Migration and justice: a reply to my critics

Abstract

In this response to six critics, I begin by clarifying the sense in which my approach to the issue of immigration is ‘realistic’. I also explain why a realistic approach must place immigration in a nation-state context, although without treating it as primarily reparative for historic injustice. I suggest that it is implausible to regard global equality of opportunity, as opposed to global sufficiency, as setting limits to national self-determination. I then defend my use of the distinction between refugees and economic migrants to frame the discussion of immigration against the charge that all migrants are potentially vulnerable to the decisions of admitting states, since these may determine the fate of their life-projects. And I also defend the claim that, in the case of refugees, justice requires only that each state should discharge its fair share of the burden of admitting them; doing more than this would require popular consent. Finally, I consider the case of irregular migrants, and explain in what sense they have taken unfair advantage of other potential migrants; I defend offering a conditional amnesty to people in this category.

Keywords:

• amnesty
• burden-sharing
• economic migrants
• equality of opportunity
• immigration
• irregular migrants
• nation-state
• realism
• refugees
• vulnerability

Notes

1. Thanks to Phil Parvin’s excellent introduction to this symposium, I need not expand on this point any further here.

2. In fact, Rawls is ambiguous about this. He wavers between saying that equality of opportunity can’t be fully achieved so long as the institution of the family exists, and saying that family-influenced differences in motivation and capacity to gain from education are consistent with fair equality of opportunity as he defines it. See my discussion in ‘Equality of Opportunity and the Family’ in (Miller, 2013, pp. 142–164).