Dangerous Daydreams: Political Philosophers and Immigration Control

Much mainstream philosophical work on migration focuses on whether or not states have a unilateral right to exclude would-be migrants from their territory. This is, clearly, a vitally important question for this central issue in contemporary politics. However, one striking feature of much of the literature that defends the states right to exclude would-be migrants is that it has very little to say about real-world practices of immigration control. Christopher Heath Wellman’s entry on Immigration in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy is exemplary in this regard. Wellman offers a useful overview of arguments for and against open borders, and also addresses a number of important ‘applied’ questions concerning refugees, guest workers, and the ethics of recruiting and selecting immigrants. It is striking, however, that Wellman does not address questions about which forms of immigration control are morally acceptable. Perhaps this omission can be explained because practices of control do not and cannot affect our normative consideration of the central issue—whether or not states have a right to unilaterally control their borders. However, this is questionable. Even if controls on movement can be justified in the abstract, that does not settle the question of how those controls can be imposed in the real world, or even if they can given all that we have learned about how states actually attempt to control their borders now.  

Many rich democracies in the Global North have made it very difficult for foreigners to apply for asylum from abroad while simultaneously attempting to disincentivize them from reaching their territory. Much academic work captures this point by saying that the current system operates according to a logic of deterrence. For example, some states around the world have limited access to asylum procedures by declaring that refugees who have traveled through a ‘safe’ country en route to their destination are unable to lodge a claim for asylum in that state. Some practice non-arrival measures that aim to prevent migrants from accessing their territories, such as maritime interdiction. Several states now practice forms of offshore asylum processing and support the relocation of refugees to third countries (more on this later). Many have also criminalized unauthorized migration and human smuggling. Taken together, these policies make it very difficult for unauthorized migrants to reach destination states. It is also common for states to adopt indirect measures that intend to make their states less attractive destinations for refugees by, for example, instituting detention policies on arrival, and limits on family reunification. 

Second, while deterring unauthorized migrants, rich democracies in the Global North inflict much cruelty and suffering. It helps to distinguish between the cruelties that unauthorized migrants face when attempting to travel to destination states, which I term remote cruelty, and the cruelties they often face if they enter such states, which I term proximate cruelty. The terms are not supposed to denote cruelty for which rich democracies are and are not responsible. These states play a direct role in bringing about both kinds of cruelty; they do not simply permit or fail to prevent cruelty that takes place outside their territory.

Rich democracies in the Global North employ various forms of ‘remote control’ techniques to limit the number of unauthorized migrants who reach their territories. As the sociologist David Scott FitzGerald notes, this is an umbrella term for “practices, physical structures, and institutions whose goal is to control the mobility of individuals while they are outside the territory of their intended destination state,” so these states can select which migrants they want to admit while identifying, monitoring, detaining, and deterring those they want to repel. Most saliently, states from the Global North fund detention and border security initiatives in the Global South, ‘train’ local law enforcement agencies, and engage in joint interception activities. Rich democracies hope this will both prevent unauthorized migrants from arriving on their land, while also deterring others from attempting such journeys. Vitally, because the deterrence takes place abroad through complicated chains of authorization involving many different state actors and private corporations’ states hope to avoid legal responsibility for the ways that migrants are treated. Several prominent scholars, such as Didier Fassin, insist that rich democracies want these harsh methods of deterrence to take place overseas because it renders the cruelty they involve ‘invisible’ to electorates at home who may object to it on humanitarian grounds.

Remote control policies thus subject some of the most vulnerable people on the planet to horrendous cruelty and suffering. In many respects, current practice mirrors older patterns of colonial domination where native leaders were incentivized to oppress their own people at the behest of the colonizers. Acute and systematic fear is employed in the hope of achieving a form of social control.

If unauthorized migrants manage to reach rich democracies in the Global North, they face further cruelty. On arrival, many are detained in state-run facilities: prisons, immigration removal centers, and temporary processing centers. Conditions are often grim; mold and vermin thrive, and disease is rife. Adequate medical treatment is often lacking. Moreover, detained migrants can be subject to verbal and physical abuse from underpaid and undertrained staff.

State agents also have a persistent record of inflicting cruelty on unauthorized migrants before they are detained. In many European states, there are credible reports of police and Border Patrol officials engaging in violent border pushbacks. The work of Elizabeth Cohen details how, in the USA, immigration officials stand accused of holding cursory and manipulative ‘credible fear’ interviews instead of sincerely assessing whether unauthorized migrants have a compelling asylum claim. Advocacy organizations have also reported many examples of agents falsely telling unauthorized migrants they require the prior approval of Mexican authorities to lodge asylum claims. Likewise, there have been numerous reports of agents pressurizing and intimidating unauthorized migrants to sign false statements that undermine their asylum applications. Furthermore, state agents can also perpetrate dreadful cruelty by enforcing policies decided on by political decision-makers. The most notorious example is the Trump regime’s family separation policy, introduced in 2018, which forcibly removed migrant children from the adults they were traveling with (usually their parents or other family members).

Until defenders of restrictive immigration controls are prepared to think seriously about how immigration controls will actually be imposed now and around here, where some human beings will seek to resist them due to a comprehensible desire to improve their lot in the face of injustice and brutality, there is little reason to think that these theorists have done anything better than fantasize about immigration restrictions in an imaginary world.  

Consider the following case. In his book Strangers in our Midst, David Miller argues that immigration controls are not necessarily coercive. To motivate this point, Miller considers a situation where a state erects an impenetrable barrier along its borders so that unauthorized migrants simply cannot access its territory. According to Miller, these migrants are not coerced; they are simply prevented from entering the state. This is a momentous move because philosophers generally accept that coercive acts require a particular justification that can make sense to the affected whilst acts of prevention do not.

As many scholars have observed, this argument has the unfortunate consequence of saying nothing about the overwhelming majority of immigration control measures that actually exist. While this is correct, it is more damning to consider how Miller develops his argument. Having contended that border controls are not necessarily coercive, Miller goes on to assert that “closing borders is properly understood as preventative.” This is shady. Even if we grant that Miller has established that some ways of closing borders are not coercive, this does not establish anything about how the act of closing borders should ‘properly’ be understood. Anyone with a skeptical cast of mind will question if such a complicated phenomenon as closing borders can have a ‘proper’ essence that lies below its manifold surface appearances, and which Miller has somehow divined. Given that most of the actions that states engage in order to close their borders are coercive, Miller appears to be insisting that an anomalous element of immigration control represents its proper essence. It is not hard to see why some might worry that this is mystifying in the old-fashioned Marxist sense.

In an important sense, philosophers who defend restrictive immigration controls in theory, while failing to treat contemporary practices of border control, have just found another way of committing the failure of assuming compliance and therefore assuming away the issue that actually needs confronting. Immigration control isn’t going to seem like a pressing philosophical issue as long as normative theorists think it is intellectually respectable to simply assume that the relevant constituency of people (in this case, desperate foreigners) will comply with a set of proposals so long as those proposals can be justified by whatever standards of reasonableness they insist everyone ought to accept. Defenders of restrictive control policies must front up to the fact that no matter how reasonable the proposals may seem in theory, they just will not be complied with by all. If they do that, they will realize they should be asking what states can and can’t do to those who do not comply in the hope of salvaging some faded version of the kind of national self-determination they claim to hold so dear. Pretending that the question does not even arise is just evasive. It is also philosophically questionable; as David Schmidtz notes, “Failing to engage real problems is not a way of having high standards,” but a refusal to seriously consider what counts as a high standard in response to a particular problem.    

Several years ago, José Jorge Mendoza issued a pertinent reminder about immigration enforcement when he wrote that “a state can limit its border enforcement to morally acceptable levels while at the same time tacitly accepting that there will be some degree of unauthorized entry into its territory.” This may seem facile, but it is profoundly important. Mendoza registers that even if border enforcement is a legitimate policy objective, this does not settle the question of how that enforcement should be undertaken. At the same time, he attunes us to the fact that a degree of non-compliance is not only to be reckoned with, but also hoped for, because full compliance can only ever be achieved through unacceptable methods. Those who defend restrictive controls on principled grounds show little sign of grasping the seriousness of either point. They theorize about immigration control in dreamland.

Edward Hall

Dr Edward Hall is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield. He is the author ofValue, Conflict, and Order: Berlin, Hampshire, Williams, and the Realist Revival in Political Theory(University of Chicago Press, 2020), and co-editor of Political Ethics: A Handbook(Princeton University Press, 2022). He is currently writing a book for Oxford University Press, tentatively entitled Power and Powerlessness: The Liberalism of Fear in the Twenty-First Century.