ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: justice in immigration
Author:
Panel proposal (Geert Demuijnck & Speranta Dumitru) Justice in Immigration Economists have dealt with migration issues long before philosophers and theorist of justice take an interest in them. From labour mobility and family migration, to the consequences of brain drain and illegal immigration on the wages level and labour market, there are few topics untouched by economic research. In the meantime, normative theories of justice have systematically worked on the assumption that societies are closed, with a limited number of members. Nowadays, due to the rapid increase of migration flows, this tendency seems to be reversed and more scholars working in normative theories of justice become interested in the evaluation of what would be the fair rules of immigrant admission or of their economic and social rights once admitted in the host countries. The following four papers will be discussed in this panel: 1. Mexican-American migration policies: How do economists justify them? Bernardo Bolaños Bernardo Bolaños Guerra Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Cuajimalpa México Abstract: Mexico has become the biggest producer of emigrants of the world. Mexico also receives the pressure of important flows of immigrants from Central and South America. We will describe the contradictory consensus about migration policies shared by both left and right winged Mexican politicians. Then we will discuss the viability of a new consensus. A fair migration policy should balance freedom of movement against reciprocity of foreign countries. It will be claimed that it is legitimate to tax foreign residents more than nationals in order to finance the access of the former to local public services if, reciprocally, nationals are taxed more abroad. 2. Is it possible to limit economic migration in the name of justice? Geert Demuijnck, université catholique de Lille This paper argues against some proposals that have been advanced to limit economic migration. It will be shown that, under both assumptions of moral universalism and the legitimacy of social and economic claim rights, most of these arguments turn out to be very weak if not wrongheaded. Paradoxically, arguments of justice seem rather compelling to justify some limitations of economic emigration rather than economic immigration whereas from a legal viewpoint, the opposite is true. 3. Is it just to tax the freedom of movement? Speranta Dumitru, Université Catholique de Louvain, Chaire Hoover, The paper compares different proposals to tax freedom of movement, either on the benefit of the host country (such as Gary Becker’s proposal to charge the immigrants’ entry in a rich country), or in favour of the original country. It is argued that from a libertarian viewpoint, it is preferable to tax immigrants in the host country, although, under some specific conditions, it is legitimate to tax emigrants in the country of origin. 4. WELL-UNDERSTOOD COSMOPOLITANISM AND MIGRATION Vincent Aubert, IUniversité Catholique de Louvain, Belgique This paper is about how justice guiode us in articulating a satisfactory ethics of migration. I begin with a criticism of “common sense intuitionism” - the attempt to reach local reflective equilibria for each ethical issue - and claim that there is no alternative to the elaboration of an ideal theory of justice. I derive a method to build an “ethics of migration” and assert that migration as a serious ethical issue concerns non-ideal theory (part I). I suggest a way to build an ideal theory of (global) justice, which combines a principle of moral equality applying to culturally-situated individuals with Hume’s circumstances of justice and claim that contingent social institutions ought to be justified to equals. I try, then, to show that accepting this theoretical framework allows to reconcile cosmopolitanism with “closed” political societies, nations and cultural identities (part II & III). Moving to non-ideal circumstances, I conclude with asserting that the outline of ideal theory proposed limits what can be done in the name of cultures and standards of living and calls for more permeable borders (part IV).
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