Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders

The Review of Politics

Volumn 49, Issue 2, 1987, Pages 251-273

  Carens, Joseph H ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84975997447     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500033817     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. The conventional assumption is captured by the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy: “Our policy—while providing opportunity to a portion of the world's population—must be guided by the basic national interests of the people of the United States” From U.S. Immigration Policy and the National Interest: The Final Report and Recommendations of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy to the Congress and the President of the United States (1 March 1981). The best theoretical defense of the conventional assumption (with some modifications) is Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 31–63.
2. A few theorists have challenged the conventional assumption. See Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 89–95;
3. Judith Lichtenberg, “National Boundaries and Moral Boundaries: A Cosmopolitan View” in Boundaries: National Autonomy and Its Limits, ed. Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), pp. 79–100, and
4. Roger Nett, “The Civil Right We Are Not Ready For: The Right of Free Movement of People on the Face of the Earth,” Ethics 81:212–27. Frederick Whelan has also explored these issues in two interesting unpublished papers.
5. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 10–25, 88–119.
6. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 60–65, 136–42, 243–48.
7. The argument for a global view of the original position has been developed most fully in Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 125–76, especially 129–36 and 143–53. For earlier criticisms of Rawls along the same lines, see
8. Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 128–33 and
9. Thomas M. Scanlon, “Rawls's Theory of Justice,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 121, no. 5 (May 1973): 1066–67. For more recent discussions, see
10. David A. J. Richards, “International Distributive Justice,” in Ethics, Economics, and the Law, eds. J. Roland Pennock and John Chapman (New York: New York University Press, 1982), pp. 275–99 and
11. Charles Beitz, “Cosmopolitan Ideals and National Sentiments,” The Journal of Philosophy 80, no. 10 (October 1983): 591–600. None of these discussions fully explores the implications of a global view of the original position for the issue of immigration, although the recent essay by Beitz touches on the topic.
12. Rawls, Justice, pp. 136, 72.
13. John Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” The Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 9 (September 1980): 515–72.
14. Compare Beitz, Political Theory, p. 183.
15. For more on the comparison of mobility within a country and mobility across countries, see Joseph H. Carens, “Migration and the Welfare State” in Democracy and the Welfare State, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
16. Rawls, Justice, pp. 212–13.
17. For statistics on current and projected levels of immigration to the U.S., see Michael S. Teitelbaum, “Right Versus Right: Immigration and Refugee Policy in the United States,” Foreign Affairs 59 (1980): 21–59.
18. For the deep roots of the right to emigrate in the liberal tradition, see Frederick Whelan, “Citizenship and the Right to Leave,” American Political Science Review 75, no. 3 (September 1981): 636–53.
19. Rawls, Justice, pp. 325–32.
20. For recent discussions of utilitarianism, see Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979)
21. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)
22. R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); and
23. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
24. For recent communitarian critiques of liberalism, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981) and
25. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For a critique of the critics, see
26. Amy Gutmann, “Communitarian Critics of Liberalism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (Summer 1985): 308–322.
27. Walzer, Spheres, p. 61.
28. Compare Walzer's claim that the caste system would be just if accepted by the villages affected (., pp. 313–15).