An immigration-pressure model of global distributive justice

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 5, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 97-127

  Cavallero, Eric ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

borders; cosmopolitanism; development; development assistance; distributive justice; equality; global justice; immigration; international law

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248034167     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X06060621     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Although it is articulated in terms of an international system that concentrates sovereign powers in exclusive territorial jurisdictions (that is, nation-states), the proposal I defend here is not wedded to the nation-state or to an international state system. It is compatible with a global-federative system in which sovereign powers are dispersed across territorially nested jurisdictions (e.g., the federative model defended in Thomas Pogge, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty’, Ethics 103 (October 1992)).
2. Joseph Carens suggests another salient analogy: ‘Citizenship in the modern world is a lot like feudal status in the medieval world. It is assigned at birth; for the most part it is not subject to change by the individual's will and efforts; and it has a major impact upon that person's life chances. To be born a citizen of an affluent country like Canada is like being born into the nobility. To be born a citizen of a poor country like Bangladesh is (for most) like being born into the peasantry in the Middle Ages.’ See Joseph Carens, ‘Migration and Morality: A Liberal Egalitarian Perspective’, in Free Movement: Ethical issues in the Transnational Migration of People and Money, edited by Brian Barry and Robert E. Goodin (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).
3. See Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Brian Barry, Theories of Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
4. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 117. The ‘target’ that Rawls advocates as limiting the extent of mandatory aid is expressed in his proposed ‘duty of assistance’. It requires economic assistance to countries in dire need, and sufficient assistance to foster the establishment of liberal or ‘decent’ societies in every country. Decent societies are ones that respect certain minimal human rights and are regulated by a shared conception of justice, though not a liberal one.
5. Cf. Rawls: ‘[I] follow Kant in thinking that a world government. would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by frequent civil strife as various regions and peoples tried to gain their political freedom and autonomy.’ See Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 36.
6. Cf. Pogge, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty’.
7. See Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice and the Liberal State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980); Joseph Carens, ‘Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders’, Review of Politics 2 (1987); Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees (New York: Routledge, 2001). Many others, such as Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, have defended open borders on grounds of economic efficiency.
8. Brian Barry notes this, and describes a plausibly bad open-borders scenario in Brian Barry, ‘Quest for Consistency: A Skeptical View’, in Free Movement: Ethical issues in the Transnational Migration of People and Money, edited by Brian Barry and Robert E. Goodin (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), pp. 279–82.
9. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 39.
10. If these are good reasons for permitting restrictions of immigration, are they not also good reasons to permit countries to restrict emigration? According to Walzer, the two are ‘asymmetrical’, because whereas restrictions on immigration can serve to defend the traditions and political culture of a community of individuals who are committed to one another, ‘restraint of exit replaces commitment with coercion. So long as the coerced members are concerned, there is no longer a community worth defending.’ See Walzer, Spheres of Justice, p. 41. As a defense of the existing legal asymmetry between immigration and emigration restrictions, this argument may be inadequate. Certainly, from the perspective of CP, the coercion problem cuts both ways: those who must remain in a poor society because they are denied entry to a rich one are also coerced. But if CP is satisfied, then Walzer's argument seems exactly right. In the following, I will assume that the right of exit is recognized under international law as it is today. See, for example, Article V, section (d) ii of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (URL: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/d_icerd.htm).
11. Here the analogy with at least one exemplar of equal protection under domestic law is imperfect; in effect, I am endorsing the legitimacy of a ‘separate but equal’ doctrine for national citizenship groups. This seems acceptable, and even accords with the logic of the Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas 347 US 483 (1954). There, the Court found that in public education ‘separate educational facilities are inherently unequal’ (emphasis added) because of the intangible expressive force of segregation, which was plainly intended to denote the inferiority of ‘the negro race’. It seems unlikely that separate, but equal arrangements would carry that expressive force in the international context.
12. Perhaps relocation loans could be offered by a credit union that funds new immigrants with receipts from established ones. 19. Calculations should be made on the basis of accepted offers that actually result in migration, in order to screen for bogus applications. Offers can be made in confidence so that acceptance rates can be expected to reflect individual preferences, and not social pressure to skew the sample group. Since an undesired migration imposes a significant cost on any individual, bogus applications can plausibly be expected not to distort the sample.
13. For an account of this topic, see Joseph Carens, ‘Who Should Get In? The Ethics of Immigration Admissions’, Ethics and International Affairs 1 (2003): 95-110.
14. If they seek refuge from strife or catastrophe, they are owed assistance; but the duties of the international community to them do not fall under CP.
15. This definition is stipulative for the present discussion, and is not identical with international legal definitions. Currently, under the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, as amended by the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is anyone who ‘owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it’ (emphasis added). See URLs: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/o_c_ref.htm, as amended by http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/o_p_ref.htm.
16. I thank Jerry Gaus for pointing this out. Cf. James Woodward, ‘Commentary’, in Free Movement: Ethical issues in the Transnational Migration of People and Money, edited by Brian Barry and Robert E. Goodin (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).
17. Thus, if a problem arises in some possible world in which the proposal is implemented, but that problem could not reasonably be expected to arise in the actual world, given what we know about it, then the possible world is not illustrative in the right way. Illustrative worlds are ones in which reasonable, empirically grounded assumptions hold about human nature, about social and economic systems, and about the strength and distribution of preferences among individuals. For example, the empirically established, strong inverse relationship between fertility rates and the educational opportunities and economic empowerment of women is an established fact about the actual world; worlds in which that empirical relationship does not hold are not members of the illustrative set.
18. Cultural and other factors can complicate matters. I discuss such complications below and modify the proposal accordingly.
19. At the point at which this is the dominant migration incentive, economic rationality would suggest that nations should simply open their borders. However, if some choose not to do so at equilibrium, no individual is thereby systematically disadvantaged.
20. I am grateful to Jay Cox for suggesting this formulation.
21. Cf. Barry, ‘Quest for Consistency: A Skeptical View’, pp. 79–82.
22. The method of calculation is explained at http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/indices/hdi_calculator.cfm.
23. The best index is the one best designed to target the sources of immigration pressure, taking into account the costs and limits of data collection and analysis. As an initial modification in the direction of the most appropriate metric, the HDI component of per capita GDP should probably be replaced with a more egalitarian component, such as bottom-quintile average household income.
24. Competitive disbursement is probably the best response to the documented failures of aid conditionality. Economist Jacob Svensson has detailed the advantages of allocating aid across a set of countries and then disbursing on the basis of relative performance. See Jacob Svensson, ‘Why Conditional Aid Does Not Work and What Can Be Done About It?’ Journal of Development Economics 70 (2003): 381-402.
25. See URL: http://www.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was adopted by General Assembly resolution 2200A (XXI) in 1966, and entered into force in 1976. As of June 2004, there were 152 parties to the convention and 8 more countries that had signed, but not yet acceded to it. The only large countries (with populations of more than 1 million) that have neither signed nor acceded to it are China (PRC), Cuba, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mauritania, Myanmar, Oman, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and United Arab Emirates. See URL: http://www.unhchr.ch/pdf/report.pdf.
26. See CERD, Article 5, Sections (d), (e), and (f). The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination was adopted by General Assembly resolution 2106 in 1965, and entered into force in 1969. See URL: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/d_icerd.htm. As of June 2004 there were 177 parties to it and one additional signatory. The only large countries (with populations of more than 1 million) not party to it are Angola, Korea (DPRK), Malaysia, and Singapore. See URL: http://www.unhchr.ch/pdf/report.pdf.
27. Michael Dummett makes a strong case for the view that political considerations, particularly racism and xenophobia, are generally the limiting factors. See Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees (New York: Routledge, 2001).
28. For a review of the earlier literature, see Henrik Hansen and Finn Tarp, ‘Aid Effectiveness Disputed’, Journal of International Development 3 (2000): 375-98.
29. Milton Friedman, ‘Foreign Economic Aid’, Yale Review 47 (1958): 500-16; P.T. Bauer, Dissent on Development (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1971); P.T. Bauer, Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
30. Paul Mosely, Jane Harrigan and John Toye, Aid and Power: The World Bank and Policy-Based Lending (New York: Routledge, 1995).
31. Peter Boon, ‘Politics and the Effectiveness of Foreign Aid’, European Economic Review 2 (1996): 289-329.
32. Craig Burnside and David Dollar, ‘Aid, Policies, and Growth’, American Economic Review 4 (2000): 847-68.
33. This is William Easterly's characterization, ‘Can Foreign Aid Buy Growth?’ Journal of Economic Perspectives 3 (2003): 23-48.