Enforcing immigration law

Abstract

Over the last few years, an increasingly sophisticated literature devoted to normative questions arising out of the enforcement of immigration law had developed. In this essay, I consider what sorts of constraints considerations of justice and legitimacy may place on the enforcement of immigration law, even if we assume that states have significant discretion in setting their own immigration policies, and that open borders are not required by justice. I consider constraints placed on state or national governments, constraints on enforcement by substate governments, and constraints on the actions of individuals. I show that there are significant limits on what states may do and what they may require substate governments and individuals to do, in enforcing their immigration laws, but that these constraints are not clearly incompatible with significant state discretion in setting immigration policy. Nonetheless, consideration of justice in enforcement is necessary for any complete normative account of immigration.

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

“…On the one hand, the authorities can cooperate with each other for the purpose of immigration enforcement, so there is no need to build a blanket firewall of the sort advocated by Carens (2013: 132–135). One might worry that this will discourage irregular immigrants from going to the doctor, taking their children to school, and reporting crimes out of fear that their irregular status might be found out and they will be subsequently deported (Lister, 2020: 5–6). I am happy to grant an exception in these cases, but only insofar as it is necessary to protect their human rights to health, education, and security.…”

Saving Migrants’ Basic Human Rights from Sovereign Rule

“…This camp consists of a range of contributions that respond to states’ violations of basic human rights at borders by theorizing and advocating for solutions that are understood as tweaks conducive to making supposedly liberal democracies live up to their ideational promises. Dominant principles of sovereign state jurisdiction over immigration enforcement thus largely go unchallenged: it is not that our systems of bordering are fundamentally misconceived but that principally adequate systems stand in need of serious repair (e.g., Cohen 2020; Lister 2020; Mendoza 2017). For instance, Elizabeth Cohen (2020, chaps.…”

Authority and Immigration

“…On Nagel’s account, all it has to show is that its immigration policy does not violate the basic human rights of the immigrants, a condition that might require it to admit asylum seekers, for example. This account could of course be strengthened by adding further moral requirements, such as procedural requirements to govern the way that immigrants are treated by the admission system (for a good account of the moral constraints that states may be subject to when dealing with immigrants, see Lister, 2020: section 2). But these constraints would be self-imposed; they would be no different in principle from the constraints that citizens impose on themselves when they legislate to protect animals against cruel treatment.…”