One reason that immigrants relocate to new countries is because they want their children, grandchildren, and so on, to lead better lives than they would otherwise. This somewhat banal observation offers what I think is a compelling justification for relatively well-off nations to admit migrants from relatively worse-off nations.
This justification starts by appealing to the idea of samaritan duties. Aptly named after the Biblical parable (Luke 10:25-37), samaritan duties are natural duties to assist the imperiled when doing so does not come at too great a cost to oneself.
Here is a favorite example among philosophers of samaritan duties in action. Imagine that you’re walking to some event in a fine pair of shoes, when you happen upon a pond with a drowning child in it. Luckily, the pond is shallow, so all you would need to do is wade in and pluck the child out. Alas, this will thoroughly ruin your fine shoes. Would it be permissible for you to allow the child to drown in order to preserve your fine shoes? Just about everyone answers with a firm “no.” You have a duty to rescue the child. Samaritan duties explain why. The child is imperiled, and you can alleviate their perilous condition at the comparatively meager cost of ruining your fine shoes. Shoes, however fine they may be, are not as valuable as a human life, so the cost you bear is dwarfed by the benefit that the rescued child receives. Samaritan duties are relevant in cases like this drowning child example—they hold that when we can help people in perilous situations at relatively little cost to ourselves, then we have an obligation to do so.
Let’s return to the question of immigration. One could argue that members of well-off nations have samaritan duties to admit migrants from relatively poorly-off nations. People from poorly-off nations are often imperiled, and we can help them at the relatively low cost of granting them entry (I am going to assume that one can be imperiled without qualifying as a refugee—the kind of case I have in mind are individuals who will lead significantly better lives were they to immigrate, but who are not actively persecuted or suffering severe human rights violations).
Despite the near universal acceptance of samaritan duties, some thinkers object to the samaritan case for immigration. Importantly, these thinkers don’t reject the claim that we bear, or could bear, samaritan duties to individuals in other nations. Rather, they challenge whether well-off nations have samaritan duties to admit those persons as immigrants. There are two prominent ways that philosophers have challenged the samaritan case for immigration.
The first is to argue that duties to admit migrants would come at too great a cost to members of the host country. That cost would be a curtailment of individuals’ rights to freedom of association. People, we normally think, are entitled to associate with whomever they please. Forcing someone to associate with people they don’t want to associate with is an objectionable abridgment of their freedom. A duty to admit migrants would come at the expense of restricting the right to freedom of association. If we tell you that you have to let certain individuals into your life or your community, then it is no longer up to you to choose with whom you associate. Being required to admit migrants, the objection concludes, comes at too great a cost to the interest of free association. Consequently, we have no samaritan duty to admit migrants.
The second objection holds that we can help imperiled individuals in other countries in ways that do not require admitting them as immigrants (on this point, see the chapter by David Miller here). Samaritan duties, after all, require that we help the imperiled in some way that alleviates their imperilment. How exactly we help the imperiled is left up to us. All we are required to do is to help get them out of their imperiled state (when it’s not too costly for us to do so). We could help the imperiled through means other than permitting them to migrate to well-off nations. Maybe we can cut the imperiled a check and leave matters there. By having done our share to help those who were imperiled, we will have discharged our samaritan duties, which removes the ground for the duty to admit migrants.
These objections raise a considerable challenge to the samaritan case for immigration. However, we have already encountered a compelling reply to them. The banal observation made at the start of this essay- that immigrants relocate to improve the lives of their descendants as well as their own- can be relied on to answer the preceding two objections. At the heart of this commonplace observation is a philosophically significant insight: the admission of imperiled immigrants also provides assistance to their descendants. This means that the number of individuals who would be assisted by permitting immigration is several magnitudes greater than what we may have at first thought—in doing so, we benefit not only the immigrants, but their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on. Once we take into account the fact that a considerably larger number of individuals benefit from immigration, I believe we will have compelling rejoinders to the two objections to the samaritan justification of immigration.
Central to this argument is the claim that we have samaritan duties to future persons. Put plainly, my claim is that if we can prevent future persons from being imperiled at relatively little cost to ourselves, then we have a duty to do so. This claim confronts a notorious challenge concerning duties to future generations popularized by Derek Parfit (among others) which has come to be known as the non-identity problem. The non-identity problem starts with a simple observation: the fact that you (or I, or anyone for that matter) exist depends on certain contingent circumstances that could easily have been changed. Think about how many events had to line up for you to exist. If your parents had met at different times in their lives, if they had children at any other point in their lives, or if they had met different partners, then you would not exist, and someone else might instead. Because our existence is precarious in this way, the choices that we make and the things that we do now will alter what particular individuals exist in the future. The non-identity problem arises from the fact that the way we normally think about morality presupposes fixed and stable individual identity, but when we think about moral duties concerning future persons, no such determinate identity can be taken for granted, and this makes it difficult to make sense of duties to future persons.
Here is an example of Parfit’s that illustrates the challenge of dealing with the non-identity problem. Parfit presents the case of
The Risky Policy. Suppose that, as a community, we have a choice between two energy policies. Both would be completely safe for at least two centuries, but one would have, for the further future, certain risks. If we choose the Risky Policy, the standard of living would be slightly higher over the next century. We do choose this policy. As a result there is a similar catastrophe two centuries later, which kills and injures thousands of people.
The question here is: do we make future people worse off by choosing the Risky Policy? The typical intuition is “yes.” This is where the difficulty with indeterminate identity comes in. The people who suffer from the future consequences of the Risky Policy would not exist if that policy were not chosen. Normally, making someone worse-off requires making their life go relatively worse than it would have otherwise. But if we hadn’t chosen the Risky Policy, then different future people would exist in place of those who would be killed and injured by the fallout of the Risky Policy. The lives of the killed and injured would not be made better by choosing a different policy, as they wouldn’t come into being at all. On the typical understanding of harming someone, it can’t be said that we harm future people by choosing the risky policy because we do not make them any worse off than they would be otherwise (since they would not be otherwise).
We confront the same challenge if we want to say that we have samaritan duties to future persons. To make the problem clear, let’s imagine a simple case where there are two ways the world could be. In world A, relatively well-off nations do not admit imperiled migrants. In world B they do. The descendants of the imperiled in A will, suppose, themselves be imperiled, whereas those descendants in B will not be imperiled. Notice that it is not true, on the typical understanding of making people better off, that the descendants born in A would be better-off in B. Different people will exist in place of the A-descendants in the B world. By rescuing those who would be born in A, we cause different people to exist in their place. Our present puzzle is that of determining whether it can make sense to say that we have duties to rescue imperiled future persons if our doing so will cause different people to exist in their place.
I will offer two ways in which we can make sense of having samaritan duties to future persons. It is not especially important which we choose to take on. All we need is to accept one of these approaches so as to make sense of samaritan duties owed to future persons.
The first approach is meant to mirror Parfit’s own response to the non-identity problem. We might think that the lesson we learn from the non-identity problem is that we let individual identity play too large of a role in our moral thinking. Maybe what matters isn’t making people better-off, but rather making better-off people. Let’s call this kind of strategy the impersonalized approach. The impersonalized approach tries to do away with individual identity in our moral reasoning. Applied to samaritan duties, the impersonalized approach holds not that we should remove people from imperiled circumstances, but rather that we should reduce imperilment, or the state of being imperiled, in the world. If samaritan duties are all about reducing imperilment, we no longer need to be worried about the fact that our decisions now will change who exists in the future—what matters is that we reduce the amount of imperilment, not that we help rescue certain people from being imperiled.
The second strategy holds that samaritan duties to future persons apply to types rather than particular persons. A “type” is a normatively significant set of characteristics that defines a category of persons. Consider an example of a couple thinking about a future child. The couple does not have any one particular person in mind when they are thinking about their future child. Instead, they are thinking about the future child in general terms; they are thinking of the future child as a type. And it seems sensible to say that the couple ought to do right by the child. They ought to do things like pursue prenatal care for the sake of the child, even if that changes what particular child will be born.
This way of reasoning is not all that out of place in our everyday lives. When I plan a course that I will teach, I try to keep in mind what my students will likely have difficulty with, what they will likely find interesting, and so on. I don’t have any particular individual students in mind, I’m thinking about them as a general category with certain common features—I am thinking of my students as a type. And it seems sensible to say that while I’m designing my course, I should do right by my students. Perhaps samaritan duties apply to the descendants of migrants as a type. What we ought to do is act in ways that would preclude the descendants of migrants as a type from being imperiled, rather than acting in ways that would rescue particular descendants of migrants from imperilment. This strategy resolves the non-identity problem since, while the identity of discrete future persons might change in response to our actions, their type remains fixed, and it is to types that samaritan duties attach in the case of future persons.
So, we have two ways of making sense of how we can have samaritan duties to future generations. The first approach is to claim that samaritan duties should be understood as impersonal duties to reduce and eliminate imperilment. The second approach is to claim that samaritan duties to future persons apply to types, rather than discrete individuals. In either case, it is true that we ought to act in ways that would alleviate or eliminate the imperilment of future persons. With this claim established, we can return to the two objections to the samaritan case for immigration.
The first objection, recall, challenged the samaritan case for immigration by arguing that assisting via immigration would be too costly to host countries. That excessive cost would come in the form of curtailed rights to freedom of association. The fact that immigration assists a considerably greater number of people than we may have at first thought gives us a way to reply to this objection.
What cost is reasonable for one to bear in rescuing an imperiled other will depend on the severity of the imperilment and number of people imperiled. That is, if some act of rescue comes at a cost to the rescuer, as the number of people rescued increases, greater costs become reasonable to bear. Here is an example to illustrate the point. Suppose a technician at a nuclear power plant is alone in the plant when a malfunction occurs. The technician could leave the power plant and save her skin, or she could go correct the malfunction and suffer a heavy dose of radiation (which is sure to lower the length of her life by some years). Now consider two different cases. In the first, the power plant has been built in an isolated area where only the rare adventurous explorer will be exposed to radiation in the future. In the second, the power plant is near a populous area, such that if the malfunction is not corrected, a large number of people will be irradiated. If the risk of some explorer stumbling upon the defunct power plant is low enough in the first case, I take it that it would be permissible for the technician to save her skin. In the second case, however, the technician has a samaritan duty to correct the malfunction.
What this case is meant to show is that when the number of people in need of rescue increases, it becomes reasonable to bear a greater cost to rescue. In the case of immigration, taking into consideration our samaritan duties to future persons drastically increases the number of individuals that would benefit from our assistance. When we allow imperiled individuals to immigrate to better circumstances, we not only remove them from imperilment, we do the same for their children, their grandchildren, their great grandchildren, and so on into the future. The sheer numbers in play are several magnitudes greater than first thought. When we take into account the fact that we will be benefitting future generations into the distant future, we can see that the number of samaritan duties we fulfill by admitting immigrants makes it reasonable to bear a far greater cost than if we attend only to those admitted at first. This drastic increase in numbers makes it reasonable to expect the members of host countries to bear the cost of a curtailed right to freedom of association in order to assist migrants and their descendants.
So much for the reply to the first objection, let us turn to the second objection to the samaritan case for immigration. The second objection, recall, holds that well-off nations do not have a samaritan duty to admit migrants because there are other ways to discharge that duty. This objection critically turns on there being available reasonably effective alternative means of assisting the imperiled. Clearly, I can’t discharge my duty to rescue you by doing something that is ineffective at alleviating your imperilment. Throwing a life preserver to a drowning child that cannot use it does not suffice to preclude you from having to wade in and pluck the child out.
Once we take future generations into account, we will not find any reasonably effective alternative to immigration for assisting future generations. Unfortunately, we haven’t quite figured out how to make persisting positive contributions to future generations besides immigration. The closest tool available to us is institutional development, and this tool is not especially well-understood as of now. The World Bank provides (rather disappointing) illustrations of how much is left to be learned about the process of developing and maintaining well-functioning institutions in the long term. Policies exhibit complex effects, often leading to unanticipated outcomes in unpredictable ways. Identical institutions placed in near identical social and economic settings can produce drastically different outcomes. The implementation of novel laws displays a complex sensitivity to background social conditions, making the outcome of instituting new laws generally unpredictable. As of now, we simply do not have sufficient evidence, and sufficiently well-developed theories, to understand how to implement institutions that benefit individuals into the distant future. If institutional development is the only alternative means for benefiting the distant descendants of imperiled would-be migrants, and if we do not understand institutional development well enough to make it the case that those descendants benefit, then we simply have no reasonably effective alternative means for assisting the descendants of imperiled individuals. That leaves us with admitting imperiled migrants into relatively well-off nations as the most effective means for assisting their descendants.
Thus, we see that the relatively banal observation that immigrants often move to benefit their descendants carries rather considerable implications regarding our duties towards migrants. If it is true that we can benefit migrants and their descendants by permitting them to immigrate to relatively well-off nations, then I believe that we have a duty to do so.
Alexander Motchoulski
Alexander Motchoulski is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Arizona working in social and political philosophy. His research involves topics such as relational egalitarianism, democratic theory, and public reason liberalism. You can learn more about his work at https://www.alexmotchoulski.
