs and benefits that must be accounted for in migration. See Lea Ypi (2008). ‘Justice in Migration: A Closed Borders Utopia?’, Journal of Political Philosophy 16(4): 391–418.
Michael Walzer (1983). Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books, 41.
For a discussion, see Christian Joppke (2005). Selecting by Origin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Thomas Pogge (2008). World Poverty and Human Rights. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Joseph Carens (1987). ‘Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders’, Review of Politics 49(2): 251–273.
For just some of this evidence, see Sanjeev Gupta, Catherine A. Pattillo and Smita Wagh (2009). ‘Effect of Remittances on Poverty and Financial Development in Sub-Saharan Africa’, World Development 37(1): 104–115
Richard Adams Jr. and John Page (2005). ‘Do international Migration and Remittances Reduce Poverty in Developing Countries?’, World Development 33(10): 1645–1669.
Matthew Gibney (2006). ‘A thousand little Guantanamos: Western states and measures to prevent the arrival of refugees’, in Migration, Displacement, Asylum: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2004, (ed.) K. Tunstall. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
As Christopher Wellman (2008) observes, in, ‘Immigration and Freedom of Association,’ Ethics 119(1): 109–141.
See respectively David Miller (2005). ‘Immigration: The Case for Limits’, in Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics, (ed.) Andrew Cohen and Christopher Wellman. Maiden: Blackwell Publishers.
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© 2014 Patti Tamara Lenard
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Lenard, P.T. (2014). MigrationMatch.Com: Towards a World Migration Organization. In: Brooks, T. (eds) New Waves in Global Justice. New Waves in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137286406_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137286406_10
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