Immigration, global justice, and the state

The political philosophy of migration has been dominated by three competing approaches: inclusive cosmopolitanism, exclusive cosmopolitanism, and exclusive statism. Inclusive cosmopolitans argue that citizenship is morally arbitrary, and so should not determine a person’s life chances. Open borders would mitigate the inequalities in life prospects that result from the lottery of birth by allowing people to access (better) opportunities in other countries. Exclusive cosmopolitans agree that citizenship is irrelevant from a moral point of view, but believe that open borders would have suboptimal (and sometimes even negative) effects on global justice, so that states have good reason to control their borders. Finally, exclusive statists claim that states are the appropriate site of justice and that there is something ethically significant about citizenship (e.g., jurisdictional authority, collective ownership, freedom of association, or democratic self-determination) that entitles states to control their borders. This article develops a fourth approach: inclusive statism. It is statist in that it takes states as the primary site of justice, and it is inclusive because it argues that nothing in this picture justifies their right to exclude. In this way, it offers an alternative, more conciliatory, defense of open borders.