Debate

Open or Closed Borders? The Ethics of Migration

States control their borders, and most have also bound themselves by the Refugee Convention not to return refugees to persecution. Where does a democracy’s right to decide who may come and stay end – and what does it owe to those who come, or are turned away?

Few issues shape elections in Europe and North America as strongly as migration. Some 280 million people live outside their country of birth, and in the mid-2020s more than 100 million were forcibly displaced, according to the United Nations – most of them within their own country or in neighbouring states. Rich democracies have tightened their border and asylum rules, from the EU’s Pact on Migration and Asylum of 2024 to agreements to process asylum claims in third countries, while ageing societies compete for workers. Political philosophy long took it for granted that states may control their borders; only since the 1980s has it argued seriously about whether that right exists, how far it reaches and what limits human rights set to it. Sociology adds the question of why people move at all.

Open in the star map

Positions

Open borders

Joseph Carens (1987) argues that in Western liberal democracies citizenship plays the part that feudal rank once did: a status acquired by birth that greatly improves a person’s prospects in life. If birthplace is as morally arbitrary as class or skin colour, and freedom of movement within a country counts as a basic liberty, it is hard to justify keeping people out merely because they were born elsewhere. Liberal egalitarian, libertarian (Michael Huemer, 2010) and utilitarian arguments converge here: economists estimate that freer movement could greatly increase global wealth, much of it for the poorest. Carens accepts restrictions in extreme cases, such as threats to public order, but places the burden of justification on exclusion.

The right to decide who belongs

Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice, 1983) argues that political communities, like clubs or families, can only remain communities with a character of their own if they control their membership: admission and exclusion lie at the core of self-determination. David Miller (Strangers in Our Midst, 2016) defends a “weak cosmopolitanism”: every person’s basic human rights count equally, but citizens may give priority to compatriots and decide democratically how many and which immigrants to admit, as long as they respect the claims of refugees and treat newcomers fairly. Christopher Heath Wellman (2008) grounds the right to exclude in freedom of association, which includes the freedom not to associate. The economist Paul Collier (Exodus, 2013) adds concerns about social trust and about the departure of skilled people from poor countries.

Hospitality and the right to have rights

Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795) grants every stranger a cosmopolitan right of “hospitality”: not to be treated with hostility on arrival, and not to be turned away if that would mean their ruin – a right to visit, not yet a right to stay. Arendt, herself stateless for years, concluded from the fate of the stateless between the world wars that human rights mean little without membership in a political community: what the stateless had lost was “the right to have rights”. Benhabib (The Rights of Others, 2004) builds on both: democracies may define their membership, but the human right to asylum and a path to citizenship for long-term residents limit that power, and the boundaries of the “people” are renegotiated again and again in “democratic iterations”.

Held by

Immanuel Kant1724–1804
Hannah Arendt1906–1975
Seyla Benhabibb. 1950

Migrations are made

Sassen (Guests and Aliens, 1999) argues that migration is not simply the result of poverty pushing people out and wealth pulling them in: most poor people never migrate. Large flows follow particular bridges – colonial ties, foreign investment, military interventions and the recruitment of labour, as in West Germany’s recruitment of “guest workers” from 1955 – that the receiving countries themselves have built; and Europe’s own history is a history of migration. Sociologists of migration add that many migrants lead transnational lives between two societies. A policy that treats migration as an external threat to be stopped at the border thus misreads a process in which receiving states take part – which does not settle the normative question, but changes its terms.