Refugees, economic migrants and weak cosmopolitanism

Abstract

This article takes issue with several features of David Miller’s account of justice with respect to refugees and to economic migrants, as outlined in Strangers in our Midst. It suggests that even within the terms of his own weak cosmopolitanism, the requirements of justice are more demanding than he acknowledges. In particular, the argument advanced criticizes Miller’s ‘fair shares’ argument concerning obligations to refugees and his recourse to ‘mutual advantage’ in theorizing economic migration.

Keywords:

• refugees
• economic migrants
• fair shares
• temporary migration
• cosmopolitanism

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my fellow commentators and the audiences at the APT Political Thought conference at Oxford and at the Symposium on Strangers in our Midst at the University of Hamburg. Thanks to Phil Parvin and Leigh Jenco for the invitation to the former, and Christine Straehle for the invitation to the latter. I am also grateful to an anonymous referee for their comments and to Phil Parvin for his editorial work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Owen (2016) for a fuller discussion of this issue.

2. As Matthew Gibney has recently argued, respecting the choices of refugees to the widest extent compatible with a fair distribution of responsibility for refugee protection ‘is likely to be pivotal in refugees developing into independent, dignified and contented members of their new society’ (2015, p. 12). It should be noted that Gibney’s criticism is directed against my own previous writing on this topic (Owen 2016) as well as Miller’s (2007) and his point is well-taken.

3. We should also, I think, be more wary that Miller allows of refugee trading schemes on general grounds. Miller’s response to objections to refugee trading schemes hangs on the claim that these objections suppose ‘that under a transfer system states will vary the amount they pay to pass refugees on according to the specific characteristics of the refugees themselves, and I can see no good reason to accept this assumption.’ He contends: ‘The payments made are meant to reflect the material costs borne by the receiving states in accommodating the refugees who are transferred, and these will be uniform costs.’ But the claim that such cost will be uniform is dubious: the material costs of accommodating different groups of refugees may vary significantly depending on their differing abilities to integrate into a given state or to contribute to that state.

4. The standard model of thinking about this in terms of one-off emergency scenarios is very misleading in this respect.

5. I am grateful for an anonymous referee for pushing me to clarify this point and providing a lucid formulation of how to do so.

6. Although it would need some nuancing in relation to practices of temporary or circular migration of high skilled professionals.

7. See Brock and Blake (2015) for a significant debate on this topic that is continued and expanded in the special issue of Moral Philosophy and Politics addressing their dialog.

8. Anderson (2013) has a good discussion of how this may occur in the context of her discussion of black–white inequality in the USA and there are several respects in which her analysis can be applied to immigrant-citizen relations.

9. See Owen (2013) for a consideration of this issue.