Global equality of opportunity and self-determination in the context of immigration

Abstract

David Miller’s political philosophy of immigration employs two complementary argumentative strategies to challenge open border theories. The first strategy is to defeat the principled case for open borders, such as the global equality of opportunity argument for more lax immigration control. The second strategy is to establish the democratic community’s prima facie right to determine the shape of its future, including membership and the right to exclude. First, I argue that Miller’s conception of global equality of opportunity is overly narrow and that his objections to the principle, to the metric and to what counts as feasible political action misfire against other, more plausible, accounts. Second, I argue that his democratic interpretation of collective self-determination does not solve the pressing question concerning the morally justified scope and content of self-determination and the moral limits of the right to exclude. I conclude by questioning Miller’s general strategy: whether theories of immigration should be engaged in an exercise of shifting the burden of proof between open and closed borders. By contrast, I argue that a more desirable task for the political philosophy of immigration is to find ways in which the joint requirement of global equality of opportunity and collective self-determination can be coherently upheld.

Keywords:

• global fair equality of opportunity
• moral arbitrariness of birthplace
• right to collective self-determination
• justified constraints on the right to exclude
• personal autonomy and political belonging

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Christine Straehle, David Miller, Philip Cole, and participants of the ‘Strangers in Our Midst Book Symposium’ at the University of Hamburg for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. A discussion on which factors are considered morally arbitrary, and why, according to different conceptions of equality of opportunity would take us beyond the scope of this essay.

2. I return to this point concerning what is of value in relations of co-citizenship and shared jurisdiction in Section 2.

3. This seems to be Miller’s fundamental concern in light of his earlier take on global egalitarianism in Miller (2007). For a helpful discussion on this point see Owen (2010).

4. Rawls’ fair equality of opportunity principle requires equalizing opportunities among children with roughly equal talent and motivation. As a consequence, opportunities between children who are differently talented do not need to be equalized. I want to focus on the problem of motivation here.

5. It is different from the ‘narrow political’ identification Miller discusses in Miller (2016), p. 9.

6. David Owen, in this volume, makes a compelling argument for why even this more minimalist human rights constraint is incompatible with democratic self-determination.