Structural Injustice and Socially Undocumented Oppression: Changing Tides in Refugee and Immigration Ethics

In this review essay, I discuss two recent works in refugee and migration ethics, Serena Parekh’s No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis and Amy Reed-Sandoval’s Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice. I find that their methodological ambitions overlap significantly and that their arguments represent welcome and largely successful examinations of generally neglected issues. I also explain how both approaches could fruitfully learn from each other, and argue that they lay pioneering groundwork for future work to continue the analysis of only nascent modes and areas of inquiry.

Socially Undocumented

What does it really mean to “be undocumented,” particularly in the contemporary United States? Political philosophers, policymakers and others often define the term “undocumented migrant” legalistically—that is, in terms of lacking legal authorization to live and work in one’s current country of residence. Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice challenges such a pure “legalistic understanding” by arguing that being undocumented should not always be conceptualized along such lines. To be socially undocumented, it argues, is to possess a real, visible, and embodied social identity that does not always track one’s actual legal status in the United States. By integrating a descriptive/phenomenological account of socially undocumented identity with a normative/political account of how the oppression with which it is associated ought to be dealt with as a matter of social justice, this book offers a new vision of immigration ethics. It addresses concrete ethical challenges associated with immigration, such as the question of whether open borders are morally required, the militarization of the Mexico-U.S. border, the perilous journey that many Mexican and Central American migrants undertake to get to the United States, the difficult experiences of many socially undocumented women who cross U.S. borders to seek prenatal care while pregnant, and more.

Working in tandem: Proportionality and procedural guarantees in EU immigration law

This Article aims at highlighting theoretical and practical issues around the application of the general principle of proportionality in EU immigration. It focuses on the application procedure foreseen by the Single Permit Directive by proposing an argument that combines proportionality and procedural guarantees. This Article has two main objectives: First, it explains why and how the general principle of proportionality is applicable to first admission applications. In this context, the Single Permit Directive—adopted as an important piece of the emerging EU legal regime on immigration—will represent a common theme for our reflections and a timely example on the practical implications of the argument presented in this Article. Second, it explores an important dimension of the legal-philosophical relevance of proportionality as applied to immigration. This specific Article might be apprehended from the point of view of a larger debate on the meaning of discretion in immigration law. It connects to the field of immigration ethics, a field in which legal scholars should become more active. As will be shown, ethical and legal considerations on immigration should work closely together, thereby improving current regulations and their implementation.

Internalized Borders: Immigration Ethics in the Age of Trump

The Trump administration’s immigration measures and attendant dehumanizing rhetoric have fanned the flames of nationalism and sown fear in communities. Its internal enforcement strategies are bolstered by manipulative narratives that perpetuate myths and reflect facile analyses of complex dilemmas, focusing on symptoms rather than causes of migration. Reducing immigration questions to the locus of border crossers alone eclipses from view transnational actors responsible for economic instability, violent conflict, or labor recruitment, and also eclipses their accountability. Recent developments in migration ethics help illuminate significant historical and structural contexts of migration as well as models of justice and norms for negotiating duties of reception that better reflect such relationships. Attending to underlying fears and idolatries that contribute to exclusionary dynamics also emerges as critical for advancing just policy reforms and cultivating civic friendship moving forward.

Immigration Ethics and the Context of Justice

By now one might hope that the robust body of theoretical work recently published on immigration ethics would have taken general political philosophy a long way from the prevailing Rawlsian-style insularity premise, according to which society is “a closed system isolated from other societies” into which persons “enter only by birth and exit only by death.” But there are still a great many political theorists whose focus is unreflectively endogenous and who assume away questions of states’ constitutive scope and boundaries. One of the signal merits of David Miller's new book, Strangers in Our Midst, is that it lucidly demonstrates why ignoring state boundary constitution is untenable for political theory. Miller shows that foundational debates in political philosophy are inescapably related, both as premise and entailment, to many normative immigration questions.