ABSTRACT
My goal here is twofold: First, I wish to make a plea for the relevance of moral considerations in debates about immigration. Too often,
immigration debates are conducted solely from the standpoint of “what is good for us,” without regard for the justifiability of immigration policies to those excluded. Second, I wish to offer a standpoint that demonstrates why one should think of immigration as a moral problem that must be considered in the context of global justice. More specifically, I will argue that the earth belongs to humanity in common and that this matters for assessing immigration policy. The case I will be particularly interested in is immigration into the
political leaders and citizens, as well as most contemporary philosophers, would acknowledge, at least in some form. Immigration-permanent or temporary-can serve this function partly because it allows some people access to greener pastures, and partly because of the remittances sent back by immigrants to their countries of origin. Once we think of immigration in a global context, we are led to ask more fundamental questions-namely, why it would be acceptable in the first place (especially to those thus excluded) that we draw an imaginary line in the dust or adopt the course of a river and think of that as a border. As Rousseau famously remarks at the opening of Part II of his Second Discourse on Inequality, “The first person who, having fenced off a lot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.” Is it only because of such simplicity that states are accepted? Such thoughts leave us wondering about the legitimacy of a system of states per se.
