Three essays on the legitimate authority of immigration control

Abstract

Political theorists have often maintained that the pursuits of justice, freedom or democracy give states moral rights to exclude would-be immigrants. But it is not clear if such general considerations can decisively answer the question if states can generate morally legitimate authority over the particular subjects of their migration control regimes, that is, hold an enforceable right to their compliance with such regimes’ directives. This thesis provides three essays to argue that such authority is often absent. All three essays contend that a liberal conception of legitimate authority in migration control requires that states treat those whose compliance they seek according to certain moral principles, and that entrenched features of states’ migration control regimes habitually stand in the way of the realization of these principles. The first essay argues that states operating according to dominant conceptions of sovereignty cannot robustly respect migrants’ basic human rights. The second essay contends that the international behavior of at least some states is characterized by their perpetration of ‘colonial norms,’ and thus undermines the moral equality of some of the people they later come to claim migration control authority over. Finally, the third essay argues that global power relations sometimes condition the bargaining processes that precede the conclusion of bilateral migration management (or ‘border externalization’) agreements between migration destination and origin and transit states in a way that undermines the latter states’ sovereign equality. These arguments have significant upshots for adherents of liberal political thought. The first two essays imply that there are many migrants who have no moral duties to comply with the migration rules of the states they strive to migrate to. The third essay implies that migration management ‘partner states’ in the Global South often have no moral duties to treat contractual agreements as binding.