Can immigration restrictions be justified?

Many arguments have been put forward in favor of restricting immigration, from establishing security (especially since 9/11) to dire political realism. Most of the arguments for restrictions are based on the state’s right to self determination, which includes rights such as freedom of association or preserving culture. However, not only are these justifications inadequate in themselves but also can be easily trumped by the human right to freedom of movement and subsistence if we consider the current context of extreme global inequalities and severe global poverty, in which citizenship is equivalent to medieval feudal status.

Christopher Wellman has argued for border restrictions based on a state’s right to freedom of association. Seeing states as autonomous bodies and comparing them with private clubs or marriages, Wellman holds that the state’s right to freedom of association includes the right not to associate and the right to disassociate. Although recognising that the state’s right to self-determination could be outweighed in sufficiently compelling instances, Wellman stresses that denying the state’s right of freedom of association would fail to condemn annexations of territory by states and would additionally prevent states from joining regional agreements such as the EU or NAFTA. One fails to see however how these issues are directly related to immigration, and how open borders would lead to Wellman’s scenarios.

The appeal of Wellman’s argument is that his defense of immigration restrictions does not mention the political community’s distinctive character or culture, as every political community is entitled to the right to freely associate. What he does omits is the close (but unjustified) link between a state’s right to freedom of association and a state’s claims to territorial jurisdiction, which itself derives from the individual’s right to place theorised by Hobbes. This link is crucial when justifying immigration restrictions, as the territory of a state if commonly conceptualised as if it were an individual’s private property. Thus, restricting immigration is not only refusing to associate but forcibly excluding from a territory, and Wellman seems to fail to address this point. Not only are territorial claims difficult to justify in most cases, but an individual’s right to freedom of association can be opposed to that of the state to reject immigration restrictions.  Overall, the analogy between personal and political freedom of association is highly questionable, as well as whether corporate political entities are eligible for moral rights (aren’t state meere instruments?). And, in any case, only legitimate states would have a presumptive right to exclude outsiders if we accepted  a state’s right to freedom of association.

A second case for restricting immigration derived from a state’s right to self-determination is that of preserving culture. Miller has stressed the appeal of cultural continuity and the fact that (most) people want to be able to shape the way their nation develops. Although preserving a particular culture or way of life is not morally objectionable in itself (at long as it does not entail claims of domination or superiority), one fails to see how open borders would impede this preservation. One just has to look at how many cultures have been preserved in the context of free migration within the state, as is the case of Quebec in Canada, or across states, as exemplified by the European Union. The idea that open borders would threaten particular cultures not only assumed that the immigrants’ culture is completely incompatible and that newcomers will always resist assimilation but it is also based on an irrational fear of change and an underestimation of how much culture changes naturally.

As seen, the political rights of self-determination of a state, whether based on the right to freedom of association or on the desire to preserve a particular culture, are not particularly strong cases for restricting immigration, and they become even less convincing in a context of global poverty and persistent human rights violations. Because we live in a world in which the country of birth of an individual matters tremendously to their life prospects (to the extent that their right to life can be threatened by the place they are born in), any possible justification for immigration restrictions based on a state’s right to self-determination is constantly being trumped by global poverty and human rights violations. Some theorists have argued that opening borders in the current context would provoke a serious brain drain of the countries of emigration as only the most capable individuals would emigrate, but this would only be the case if an open borders policy was not counterbalanced with effective foreign aid and better global institutions (despite the ongoing debate over their effectiveness). Not only have individuals a right to migrate, they also have a right to stay wherever they are and thus all states should ensure that both rights are fulfilled. Although immigration should not be seen as an alternative to directly addressing global poverty, people should have the right to migrate without threatening anyone’s culture.