Abstract
Between 2000 and 2020 the estimated number of individuals living in countries other than their birth country grew from 150 million to 272 million, or from 2.8% to 3.5% of world population. 1 Partly because of this substantial growth, international migration is now an important area of enquiry for researchers in philosophy, politics, and economics. The Symposium brings together five leading and diverse thinkers from different disciplines to address some familiar and less familiar migration-related issues. They do so in a way that illuminates an issue of pressing public concern as well as some more general theoretical debates in political philosophy.
Paul Bou-Habib's subtly argued paper on ‘The Brain-Drain as Exploitation’ presents a distinctive of account of the wrongs involved in brain drain. Bou-Habib argues that migrants may be free to move, and he does not argue that migrants have duties of compensation to the home state. He argues, instead, that by free-riding on the human capital formation services of home states the states that currently receive skilled migrants from poor home states are making exploitative gains. As a result, receiving states have duties of compensation to migrants’ home states.
In their lucid and thought-provoking paper, ‘Only Libertarianism Can Provide a Robust Justification for Open Borders’, Christopher Freiman and Javier Hidalgo turn to explore whether existing border regimes are deeply unjust because individuals possess a human right to engage in international migration. The authors argue that only a rights-based version of libertarianism provides a relatively robust justification for such a right. If so, those of us who are currently committed to the human right to migrate face a powerful challenge: they must either revise their commitment or reconsider their attitude to rights-based libertarianism and its less palatable implications.
Increased migration has generated political division amongst institutional as well as individual agents. One type of institutional dispute has arisen when sub-state jurisdictions declare themselves migrant ‘sanctuaries’ and thereby attempt to frustrate state policies designed to restrict migration. Patti Tamara Lenard's paper on ‘Sanctuary as Democratic Non-Cooperation’ is an innovative assessment of the phenomenon that is alive to the possibility that ‘democratic non-cooperation’ may also come in forms less welcome to progressive opinion. Anyone concerned with general debates about civil disobedience and political resistance and about the political theory of federalism could read Lenard's essay with profit.
Martin Ruhs's paper ‘Who Cares What the People Think? Public Attitudes and Refugee Protection in Europe’ combines characteristically sophisticated public opinion analysis with moral and political theory. His argument is focused on the role of public opinion in justifying refugee policy in the modern world. It claims that public opinion is a legitimate consideration that should inform public policy making, and that public attitudes exercise a soft feasibility constraint on policy implementation. Ruhs also argues that there are reasons to take those attitudes into account that do not derive simply from a commitment to the democratic process.
Drafts of each of these papers were discussed at a workshop in New Orleans sponsored by the Murphy Institute at Tulane University. Tom Christiano and Andrew Williams are very grateful to the workshop participants, including Gillian Brock and Joseph Carens, and to each author for responding thoroughly to commentary and criticism. We are similarly grateful to their reviewers for several rounds of detailed feedback. It would be impossible to meet the standards to which the journal aspires without the great generosity and professionalism of our reviewers as well as our Managing Editor, Dr Kellie Warren, and we are very happy to acknowledge their contributions. Finally, we are delighted to acknowledge the indispensable support for the conference and the journal provided by Dr Meg Kennan, Prof. Steve Sheffrin and Prof. Gary Hoover of the Murphy Institute.