Border-Crossing: Immigration Law, Racism and Justified Resistance

Abstract

Aside from the case of refugees under international law, are non-citizen outsiders morally justified in unlawfully entering another state? Recent answers to this question, based on a purported right of necessity or civil disobedience, exclude many cases of justified border-crossing and fail to account for its distinctive political character. I argue that in certain non-humanitarian cases, unlawful border-crossing involves the exercise of a remedial moral right to resist the illegitimate exercise of coercive power. The case accepts, for the sake of argument, two conventional assumptions among defenders of immigration restrictions: that states have a ‘right to exclude’ and that migrants have a prima facie duty to respect borders. Nonetheless, where immigration law is racist or otherwise discriminatory, it violates the egalitarian standards at the core of any authority it can plausibly claim over outsiders. In such cases, it may be resisted even where the law is facially non-discriminatory.

Global justice, individual autonomy, and migration policy

“…To this effect, I propose three conditions that must be met for immigration settled irregular migrants, then there is also some period of time before this threshold is crossed". 16 This question has been explored at length by Hidalgo (2019), Huemer (2019), andAitchison (2023). For a contrary view, see Yong (2018) and Miller (2023).…”

The ethics of immigration enforcement: How far may states go?

“…The second objection is that immigration controls are systematically biased against racial minorities and other historically discriminated groups. Racist prejudices continue to inform admission and surveillance practices, making it almost impossible to insulate immigration enforcement from racial discrimination (Aitchison, 2023: 608–610; Fine, 2016; Sager, 2020: 58–59). For this reason, even if immigration restrictions may be justified in principle, they are unjustified in practice.…”

“… 2. For opposing views in this debate, see Hidalgo (2019), Huemer (2019), and Aitchison (2023), on one side, and Yong (2018) and Miller (2023), on the other. …”

Colonial injustice, legitimate authority, and immigration control

“…In doing so, the argument expands on contributions that have pointed at other contextual factors as challenges to the state's legitimate authority over (would-be) immigrants (e.g. Aitchison, 2021;Blunt 2019;Sandven, 2022;Schmid, 2022). Importantly, it also refutes the idea that preexisting moral commitments can coherently overdetermine all relevant normative conclusions about migration control, so that non-cosmopolitan and cosmopolitan liberals may reach opposing conclusions on the basis of a shared set of factsabout colonial norms and practices, for instance (see Finlayson, 2020;Kreutz, 2022).…”