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Political Philosophy

Philosophers & Immigration Control

Edward Hall argues that philosophers of immigration are not thinking it through.

Much mainstream philosophical work on migration focuses on whether or not states have a unilateral right to exclude would-be migrants from their territory. This is, clearly, a vitally important question for contemporary politics. However, one striking feature of much of the literature which defends states’ rights to exclude would-be migrants is that it has very little to say about real-world practices of immigration control. Christopher Heath Wellman’s entry on ‘Immigration’ in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy is exemplary in this regard.

Wellman offers a useful overview of arguments for and against open borders, and also addresses a number of important questions concerning refugees, guest workers, and the ethics of selecting or recruiting immigrants. It is striking, however, that Wellman doesn’t address questions about which forms of immigration control are morally acceptable. Perhaps this omission can be explained because practices of control cannot affect our consideration of the central issue, of whether or not states have a right to unilaterally control their borders. However, even if controls on movement can be justified in the abstract, that does not settle the question of how those controls can morally be imposed in the real world, or even if they can.

Current Attempts to Control Access

Many rich democracies in the Global North have made it very difficult for foreigners to apply for asylum from abroad, while simultaneously attempting to discourage them from reaching their territory to claim asylum there. For example, some states limit access to asylum procedures by declaring that refugees who have travelled through a ‘safe’ country en route are unable to lodge a claim for asylum in the subsequent state. Some practice measures that aim to prevent migrants from physically accessing their territories, such as maritime interdiction. Several states now practice offshore asylum processing, and support the relocation of refugees to third countries. Many have also criminalized unauthorized migration and human smuggling. Taken together, these policies make it very difficult for unauthorized migrants to reach their desired states. It is also common for states to adopt indirect measures which intend to make their lands less attractive for refugees, by, for example, instituting detention policies on arrival, or limits on family reunification. Much academic work captures this attitude by saying that the current system operates according to a ‘logic of deterrence’.

While deterring unauthorized migrants, rich democracies in the Global North inflict much cruelty and suffering. It helps to distinguish between the cruelties that unauthorized migrants face when attempting to travel to destination states, which I term remote cruelty, and the cruelties they often face if they manage to enter such states, which I term proximate cruelty. These terms aren’t supposed to denote which cruelties rich democracies are or are not responsible for.

Rich democracies in the Global North employ various ‘remote control’ techniques to limit the number of migrants who reach their territories. This is an umbrella term for “practices, physical structures, and institutions whose goal is to control the mobility of individuals while they are outside the territory of their intended destination state” (Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers, David Scott FitzGerald, 2019, p.9). This is done so that these states can select which migrants they want to admit, while identifying, monitoring, detaining, or deterring those they want to repel. Most saliently, states from the Global North fund detention and border security initiatives in the Global South, ‘train’ local law enforcement agencies, and engage in joint interception activities. Rich democracies hope this will both prevent unauthorized migrants from arriving on their land, while also deterring others from attempting the journey. States hope to avoid legal responsibility for the ways that migrants are treated in this situation just because the deterrence takes place abroad, through complicated chains of authorisation involving many different state actors and private corporations. Several prominent scholars (for instance, David Scott FitzGerald and Didier Fassin) also insist that rich democracies want these harsh methods of deterrence to take place overseas because it renders the cruelty they involve invisible to electorates at home, who may object to it on humanitarian grounds. Remote control policies thus subject some of the most vulnerable people on the planet to horrendous cruelty and suffering. For instance, systematic fear is employed in the hope of achieving a form of social control. In many respects, this practice mirrors older patterns of colonial domination, where native leaders were incentivised to oppress their own people at the behest of the colonisers.

If unauthorized migrants manage to reach rich democracies, they can face further cruelty. On arrival, many are detained in state-run facilities: prisons, immigration removal centres, or temporary processing centres. Conditions are often grim; mould and vermin thrive, and disease is rife. Adequate medical treatment is often lacking. Moreover, detained migrants can be subject to verbal and physical abuse from underpaid and undertrained staff. States also have a persistent record of inflicting cruelty on unauthorized migrants before they are detained. There are credible reports of police and border patrol officials engaging in violent border pushbacks in many European states. In the US, immigration officials stand accused of holding manipulative ‘credible fear’ interviews instead of sincerely assessing whether unauthorized migrants have a compelling asylum claim (see Illegal, Elizabeth Cohen, 2020, p.61). Advocacy organizations have reported many examples of US agents falsely telling unauthorized migrants that they require the prior approval of Mexican authorities to lodge asylum claims (Refuge Beyond Reach, p.123). There have also been numerous reports of agents pressurising and intimidating unauthorized migrants to sign false statements that undermine their asylum applications (Illegal, pp.61-62).

State agents can also perpetrate dreadful cruelty by enforcing policies decided on by political decision-makers. The most notorious example is the earlier Trump regime’s family separation policy, introduced in 2018, which forcibly removed migrant children from the adults with whom they were travelling – usually their parents or other family members.

The Ethics of Migration Control

Until theoretical defenders of restrictive immigration controls are prepared to think seriously about the practicalities of imposing such controls while some people resist them due to a (natural) desire to improve their lot in the face of injustice and brutality, there is little reason to think that these defenders have done anything better than fantasize about immigration restrictions in an imaginary world.

Consider the following case. In his book Strangers in our Midst (2016), David Miller argues that immigration controls are not necessarily coercive. To illustrate this point he considers a situation where a state erects an impenetrable barrier along its borders so that unauthorized migrants simply cannot access its territory. According to Miller, these migrants are not coerced; they’re simply prevented from entering the state (pp.73-74). Philosophers generally accept that coercive acts require a justification that can make sense to the affected, whilst acts of prevention do not. But, as many scholars have observed, this argument says nothing about the overwhelming majority of immigration control measures that actually exist.

It’s even more damning to consider how Miller then develops his argument. Having contended that border controls are not necessarily coercive, he goes on to assert that “closing borders is properly understood as preventative” (p.75). This is shady. Even if we grant that Miller has established that some ways of closing borders are not coercive, this does not establish anything about how closing borders should be understood. Given that most of the actions in which states engage in order to close their borders are coercive, Miller appears to be insisting that a rare aspect of immigration control somehow represents the true underlying nature of border control in general.

In an important sense, philosophers who defend restrictive immigration controls in theory, while failing to consider contemporary practices of border control, have simply found another way of assuming compliance, and therefore brushing away the ethical issue that actually needs confronting. Immigration control isn’t going to seem like a pressing ethical issue as long as theorists think it’s intellectually respectable to simply assume that the relevant people (in this case, desperate foreigners) will comply with whatever rules are put in place. In the real world defenders of restrictive control policies must confront this fact. If they do so, they will realise they should be asking what states can and can’t acceptably do to those who do not comply. Pretending that the question doesn’t even arise is just evasive. As David Schmidtz notes, “Failing to engage real problems is not a way of having high standards” but instead is a refusal to seriously consider what counts as a high standard in response to a particular problem (Living Together: Inventing Moral Science, 2023, p.89).

José Jorge Mendoza gave us a pertinent reminder when he wrote that “a state can limit its border enforcement to morally acceptable levels while at the same time tacitly accepting that there will be some degree of unauthorized entry into its territory” (‘Enforcement Matters’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29 (1), 2015, p.84). This may seem facile, but it is profoundly important. Mendoza is emphasising the point that even if border enforcement is a legitimate policy objective, this does not settle the question of how it should be undertaken. He also reminds us that a degree of non-compliance is not only to be reckoned with, but hoped for, because full compliance could only ever be achieved through unacceptable methods.

Unfortunately, those who defend immigration controls on principled grounds show little sign of grasping the seriousness of either point. They theorise about immigration control in dreamland.

Edward Hall is a senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Sheffield. He is currently writing a book on contemporary forms of state-sanctioned cruelty.

• This piece originally appeared on the blog of the American Philosophical Association (https://blog.apaonline.org).