Joseph H. Carens

This is a thorough and well-written book about immigration. Its style is certainly philosophical, but the discussion still remains grounded in regular immigration decisions where the ethical questions are quite easy to understand. At no point does the author retreat to unduly abstract arguments. So I enjoyed reading this book, but I found the author's approach a bit peculiar.

Part One of the book is concerned with citizenship, and whether or not various sorts of immigrants should obtain it. The author's review of various forms of immigration is informative, but the underlying argument is almost too simple and uncontroversial: "living in a society over time makes one a member and being a member generates moral claims to legal rights and to legal status" (p.293). This same point is repeated over and over again. It's hard to imagine that many philosophers would disagree with it. In any case, part one at least provides a good battery of justifications for defending this view for a broader audience.

The central argument of Part Two is in my opinion much more controversial, and therefore more interesting. As presented in chapter 11, the argument is that all state borders should be open to free immigration, emigration, departure and return, for all peoples regardless of their motives or their nationality. The author presents this as a human rights argument and explicitly declares that it is not a policy prescription for the present state of the world.

But when considering objections to his argument he smuggles in an additional assumption: all objections which foresee problems in the great number of emigrants that might move from poor countries to rich ones are supposedly invalid because "relatively little inequality between states" (p.278) is a premise of the open border argument. That undoubtedly takes care of the objection, but I can't see the value of a philosophical defense which just counters every objection with such an unrealistic assumption, especially one that isn't explicated and linked to the open-borders argument in chapter 11.

In the conclusion of the book the author hints that inequality and closed borders might be connected in some way: "The critique in chapter 11 is concerned with the inequality between states and with the discretionary control over immigration that makes it possible to maintain that inequality" (p.289). But if discretionary control facilitates inequality, then surely the author could have formulated an ethical argument against discretionary control without assuming equality between states? In his quest to avoid policy prescriptions the author unfortunately leaves this central question out of the book and relies too much on an unrealistic and unclear assumption of economic equality between all states. This is the weak point of Part Two.

But despite these quibbles about arguments not included in the book, the ones that were included are certainly worthwhile reading for anyone who wants to gain a clearly reasoned perspective on immigration questions. The book also contains a nice methodological chapter at the end where the author discloses the motivations behind his approach.… (mer)