Immigration is one of the major, and most contentious, political issues of our day. Can philosophy help here? David Miller thinks so. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast he speaks to David Edmonds about border controls and their justification.
This is philosophy bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
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How we deal with immigration is a major problem of our time.
But what are the philosophical issues at stake here?
Is this simply a question of human rights, or is there more going on?
This is obviously a contentious area, but David Miller thinks he has some of the answers.
David Miller, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Hello.
And I'm very happy to be rebitten, as it were.
The topic we're talking about today is immigration and border controls.
Can you just lay out what the general legal position is with countries and their right to set border controls?
Yes, well, at the moment, we live essentially under a regime of state sovereignty, where states are regarded as having wide and largely unrestricted authority to control their borders and to decide who to admit as immigrants.
There's one, I suppose, large exception to that, which is the right to claim asylum, which means that states are required to respond to asylum seekers to assess their claims and decide whether the asylum seeker has indeed a claim to come and stay in the country.
That's the position.
Are there any arguments against it?
Yes, I think in philosophical discussion of immigration and borders, many people actually challenge the status quo and argue that borders should be, in principle, fully open and in practice, as open as is, consistent with, for example, maintaining basic social order.
And there are a number of arguments to defend that view.
One, for example, a rather old argument, goes back as far as Grotius appeals to the idea that human beings own the world in common, and therefore they always retain the residual right to move across the surface of the earth and establish themselves on any part of it.