Welcome back to the second session of
our conference. This is the first session
dedicated to philosophy—the only session
dedicated to philosophy. The title of the
panel is, "The Ethics of Exclusion: On What
Basis (If Any) May We Keep Others Out?"
So this will be touching a lot of the
normative issues that were already
brought up in this morning's discussion,
though they'll now be further
developed, in greater detail at greater
length.
I'm thrilled to have here four
really interesting philosophers who all
have written on this from different
perspectives. We have Sahar Akhtar, from
Georgetown,
Joseph Carens, from University of Toronto,
Sarah Song, from Berkeley,
and Christopher Wellman, from Wash U.
We'll have each of the
speakers present for about 20 minutes
so they have a chance to really explain
what their central thoughts are.
We'll go in alphabetical order. We'll be holding
questions until the end,
so after all four speakers have spoken,
the panelists will be up here and
they'll be available for
answering questions and, as Giovanni
pointed out earlier, there will be a
plenary session at the end of the day
where additional questions can also be
raised, so if you don't get
around to asking your questions in the
Q&A at the end of this panel, there will
be another opportunity later on. But for
now, you'll get a chance to hear each of
these four philosophers present their
central thoughts on immigration, and on
what basis, if any, we may keep people out.
Sahar is starting...
This is going to be a very different
talk than the sorts of talks that the
economists gave.
It's probably going to be more hypothetical,
more conceptual,
more abstract,
maybe even in some
ways more annoying...or annoying.
but I hope that it can bear in some
shape or form on...
[video error]
We've been asked to comment on what basis
if any we can keep others out,
and I'm actually taking this question from
the opposite angle —
what bases are morally
impermissible?
I think if we can identify
bases that seem certainly off-limits,
and can understand why, we might be able
to...it might present as a new way of
thinking about what makes...inherent
permissible. But first, some terms and
qualifications:
I’m limiting my focus here to so-called
discretionary immigrants — people who have
neither urgent or special claims for immigration...for
admission,
urgent claims might include
refugees and asylum seekers and victims
of persecution and significant
oppressions.
Special claims might include
dual citizens, family reunification
purposes, or where there are existing
relationships, or particular historical
relationships, between certain states.
And the reason I'm doing this is because I
think so-called discretionary immigrants
might raise a number of distinct
challenges that these other immigrants
do not necessarily raise, and I think
there's more agreement
as to what state's obligations are concerning
the
urgent and special claims
than there are with discretionary immigrants.
I'm also restricting my focus to people
seeking membership
and I'm defining that as
permanent residency and/or citizenship.
and again, I'm focusing...
my talk on this particular
class of immigrants because I think
people seeking permanent residence also
raise distinct normative implications
that may not necessarily be true, or may
not necessarily be raised,
by other forms of immigration.
And finally, I'm
restricting my focus to liberal states.
Broadly, states that recognize and
respect individual rights and equality
and have some broad democratic
principles, like the rule of law.
Okay, so now back to the question—or at
least the way I'm taking the question—
...so what bases are morally impermissible?
Most think that states
may not exclude people on the basis of
their race.
This includes most theorists writing on this
subject,
as well as, I think, conversations in popular
and political discourse
it just seems like race is off-limits.
So my question is, why? So here's one sort
of view...
This view is what I'm calling the "Wrong to
Members" view.
The proponents of this view are Michael Blake,
as well as Kit Wellman.
Proponents of this view argue that racial
grounds are
off-limits because, and insofar as, the
wrong done to current members who share
the category, or the characteristics of
the excluded, on them. So if a state implements
racial bases for
excluding, the thought is, that is disrespectful
to existing citizens or
existing members more broadly,
who fall into the disfavored racial category.
And I think there's something…
something right about it, and agree that such
policies would be problematic for what
they say about existing citizens or
existing members. I also think this view
is right to remind us more generally of
the internal effects of immigration
policies. But ultimately there are some
shortcomings here, and you...begin
to see why. This case—
and this is where it gets hypothetical
and potentially annoying—this case is
offered by Michael Blake (and I'll offer
my own annoying case in just a moment...)
this case is offered by Michael Blake—
I'm calling it "Ensuring Ethnicity"—and
he
writes, "imagine a society...an ethnically
homogeneous society that implements an
immigration policy designed to ensure
and perpetuate this ethnic makeup of
society.” He suggests there's anything
wrong by it for the simple reason that
there...members that would be
disrespected by the policy, and I think
there's something right about this and I
actually think there's something sort of
intuitively potentially permissible
about this policy that I think it might
be because I don't know enough about it.
I don't know enough about it, and I have
a variety of questions I'd like to ask
about it. So now I want to consider this one—
this one I'm calling “Racial Ban”—a
wealthy state composed only of white
members decides to accept people of
every race except for black people. So
this case shares the same structure as
the previous case, in that there are no
existing members who will be
disrespected, wronged, by the policy
relevance bases, but this seems
intuitively very offensive to me. So if
the Wrong to Members view doesn't
explain it, and assuming that this is
wrong, or at least maybe pro tanto wrong,
wrong absent justification, then with
the explanation—so this is an
explanation that I'm trying to
develop in a larger project
and I’m just presenting a very small bit
of it here
today—so the claim that states
memberships
are appropriately subject to
anti-discrimination norms is the…
part of the explanation that I want to
give…so this is obvious. This might be
very obvious and, in fact, we hear claims
about the discriminatory nature of
immigration bases all the time, and a
number of fears also talked about
discrimination, but is it a plausible view
to say…is it plausible to say that states
may
not discriminate against
non-members, and on the bases of what? Is
that a plausible view, and if so, why? It's
certainly plausible, it's certainly
widely accepted, that states may not
discriminate with respect to their own
members. But do they have non-discrimination
needs to non-members? And what
are the implications and, more
importantly, the limits, of this
kind of view? So I think it'll help if
by looking at the domestic context or,
more specifically, associations, or
communities, where we think it generally
is impermissible to exclude or deny in
the basis of race at least that's how I
want to start it here so there are a lot
of examples for associations that are
generally…or whereby, it would be
generally wrong to exclude on
such basis but I'm going to consider
large businesses. I'm going to give sort
of a caricature of large businesses and
there'll be hopefully a point to that.
So large businesses…imagine a large
company that controls the significant
market share of major industry that
implements a whites-only hiring policy. I
think we would probably agree that that
is wrong; on the other hand, imagine
marital…take a look at marital and other
romantic relationships, or romantic
partnerships. It's not as clear, I think,
that we would consider it wrong. It’s at
least
an open question. Imagine Amanda rejects
Evan’s proposal in virtue of Evan’s race.
We might say that there's a lot that's
offensive about her character—she has
poor character; we might even think
there's something reprehensible about
her, depending that upon her belief, but whether
she's entitled to deny—
whether she's morally permitted to deny—
the marriage proposal on the basis of
race still seems like it's an open
question. Or, at the very least, that it
depends on more information. Has there
been an existing commitment? Has Amanda
made a commitment to Evan? Has it been
an ongoing relationship between them? In
the absence of those things I think it
might be an open question. Notice though
with large businesses even in the
absence of prior commitments, existing
relationships, we would still think that
it's wrong…
generally wrong for them to exclude on
the basis of race so what explains these
differences? Well, there's probably a
variety of things, a variety of
considerations that explain why we think
businesses but not marriages typically
are generally permitted to use racial
basis for exclusion, but here are two
that I think are important. First, the
first concerns the character or the
interest for the admitting party. What
are the interests irrelevant for seeking
a member, or fellow associate, in the
context of marriages? Well, the interests
are to cultivate and have flourishing
intimate relationships and, as such, it
seems that when one happens to be morally
entitled to, or one is morally entitled
to choose their marriage partner on the
basis of characteristics of their
choosing or at least on a wide variety
of characteristics and again I think
that’s still an open question. I don't
think it's decisive that we don't have
such prohibitions on racial grounds,
marriages raise interesting
questions. What are the interests at stake
for businesses and selecting members?
Well they have to do with efficiency,
Productivity, achievement, and so forth…
and
to be sure it depends on the kind of
business, and the kind of position, and
it's very often the case that business
goals depend on social…on various kinds
of social relationships between their
members; that the goals are better served
if there is a set of shared values, but
those goals are not dependent in any way
on intimate relationships— at least,
not anything like they are in marriage.
I think that’s an obvious enough
Distinction; but second, a more important
distinction that has to do with the
power of the admitting party—especially
in comparison to the power of the
membership-seeking parties.
So Amanda rejects Evans marriage
Proposal, again in the absence of
existing relationships or prior
commitments. When one rejects somebody’s
marriage proposal, you don't generally
structure that access to other intimate
possibilities, but in the case of a large
company, especially in the way that I've
described it, it shapes access to the
employment options in the industry that
it occupies. And efforts to start new
businesses are met with significant
start-up costs, whether informal startup
costs or significant entry barriers
whether informal startup cost and/or
formal ones including licenses and
property rights, especially intellectual
property rights, so the power of the
admitting party in the case of large
businesses is quite significant— at least
the power differential looks
significant—so these are some of the
considerations, I think, that tell us why
large businesses, or the membership
decisions undertaken
in large businesses, but not necessarily
those undertaken in marriage, are
appropriately subject to
anti-discrimination concerns. And by that,
one of the things that means, is that
large businesses generally have duties
not to discriminate or engage in actions
or practices that disadvantage someone
in comparison to somebody else in virtue of
certain characteristics. These
characteristics certainly range, and they
vary; they're known as “Prohibited
Grounds” among discrimination theorists.
And they certainly vary, but they
generally include socially salient
identity-constitutive traits—those are…
there's a lot packed into both of those,
and I’ll only be able to briefly say
something about each of them. By “socially
salient” I mean that it's a
characteristic structure social
interactions across a wide range of
context. By “identity-constitutive” I
mean
a trait that is often important to the
way one forges values, and maybe even
important to their conception of their
self. Common examples include: disability,
gender, race, sexual orientation, religion,
ethnicity. There is a lot of disagreement
in the discrimination theory so I'm kind
of going to be beset by the same
problems that beset that whole
literature, and one of the biggest
sources of disagreement concerns what
the wrong of discrimination is. I'm not
going to say really anything about that
here though I will in the larger project…
What the wrong of discrimination is, it
varies quite a bit..I'm drawn to views
that say that the wrong of
discrimination is that
it demeans the object, or disrespects
them. Okay, so when we think about those
two considerations that I raised—the
power, and the interest of the admitting
party—it seems like marriages stand on
one sort of end of the spectrum, and
large businesses stand on the other. And
there's probably a lot of associations
and communities that fall somewhere in
between, including religious
organizations, social clubs, cultural
groups. I don't think we need to examine
all of these groups, all of these kinds
of associations, to analyze state in the
light of some of the considerations that
I've given. It seems that states are not
only much closer to large businesses
than they are to marriages, but that
states would be even way outside, fall
much further for marriages then with
large businesses even under the
the bad caricature of a large business
that I gave. So in terms…first, in terms
of the interests at stake for state
membership, well, they're not intimate or
personal or even necessarily social; the
importance of a shared set of values in
liberal states. I don't mean to
minimize that…values including mutual
respect, economy, equality, but these
values are arguably somewhat thin and in
any case one's ability to embrace them
or perhaps more aptly respect them…I
don't believe depends on one’s race.
Just like whatever corporate values are
present in a company will not depend on
one’s race. As to the second, more
significant issue: A state controls access
to range of important life-shaping
opportunities, so not just employment but
broader economic opportunities—
geographic, political, social
opportunities, even
personal options. And efforts to start a
new state, well that's sort of
insurmountable—the states control all of
the habitable territory on earth and
you're not going to be able to succeed
at will from the state, so as such, the
power differential between states, or a state,
and
those seeking
membership in the state
is considerable. Now I don't think this
provides a decisive reason to think
states are subject to these…
these duties, but it provides
some reason. Okay, so now how does this
kind of general idea explain
potential intuitions that we might have
had about these cases?
So, first ethnicity and race—
incredibly fraught, contestable notions,
and I'm not going to give any
definitions of them here; having said
that, one might think that ethnicity is
more closely related to cultural
practices, including languages, and there
may be reasons to object to excluding
somebody on those grounds…excluding
an immigrant on those grounds…but
it doesn't seem objectionable in the
same way as racial grounds do. Language,
for instance, may not be
identity-constitutive or socially salient
in same
way. A more significant…
potential difference between the two
cases is that what we know about
ensuring ethnicity is that it's an
immigration policy designed to ensure
and perpetuate the ethnic makeup of
society. Well we might think that the
state is seeking to preserve a
vulnerable ethnic or even racial group
and as such it might be similar to what
discrimination theorists referred to
“protected groups” so protected groups
just
like prohibited grounds may vary, but
once we identify…or once a
prohibited ground category is identified
protected groups, or those groups
falling into the category that are
vulnerable in some sense,
and typically because they've
experienced abiding…
disadvantages. So if the category is
gender, women as opposed to men might be a
protected group. Something that often
sets protected groups apart is that they
may not just be prohibited grounds for
discrimination, but they might also have
special moral rights and privileges. And
insofar as we think of the first state—
the state and first policy is composed
of a vulnerable ethnic group we may
think that it too should exclude certain
kinds…it should have certain kinds of
exclusion rights that other groups are
not entitled to. Maybe the most
significant reason for the difference
between these cases is that no one is
singled out in ensuring ethnicity. So I'm
taking this straight from the author
Michael Blake…seems like we're meant to
Presume, or we’re at least potentially
meant to presume, that the immigration
policy admits people that share the
general, or share the ethnicity, but
generally excludes everybody else. So it
doesn't single out anybody for exclusion;
the policy though under racial ban is
sort of a paradigm case of direct
discrimination, or discrimination that
picks out certain people for less
favorable treatment than other, and it's…
it's almost a…
caricature of a direct discrimination
case, so I've said something about the
Wrong to Members view I'd like to just
briefly comment on the idea of open
borders, and there's no one…widely,
completely accepted characterization, or
formulation of this view. I am taking
this largely from Jospeh Carens’ work—
and he can correct me if I'm
representing it in accurately—but the
idea is just as people are free to move
within a state, they should generally be
free to move across states,
aside from security restrictions as well
as minimal restrictions protecting
property rights and enhancing everyone's
freedom of movement (such as traffic and safety
regulations). So unlike the Wrong to Members
view, this you can say what is
wrong with the policy and racial ban?
But it might also mean that all of these
cases are also wrong, and I am not clear
that they are wrong. At least it
seems to me that we need to know more
about these policies, and if you're an open
borders proponent I'm not going to
convince you that these are acceptable,
or potentially acceptable, but if you're
like me and you're not sure you're going to
want to know more information about them
and…I'm not up here telling you
that the anti-discrimination framework
can tell us decisively whether these are
right or wrong, but what they might be
able to do is help us pick out what we
need to know in order to tell whether
they're right or wrong. So, for example, insofar
as we know, none of these cases
and racial preferences…
none of these cases excludes a
vulnerable group; additionally,
these cases singled out insofar as we
know, none of these cases singled out a
particular group for exclusion. So those
are just some of the differences, and I
welcome thoughts about these cases or
others and at that, I’ll leave it.
Thank you so much.
It’s great to be here.
I really like the idea of bringing together
of
people from different disciplines and
talking across these barriers, and I
like the fact that the economists were
engaging with philosophy, and I wish I
could reciprocate here…I’m not,
it's just not part of the
argument, for the most part, so we were
asked to talk about exclusion as it
relates to immigration and so I wanted
to start by just drawing attention to
the different ways in which one
could understand exclusion in relation
to immigration. So one important
thing to see is that many forms of
exclusion could apply to immigrants who
are already present, so think about the
economic and social marginalization of
legally admitted immigrants, or think
about limiting the legal rights of
temporary workers to be another form of
exclusion; or think about the pursuit of
those without authorization—these are
all ways in which people who are already
inside can be excluded. Just take a
minute on that last one, think about
people…the
term I use is “irregular migrants,” people
who like them call them “undocumented”
people who don't like them call them
“illegal aliens” so I tried to pick a
term
which doesn't presuppose the position
but you can object to irregular
migrants as well,
anyway they're people who settled
without the state's authorization. So the
first thing to see is that even people
who have settled without the
authorization of the state are morally
and legally entitled to have their basic
human rights protected. You can't shoot
someone just because she doesn't have a
visa. But irregular migrants often cannot
exercise their legal rights effectively
because if they do so they'll be exposed
to the immigration authorities and
deported. So, if we take the protection of
human rights seriously, we should create
a firewall between immigration
enforcement on the one hand, and the
protection of human rights on the other,
and we should prohibit those who are
responsible for the latter…for
protecting human rights, say, ordinary
police, emergency medical personnel, and
so on…prohibit them from communicating
with those responsible for enforcing
immigration laws
—just the opposite of
what we actually do sometimes—so
some people are skeptical about the
feasibility of such a firewall, but I
contend many liberal democratic states
already create firewalls in many
different areas through privacy
legislation and other rules that prevent
public officials in one department from
gaining access to information that
officials in another department possess.
So the issue is not administrative
feasibility but rather the extent of our
commitment, our political will, to protect
important basic rights. And I'll just
add that in my view, over time, even
people who have settled without
authorization become members of society
in which they live, and that membership
should be recognized by granting them
legal status after they have been
present for an extended period. Now, I
know not everyone will accept these
claims, and I'm happy to pursue them
further in the discussion, but I just
mentioned them as ways of thinking about
how you…
it's the exclusion that exists of people
who are already present, and how one
might combat that exclusion. But now I
want to move on to the more
controversial parts of my talk…so
discussions like this one always take
place against the background of
presuppositions, and there can be good
reasons for adopting different
presuppositions for different purposes.
Economists, for example, sometimes
assumed a background of perfect
competition to clarify the logic of
certain economic arrangements and then
sometimes assume more realistic
background conditions for more immediate
policy purposes or for other reasons. And
we do the same in political theory, but
not always so self-consciously. Sometimes
we adopt presuppositions about values,
sometimes about the political and
economic background circumstances of our
discussion, and again the point here
is to say not that there's a right or
wrong but to be conscious of one's
presuppositions and keep some reasons
for it and then operate within the
framework in a particular discussion.
So in my talk I'm going to start by
taking as one presupposition what I call
the conventional moral view about
immigration—namely, and that is, that
states have a moral right to control
admissions, and so to exclude, more or
less, whomever they want. That's kind of
the conventional view, but we already
recognize some limits to this
conventional view, at least in principle.
If we acknowledge, as most people do,
again in principle, and most people…
I always have to say “these days…” most
people acknowledge we should not
discriminate it on the basis of race,
ethnicity, religion, in our admissions
decisions. Now, Sahar was giving
us some reasons for that, but most people
recognize there's something problematic
about such forms of discrimination; most
people recognize that immediate family
members have a special kind of claim for
admission that other people don't; most
people recognize that we have some
obligation to take in refugees; Sahar,
again, mentionrf both of those categories…
so in my talk what I want to do is to
expand a bit…the category that
we think of in the context of refugees,
and our obligations for refugees, in the
first part of the talk; and in the second
part of the talk, I want to challenge
that conventional assumption so I
presuppose it at the beginning. And, if
you think about refugees, you know it
…may seem odd to presuppose that
conventional view, but actually the whole
problem of refugees only emerges in a
context in which you had the
conventional view. If you had open
borders, you wouldn't have a problem of
refugees—they could go where they needed,
right? So that…thinking
about refugees as a distinct problem, and
this is one of the reasons why you don't
want to always just take what you think
as absolutely right, because to think
about the problem of refugees has to
presuppose a context in which states are
normally entitled to admit or exclude on
the basis of their own values and
criteria. Okay, so, even if we accept this
conventional view about the state’s right
to exercise discretionary control,
everyone—and these days I know you can
never say everyone, that's rash to
assume these views are shared by
everyone—but let's say those who present
themselves as committed to liberal
democracy, most of those people recognize
that refugees have a special claim. And
we have come—I'm going to use “we” here
collectively—we've come to this view
because of the way we responded, or
actually the way we fail to respond to
the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing
the Nazis in the 1930s. We kept most of
them out. In one famous case the United
States and Canada actually turned away a
boatload of Jewish refugees who had made
it to North America. And in many cases
the states prevented Jews from coming in
the first place by denying them visas
and putting other obstacles in their
paths, and the reasons for refusing to
admit Jewish refugees were the same
sorts of reasons that you hear today for
refusing admittance to refugees…but
we've got our own problems, it's too
expensive, some may be subversives; one
prominent government official worried
explicitly about Nazi saboteurs and spies
who might pretend to be refugees to gain
entrance to the United States; others
worried about their being communists. And
after World War II, people in liberal
democratic states recognize that this
exclusion of Jewish refugees had been a
terrible moral failure on our part and
we vowed never to let it happen again so
along with other states we created an
international refugee regime that
guarantees that people cannot be
returned to a place where they'll be
subject to persecution. But now we're
failing once again to provide refugees
with the protection that they need. Rich
states have undermined the refugee
regime with visa controls and carrier
sanctions that make it difficult for
refugees to make it to our shore. Now,
here's an obvious point, but it's still
one worth making explicitly—you cannot
claim to have addressed the refugee
problem if you set up a regime to
protect refugees that you prevent the
refugees from using. I mean that's what
we've done at least with respect to many
refugees. Well in addition to its
inaccessibility, the current refugee
regime is deeply inadequate in other
ways, mainly by the way it assigns
responsibility for taking care of
refugees. So, what do refugees need and
who should provide it? Those are the
basic questions…well, first of all what
they need is initially, at first, the
safe haven someplace where their lives
won't be in danger and their basic human
rights will be respected. And for
these purposes refugee camps make sense
if they're properly organized and
supported but it is not reasonable to
expect people to live their entire lives
in a refugee camp but that is what we do
today. Millions of refugees spend long
years of their lives sometimes their
entire lifetimes in camps with little or
no education for the children, limited or
no economic opportunities for the adults,
an extreme physical
danger, especially for the women. This is
not an acceptable way to treat people in
desperate need. Refugees who cannot
return home within a reasonable period
need a new home, somewhere where they can
live a normal life. So that's what they
need; who should provide refugees with
what they need? Well, it may be reasonable
to expect neighboring states to provide
the initial safe haven at least so long
as those states don't have to bear the
financial cost of doing so in addition
to the social dislocation that's
inevitably entailed, but there's no
reason to expect the neighboring states
to provide refugees with a new home if
that's what they need. That is a
responsibility that ought to be shared
by all states and that's precisely where
we are failing today.
Turkey is taking in millions of refugees;
Lebanon, a country of only a few million
people, and it's taken in a million—
almost a quarter of its population;
Jordan has taken in millions as well, and
there are other examples. Now, these
states are not responsible for the fact
that the people became refugees in the
first place, so it is just not reasonable
to expect them to be the only ones to
provide the refugees with the new homes
that they need, and we have failed
terribly to meet that responsibility. Now
sometimes people say, well, taking in
large numbers of refugees is just too
much to ask of us…but you know several
states including the United States and
Canada did much better after the war in
Vietnam taking in large numbers of
refugees and Germany took in a million
recently, so there are different ways to
think about how the responsibility for
resettling refugees should be shared.
Obviously, the size of the existing
population of a state is one important
consideration—you can't expect the
Netherlands to take in as many as the
United States and so on… and there
are many other considerations but…
whatever would be a fair way of sharing
that responsibility…you posit it…and
whatever would be a fair way it's just
not plausible to claim that most rich
states today are doing their fair share
in this regard. And the question that we
ought to be asking ourselves, but which
we almost never do, is what do we imagine
will happen to these people if we do not
take them in? And why do we think it
is acceptable to foist the
responsibility off onto
the neighboring states, and to shut our
eyes to the limited lives that so many
people will face when we refuse to take
them in. So that's the refugees…and
that's within the assumption that states
normally have the right to control, but
refugees as a special case…people with
especially urgent claims, but now I want
to challenge the conventional view. So
here's the case—apologies to those who
have heard it before—borders have guards
and the guards have guns,
now that's an obvious fact of political
life but it's one that's easily hidden
from view, at least from the view of
those of us who were citizens of
affluent democracies. If we see the
guards at all we find them reassuring, we
think of them as there to protect us,
rather than to keep us out but to
Africans and Afghans in small leaky
vessels seeking to avoid patrol boats
that while they cross the water to
southern Europe or to Australia; to
Mexicans were willing to risk death from
heat and exposure in the Arizona desert
to evade the fences and the border
controls..it's quite different. To these
people, the borders, the guards, the guns
are all too apparent. Their goal of
exclusion all too real, so what justifies
the use of force against such people?
I mean maybe borders and guards can be
justified as a way of keeping out
terrorists and armed invaders and
criminals but most of those trying to
get in are not like that—we know that;
they're ordinary peaceful people seeking
only the opportunity to build decent and
secure lives for themselves and their
families. On what moral grounds do can we
deny entry to these sorts of people?
What gives anyone the right to point
guns at them? Now, to many people the
answer to this question will be obvious…
well the power to admit or exclude
non-citizens is inherent in sovereignty;
it's essential for any political
community that seeks to exercise
self-determination, it has to be able to
exclude people like this. Every state has…
the legal people will say…every state
has the legal and moral right to
exercise control over admissions in
pursuit of its own national interest and
of the common good of the members of its
community, even if that means denying
entry to peaceful needy foreigners;
states can choose to be generous and
admitting immigrants, but
most cases at least they're under no
moral obligation to do so—that's the
conventional view. And I want to
challenge that view; in principle, in my
view, borders should generally be open
and people should normally be free to
leave their country of origin and settle
wherever they choose. I think this
critique of exclusion has particular
force with respect to restrictions on
movement from developing States to rich
states, but it applies more generally. So
here's the key—
in many ways citizenship in Western
democracies is the modern equivalent of
feudal class privilege…it's an inherited
status that greatly enhances one's life
chances. To be born a citizen of a rich
state in Europe and North America is
like being born into the nobility in the
Middle Ages, even if many of us belong to
the lesser nobility; to be born a citizen
of a poor country in Asia or Africa is
like being born into the peasantry, even
if there are a few rich peasants and
some peasants managed to gain entry to
the nobility. Well like feudal birthright
privileges contemporary, social
arrangements not only grant greater
advantages on the basis of birth but
they entrench these advantages by
legally restricting mobility, making it
extremely difficult for those born
into a socially disadvantaged position
to overcome that disadvantage no matter
how talented they are, or how hard they
work. And, like feudal practices, these
contemporary social arrangements are
hard to justify if you think about them
closely. Reformers in the late Middle
Ages objected to the way feudalism
restricted freedom, including the freedom
of individuals to move from one place to
another in search of a better life, and
that constraint was crucial to
the maintenance of the feudal system.
well modern practices of state control
over borders tie people to the land of
their birth almost as effectively,
limiting entry to rich democratic states
is a crucial mechanism for protecting a
birthright privilege, and if the feudal
practices protecting birthright
privileges were wrong, what just
justifies the modern ones? There are
millions of people today in poor states
who long for the freedom and economic
opportunity that they could find in
Europe and North America. Many take great
risks to come, and
if the borders were open, millions more
would move. The exclusion of so many poor
and desperate people seems hard to
justify from a perspective that takes
seriously the claim of all individuals
to be regarded as free and equal moral
persons, which I take to be a fundamental
assumption of moral reflection. Now some
will object that open borders would be
contrary to our interests—one can
challenge that on economic grounds as
Michael and others have—but suppose
they're right, suppose it is contrary to
our interest. If we want to act ethically
we have to give reasons for our
Institutions and practices and those
reasons have to take a certain form. It's
never enough to justify a set of social
arrangements governing human beings to
say, well, these arrangements are good for
us…
without regard for others whoever the “us”
may be; we have to appeal to principles
and arguments to take everyone's
interest into account, or explain why the
social arrangements are reasonable and
fair to everyone who is subject to them.
that's the general requirement. You know
The New Yorker once had a cartoon that
seems appropriate to mention here, it
shows two kings talking to one another.
The first one says to the other, “well,
monarchy may not be the best form of
government, in principle, but it has
always seemed the best form of
government for me”…and I'm afraid that
those of us who live in rich states
today are a lot like that king…the way
the world is organized may be hard to
justify in principle, but it’s good for
us.
Well, I have no illusions about the
likelihood that rich states will
actually open their borders the primary
motivation for this argument is my sense
that it is of vital importance to gain a
critical perspective on the ways in
which our collective choices are
constrained, even when we can't do
anything right here and now to change
those constraints. Social institutions
and practices may be deeply unjust and
yet so firmly established that for
practical purposes they have to be taken
as background givens in deciding how to
act in the world at a particular moment
in time.
For example, feudalism and slavery where
social arrangements that were deeply
entrenched in places in the past. In
those contexts, there was no real hope of
transcending them in a foreseeable
future, but criticism was still
appropriate. So even if we have to take
such arrangements as givens for purposes
of immediate action in a particular
context (what is to be done today and
tomorrow) we should not forget about our
assessment of their fundamental
character; otherwise we wind up
legitimating what should only be endured.
Of course, most people in democratic
states think the institutions they
inhabit have nothing in common with
feudalism and slavery from a normative
perspective; the social arrangements of
democratic states, they suppose, are
just. Well nearly so…and it's precisely
that complacency that the open borders
argument is intended to undermine. For I
imagine, or at least I hope, that in a
century or two people will look back
upon our world with bafflement and shock,
and just as we wonder about the moral
blindness of feudal aristocrats and
southern slave owners, future generations
may ask themselves how Democrats today
could have possibly failed to see the
deep injustice of a world so starkly
divided between haves and have-nots;
why we felt so complacent about this
division, so unwilling to do what we
could to change it. The argument for open
borders provides one way of bringing
this deep injustice of the modern world
into view. Now, it's only a partial
perspective, because even if borders were
open that would not address all the
underlying injustices that make people
want to move. Still, it's a useful
perspective, because our responsibility
for keeping people from immigrating is
clear and direct,
whereas our responsibility for poverty
and oppression elsewhere often is not as
obvious, at least to many people. We do have
to use overt force to prevent people
from moving, we need borders with
barriers and guards with guns to keep
out people whose only goal is to work
hard to build a decent life for
themselves and their children, and that
is something we could change. At the
least, we could let many more people in.
Our refusal to do so is a choice that we
make, and one that keeps many of them
from having a chance at a decent life.
Thank you.
So this panel has been asked to consider
the question, on what basis (if any) may we
keep others out? Who's the “we”
in this question? It's commonplace to
think of the “we” as members or citizens
of particular countries, and its
political institutions, public officials
that claim to rule in the name of
citizens. I think to answer this question,
we need to address to at least two other
questions, and so I want to focus on
these two questions in my talk: Is
special or preferential treatment of
members over non-members justified? And
is the power that we, as members of
modern states, exercise over borders
justifiable?
So the first, Radical cosmopolitans say no.
And when I say “radical” I don't mean
thoughtless because Michael Clemens said
he's been accused of being a thoughtless
cosmopolitan…I think radical cosmopolitans
are
very thoughtful, and they argue
that if we accept the moral equality of
all human beings, why shouldn't people be
free to move across borders if they wish?
The case for open borders, which Joseph
Carens just powerfully made, is
strengthened by a distributive objection;
it's a matter of luck whether one is
born a citizen of a poor or wealthy
country, yet border controls help sustain
global inequalities by preventing people
from poorer societies from moving to
richer ones. Like being born into a
wealthy family, citizenship acquired by
being born in the territory of, or to
parents of, who are citizens of wealthy
countries, is a matter of luck. To borrow
a phrase from John Rawls, it's so
arbitrary from a moral point of view, yet
strongly determines our prospects in
life. So I agree that the
distribution of citizenship is morally
arbitrary, but citizenship is nonetheless
morally significant. In my forthcoming
book on immigration, I develop a
normative theory of immigration rooted
in an ethic of membership. An ethic of
membership holds that we have particular
obligations in virtue of our membership
and political communities, and this ethic
of membership
is based on the idea of
associative obligations, which Samuel
Scheffler and others have written about.
So consider your relationship to family
and friends—we regard the needs,
interests, and desires of our friends and
family as providing us with reasons to
perform actions that we do not have
comparable reason to perform for others.
Associative obligations extend to
our membership in groups. We find
membership in religious communities,
ethnic associations, sports clubs, the
Girl Scouts, and Boy Scouts, to be not
just instrumentally valuable but
rewarding in their own right. To value
membership in a group just is to regard
that membership as giving us reasons to
do things on behalf of the group, and to
help sustain the purposes of the group.
In the case of relationships with family
and friends, we look to their needs,
interests, and desires as guides to
action; in the case of groups, we look to
group norms that play the role of
communicating the needs, interests, and
desires of the group. So the idea of
associative obligations extends, I argue,
to membership and political communities.
But what kind of relationship do
compatriots have to one another that
could give rise to special obligations?
After all, the vast majority of our
compatriots are strangers to us, so how
can it be that we actually have
particular obligations to them?
What are the ties that bind us to fellow
compatriots? So some argue that we should
regard political membership and its
obligations as grounded in consent. I'm
here thinking of a book by Peter Schuck
and Roger Smith where they seek to
revive the notion of consent-based
membership, but this runs into familiar
problems that most people haven't given
their consent to the countries they
happen to be born citizens of. Another
answer that's been very politically
potent comes from nationalists, theorists
of nationalism, who contend that
political membership is based on shared
national identity. As the political
theorist David Miller argues, with
national identity comes a kind of
solidarity that's lacking if one looks
just at economic and political
relationships. People feel emotionally
attached to one another because they
share this identity. So nationalist
conceptions have proven to be a potent
basis for defining political
community. As I'll discuss later in
my talk, the national nationalist view
suffers from some serious problems.
I think, problems that Michael Clemens
talk gets at when he's analogizing
migrant migration barriers with racism
and racial exclusions. Okay, so for now, I
want to emphasize that adopting the idea
of membership-based obligations does not
mean that we have no obligations to
those outside our circles of membership.
We can prioritize the interests of
Compatriots, but our membership
obligations must be balanced against our
universal obligations to all of humanity.
I call this position “moderate cosmopolitanism”
and of course there's a
genuine tension between the Particulars’
claim about political responsibility and
the Universalist claim about moral
equality, which will never be eliminated,
but it can be managed and reduced by
recognizing that they're mutually
constraining and that each places limits
on how the other value may be pursued.
When it comes to immigration, I argue
that what's required is not open borders
or closed borders, but open doors
coupled with robust development
assistance to poor countries; then the
question becomes, for public political
debate, open to whom? And I'll return to
this question at the end of my talk but
moving on to answer the question, on what
basis may we keep others out? The other
question we need to address is whether
state control over immigration is
justifiable? This is…a family
of views that Joe Carens referred to as
“the conventional moral view” and I want
to kind of dig underneath this view
to think about…different
attempts to justify this
conventional view. These are some of the
prominent accounts on offer in the
philosophical literature. I'll briefly
examine the first I'm assuming that Kit
will talk about his own view, and then we
can discuss some of the others that I
won't have time to discuss in the Q&A if
you like. I'm going to focus on the idea
of collective self-determination. So what
if anything, justifies state control over
immigration? Perhaps the most prominent
answer offered by theorists, and certainly
one that resonates with public political
discourse, is an account based on the
value of cultural and national identity.
Michael Walzer in his book, “Spheres of
Justice” was one of the first theorists
to explicitly examine the good of
membership in the debate…in debates
about distributive justice.
He says political membership is perhaps
the most important good, because
historically it's determined access to
rights. Before we can have civil,
political, social, economic rights we need
membership in a political community.
Walzer conceives of the political
community as a national family; like a
national family a fundamental imperative
of the state is to preserve a culturally
distinctive way of life. He suggests that
state control over immigration rests on
this cultural imperative, and this is the
quote I've provided…”the distinctiveness
of cultures and groups depends upon
closure…If this distinctiveness is a
value, as most people seem to believe…
then closure must be permitted somewhere.
At
some level of political organization,
something like the sovereign state must
take shape and claim the authority to
make its own admissions policy, to
control and sometimes restrain the flow
of immigrants.” The “we” in Walzers
argument
is a distinctive cultural group; the
states right to control immigration
derives from a cultural groups’ right of
cultural preservation. David Miller has
developed the cultural argument for
states right to control immigration in
explicitly nationalist terms; the state’s
right to control immigration is said to
derive from a nation's right to control
its own territory and according to
Miller there's a two-way interaction
between territory and the culture of the
people who live on it. First, the national
culture adapts to the territory…whether
the climate’s hot or cold, whether the
land is landlocked or open to the sea…
will encourage the development of
certain customs and discourage others.
Second, the territory itself will be
shaped according to the cultural
priorities of the people who live on it.
…cultural priorities of the people
who labor on the land. So labor not only
adds economic value but also endows the
land with cultural meaning.
So essentially, Miller offers a Lockean
argument,
because members of the nation add value
and meaning by mixing their labor with
the land; the nation as a whole has a
legitimate claim to the enhanced value
that the territory now has. I think that
Walzer and Miller's cultural and
nationalist arguments suffer from
several problems which I detail in my
book. I'll just highlight two here: first,
it permits racial and ethnic exclusions
insofar as racial and ethnic identities
are regarded as central to national
identity. Miller, to be clear, explicitly
rejects racial exclusions, for reasons
very similar to the ones that Sahar went
over in her talk, but historically
discourses of national identity have
tended to exclude and include
prospective migrants on the basis of
race, ethnicity, religion, national origin…
I think of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the
National Origins quota system, or
Trump's Muslim ban. In contrast to Miller,
and I think this is really interesting,
Walzer bites the bullet. In discussing
the White Australia Policy, he accepts
racial exclusion as an implication of a
cultural argument. In the first half of
the 20th century, the Australian
government sought to exclude Chinese
migrants in order to keep Australia
white. Walzer says that Australian
citizens faced one of two choices when
confronted with non-white refugees
seeking admission. On the one hand
Australians, could meet the duty of
mutual aid to refugees either by
admitting them, or on the other, giving
them some of their land to the needy
strangers to establish a separate
community, thereby preserving a white
Australia. Walzer gives weight to the
refugees claim to enter, but he takes
just as seriously white
Australian’s claim to keep Australia
White. A second problem with a cultural
argument has to do with who is doing the
laboring. The work is performed by
individuals, not the nation;
indeed the laborers are often non-citizen,
migrants, who are not members, so
why should the nation gain rights over
the territory and not the particular
individuals who actually perform the
labor?
If there is a compelling argument for the
state’s right to control immigration, I
believe it rests on the idea of
collective self-determination, as Walzer
and Miller do, but the collective—the we—
is defined in terms of participation and
shared institutions, not in terms of a
cultural identity. Although members of a
political community are strangers to one
another, they develop attachments, loyalty
to the community, through a shared
history of cooperating together. So what
is collective self-determination? It's a
claim of a people to rule itself. The
first article of the UN Charter states
that a central purpose of the UN is to
develop friendly relations among nations
based on respect for the principle of
equal rights and self-determination of
peoples. Article 1 of the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
declares all peoples have the right of
self-determination. By virtue of that
right they freely determine their
political status and freely pursue their
economic, social, and cultural development.
So let me just briefly sketch my
self-determination argument for the
state's right to control immigration.
First, a people has the right of
collective self-determination. What is a
people? A group…it's a group of
individuals that aspires to collective
self-rule, has the capacity to establish
and maintain political institutions, and
has a history of political cooperation
and participation. Political cooperation
can take the form of political
mobilization by a group that aspires to
statehood, or sub-state arrangements
through which they can exercise
self-determination. Political cooperation
may also take the form of participating
in already established state
institutions. So Americans are a people
not in virtue of a shared cultural
identity, as nationalists would argue, but
in virtue of a shared history of
cooperating and participating together
in common institutions. The right of
collective self-determination derives
from the basic interests of individuals,
and having some degree of control over
their lives, but collective
self-determination is a collective right
in two senses.
First, the agent is a collective agent of
People, as I've just discussed; and second,
collective self-determining
is a collective good. The interest in
question is not the interests of
individuals as individuals, but as
individuals as members of a
collective, and it enables a distinctive
kind of freedom—political freedom. The
second claim is that to exercise
self-determination on behalf of the
people it represents, the state requires
territorial rights which include the
right of territorial jurisdiction, to
make and enforce laws throughout the
territory; the right to control and use
resources in the territory; and the right
to control the movement of people and
goods in to and within the territory. Why
should we think of immigration control,
in particular, as fundamental to
collective self-determination? After all,
a state could exercise the right of
territorial jurisdiction—control over
land and resources—without also
controlling the movement of people on
the land. I actually don't know Joe's
view about rights of territorial
jurisdiction, but he might say a state
can exercise control over land and
resources, it just can't control who
comes in and who goes out, so anyone who
wants to be a member can be a member. I
think there are two kinds of argument
that we can make in thinking about why
immigration control, in particular, is
fundamental to collective
self-determination, and the first is concerned
with the effects of immigration on the
pursuit of particular goods that members
of the political community value. Some
focus on the economic impact, such as the
fiscal costs and benefits of immigration,
and the effects of immigration on the
labor market, which the morning panel and
another panel this afternoon will talk
about, and I think that in normative
debates, we often make assumptions about
the effects of immigration and we look
to economists, and it was really
helpful to hear what economists can and
cannot measure, and what we can and
cannot know, so others worry about the
political impact of immigration, on the
effects of immigration on social trust,
and on public support for social welfare
programs, and still others are concerned—
and we hear a lot about this in
contemporary discourse—the cultural
impact of immigration on the collective
self, that is the subject of
self-determination.
A second argument and, in my view,
a stronger set of arguments about the
importance of immigration control for
collective self-determination, focuses on
fundamental rights rather than
particular goods. So what rights are at
stake when it comes to immigration? And
here, it's helpful to contrast between
two alternative rights-based accounts
before saying something about my own. So
both Kit Wellman and Michael Blake
offer deontic arguments for the state's
right to control immigration. Wellman
appeals to the individual right of
freedom of association, relying on
analogies with marriage and golf clubs—
just as an individual has a vision of
what sort of marriage or what sort of
golf club she wants to have, citizens
have a vision of the political
association they want to have, and should
be able to exclude people as they wish. I
think he misses what's distinctive about
political community: it's a group bound
together by participation and shared
institutions, rather than simply by the
shared understandings of its members.
Michael Blake recognizes the
distinctiveness of the state as a
jurisdictional and institutional project,
but he doesn't really engage with the
value of collective self-determination.
So he grounds the state's right to
control immigration on the individual
right to avoid unwanted obligations. The
would-be immigrant acts to impose a set
of obligations on current residents when
she crosses into the territory, and he
uses Judith Thompson's example of the
violinist: you wake up one morning,
you've involuntarily been attached to a
violinist who now depends on you for
survival.
I couldn't resist showing you these
young violinists at this concert.
My daughter's in there, but I
would voluntarily attach to her…
Michael Blake analogizes the violinist
with the would-be immigrant: both the
violinist and the would-be immigrant
commit the same wrong—they impose on you
an obligation that you have no
independent obligation to accept being
so obliged.
I think what's missing from Blake's
account is collective self-determination.
What makes political community a
distinctive and valuable form of
association is not only that it provides…
not only that we're coerced by it;
and not only that it's a scheme of
cooperation—economic and social
cooperation—that provides basic goods
and services, but that it enables members
to exercise some degree of control over
their collective life. So a key part of
the value of political membership is
that it makes collective
self-determination possible. When
would-be immigrants enter, or remain in a
territory without authorization, they
sidestep this collective process by
which members of the community make
decisions about membership, and this
violates the right of collective
self-determination itself. So my talk is
drawn from my forthcoming book…it's just
been a big commercial…the book
develops what I call an intermediate
ethical position that aims to take
seriously both the claims of receiving
countries and the claims of prospective
migrants. I argue that
political membership is morally
significant, even if its distribution is
morally arbitrary. Political membership
grounds particular rights and
obligations and a government may show
some partiality toward the interests of
its members, yet we also have universal
obligations to those outside our borders
where prospective migrants have urgent
reasons to move, as in the case of
refugees, and other necessitous migrants,
their interest may trump the less
weighty interests of members. On my
moderate cosmopolitan approach, what's
required is not open or closed borders,
but open doors. But to whom should the
doors be open? Very briefly, in
closing because I only have a couple
minutes left, I want to consider the
substance of immigration policy—the
question, “on what basis may we keep
others out?” invites us to consider not
only the normative grounds upon which
members of political communities can
exclude non-members, but also the
particular reasons for including or
excluding prospective migrants, which
Sahar Akhtar and Joseph Carens have
also touched on. So who must be included,
and who may be excluded? Who must be
included?—a category we might call
“obligatory admissions” following Joe
Carens
and Michael Blake and others…so
refugees and asylum seekers, other
necessitous migrants who are forcibly
displaced from their countries but don't
meet the definition of refugee set forth
in international and
domestic law…we might think of climate
change refugees as an example of those
who don't fit the conventional
definition of refugee. I also argue…I
have a chapter of my book devoted to
family of current members, and there's a
really important debate to be had about
who counts as family. Now, same-sex
partners, same-sex spouses are included
by law, and who counts as family. What
about grandparents? Aunts and uncles?
Canadian law…there was a commission that
recommended this reform and said, what
about best friends? Right? If you don't
have family…and so it gets at the grounds
if you don't have a family member or
your’reestranged from your family and you
want to sponsor your best friend, why
shouldn't you be able to? So we can think
about how we might push the boundaries
of that category. Who may be excluded? So
discretionary admissions, and I talk in
the book about criteria of exclusion and
criteria of admission…just very briefly
on exclusion—prospective migrants who
may pose a genuine threat to national
security or public health…and I want to
point out here that I think this is a
legitimate ground of exclusion, but the
danger is the abuse of the use of this
criterion. It's been abused…just think of
the Trump administration's defense of the
travel ban…
it's named in the name of national
security, and I want to say that we want
to be careful about the dangers of
abusing it, but it's principled use as a
basis of exclusion is morally defensible.
So the challenge is to determine what
constitutes a genuine threat to national
security. The economic impact of
immigration on current members, I think,
is a really…it's morally relevant
and an important part of the debate and
this is where we look to
economists about what are the fiscal
impacts of immigration…what are the
impacts on the labor market? And I
think if you're a proponent of open
borders, we know we don't need to engage
in those debates, because anyone who
wishes to come can come. I think if you
take the position that I have
that says the ethic of membership is
important, then we actually want to talk
about…then we really care about the
effects of immigration on members.
Cultural impact…I'm really sympathetic
to the
line of argument that Sahar Akhtar is
developing about why not racial and
ethnic exclusion, but I think the other
side of the coin…so we think about
criteria of excluding we might think of
criteria of admission…admitting. Can we
prioritize on the basis of ethnicity or
religion? Under certain circumstances, I
argue, that you can and we might
look to some historical examples…and I'm
out of time so I'm happy to go into more
of this in the QA but this sort of gives
you a sense of how we might engage in
this debate about the substance 
of
immigration policy. Thank you.
Thank you, Sarah. And last, but not least,
Kit Wellman.
Thank you, Daniel, very much for
including me in this great conference.
I don't leave the house much, but I
definitely was willing to hop on a plane last
night to
come to this. I’m huge fans of my fellow
panelists. It's great,
as Joe said, to be at a conference that’s
interdisciplinary like this
and most of all, I think it’s important
that we
attend to something as important and significant
as this is right now.
It’s also, I must confess, a very important
personal vindication for me to be invited
to come and speak at NYU
I’m not sure I lead the world, but I’m
pretty sure I lead the room
in rejections from NYU.
I grew up a huge fan of Woody Allen, and I
wasn’t a great high school student
But I fantasized about coming to New York
and being a moviemaker.
And evidently my essay on my college application
didn’t impress the people at NYU, so I was
denied admissions
to NYU as an undergrad
So I went to North Carolina and did
a lot better as a college student
As a high school student I developed an interest
in philosophy
and I applied to the PhD program in philosophy
at NYU
I was denied!...but I’ve gone along
and applied countless times for jobs at the
philosophy department at NYU
and have never so much as gone on an interview
so I don't think I'm ever going to get a
job at NYU, so this is going to have to be
it for me.
(offstage: Speaking of the ethics of exclusion…)
…it’s an exclusion, that’s true.
It’s true, that it’s exclusion. My backstory
was not true.
I may have applied for a job at NYU at some
point, I don’t know
but I certainly
didn't apply as an undergraduate or graduate
student, and I
want you to think a bit about what you
were thinking when I told you that story.
Ok.
Were you thinking, “yeah, this guy looks
like a tool, that’s about right…I’m
not surprised”
Or “poor guy! He seems nice enough, wouldn’t
that have been great if he had gotten in?
I’m sure he’s not that bad of a philosopher…”
Ok, maybe somewhere in this continuum…right?
I suspect that none of you thought “what
an
egregious injustice!
How could they? He had a right to be an undergraduate
at NYU
and they denied him…
what standing do they have to exclude
him…from their college?
what standing do they have to exclude them
from their PhD program?
They didn't give him a job…
They had to have. He’s got a right to a
job
at NYU. So I'm guessing that
that was not your reaction. If that was your
reaction, this talk is going to have no purchase
for you.
What I'm doing…for those people who've
been here all day and
paying attention, which is a lot to ask
when you have to listen to four philosophers
in a row,
…it's a gross oversimplification,
but I think I’m anti-Mike.
Because Mike started us off with a superb
talk
where he said, hey the good folks in
Indiana in 1851 said, “we're not letting
any blacks in…”
and he expected us to think, that’s a
moral outrage. And then he flipped it on us,
so
you’d better be careful if you're going
to
exclude immigrants from a country like
the United States…you’ve gotta be careful
that
you're not doing the same thing that
these citizens of Indiana did. Right? I'm
doing the opposite…
let's start off by telling a story
about my rejection, multiple rejection, from
NYU
expecting you to think, well, maybe
that wasn’t fun for Kit,
but there’s no injustice there.
They had every right to exclude him.
And then I’m going to turn to states
And say, why isn’t it the same?
What of instead of growing up…
this is true, I was a Woody Allen fan,
and I also grew up listening to Prairie Home
Companion
And you’d always hear the news going on
about
the Norwegian dairy
farmers in the upper Midwest, right, so imagine
that my fantasy was not to be an
New York filmmaker but to be a
Norweigan dairy farmer and I
applied as an individual to emigrate to Norway
and they denied me
or maybe I went and became a philosopher and
applied
for a job in a Norwegian University and they
said
thanks but no thanks
we're not gonna let you in.
what I’m going to
suggest…I want to play with this analogy,
but
what I want to suggest is
that you're right
to be comfortable with my rejection from NYU
let’s figure out why and then talk about
Norway and then, time permitting, I'll take
on some
Challenges. All right, so I think we
believe that NYU's entitled to
self-determination. And part of that, an
important component to self-determination,
is
freedom of association, and you don't
really have freedom of association
unless you are entitled to reject certain
associations
Ok, so we’re in NYU’s Law School,
some of you know that Columbia Law School
is still reeling from when Jeremy Waldron
left Columbia Law School
and came over to NYU Law School.
And the students at Columbia are very
sad. So Columbia Law School comes to NYU
Law School and says, why don't we have a program
where any students we admit can take your
classes for free, and vice versa. This seems
like an interesting idea…
maybe NYU wants to do it, maybe they
don't right—it's their call. Maybe it'd
be better for the NYU students or the
Columbia students, or the world as a whole
if
they agreed to it, but it’s NYU’s call
whether or not they do it .
Maybe as a whole, the
entire university system said
you’ve got one of the best programs in the
world
and we’ve got one of the best programs in
the world
imagine if we combine forces we became one
University,
that'd be amazing.
All right let's do it, and then NYU says,
I’ll think about it
…thanks but no thanks.
And it seems like, and this is to
speak to the economists, but whatever the
benefits might be…maybe it is true
that would be better for NYU, or
would be better for Columbia, or for both,
or for the world if they merge, it's
NYU’s call. They are entitled to
reject association if they want. And even
with Jeremy Waldron…let's say Jeremy
Waldron was and continues to be the
greatest law professor in the world, ever,
notice two things:
it doesn't mean that if he wants to
leave Columbia and come to NYU
NYU has to take him
and it's certainly not the case that if
NYU wants him, Jeremy Waldon has to move.
Waldron as an individual has freedom of
association, and can say, you know,
NYU can make an offer, which he's free to
reject. So if I was this incredible
budding movie maker, NYU wouldn’t have had
a
right to force me to come to NYU as an
undergrad. If I was a particularly
promising prospective graduate student
in philosophy, NYU would have had no right
to say you have to come here.
The way freedom of association works—the
way
self determination works—is you can have
a permissible association if both groups agree
to it.
Norway broke
off from Sweden I think in 1905, 1906…
right so there's a separation. Sweden
might say, we’re doing all right, but we'd
like to get back together…let's reunite.
It worked for Germany, right, let's do it.
Maybe it’d be better for Swedes,
maybe it’d be better for Norwegians,
maybe it’d be better for the world if they
got
together…Norway is entitled to
accept or reject that association if
they want. European Union…
Norway is not in it. They voted it at
least twice, and Norway has twice
decided that they don't want to join
the European Union. There are some of us who
think that
the European Union is one of the most
important vehicles for the
proliferation of human rights in the world
and
that it would be stronger if Norway were
a member and so it'd be better
globally for human rights if Norway were
a member of the European Union, so we
wish that Norway would join, but we
respect that it's Norway's call. Sweden
doesn't get to forcibly annex
Norway. Sweden and the
European Union doesn't get to forcibly
annex Norway. Norway has a right of
self-determination. Okay. So it looks like
we think that institutions like NYU are
entitled to self-determination, which
includes freedom of association, and it
looks like…Norway,
legitimate states, are entitled to
political self-determination, which
includes freedom of association, and so just
as Norway may say no to Sweden…may say
no to the European Union, and just as NYU
can
say no to Kit as the individual, Norway
can say no to Kit, as an individual, or Norway
can say no to the
individual Swede who wants to join the
political association. All right, so
that's the analogy, and then, of course, the
inclination for anyone wants to resist
it, is to say
the analogy’s inapt. There are dramatic
differences between either you trying to
get into NYU, versus you trying to get
into Norway, or you trying to get into
NYU versus some poor refugee, for
instance, trying to get into NYU.
so let me talk a little about that…
so first of all
…notice the costs of saying that
NYU is a dramatically different beast
than Norway. I suspect most of you agree…
that it’s Norway’s call if they want to
be involved with Sweden,
or be a part of the European Union.
If so, then you’re at least
theoretically inclined to believe that
at least legitimate states like Norway
are entitled to political
self-determination, so there's
plenty of fancy philosophical moves to
resist that, but at least I agree theoretically…
I'm absolutely confident that freedom of
association is an integral component of
self-determination such that if you're
denied freedom of association, you’re not
fully self-determined
As Sahar mentioned…
think about the marriage exam, right, if
your father gets to pick out your marital
mate, maybe he's got good taste and
he would pick out better than you would,
maybe you'd have a good life, but
it's certainly not the case
that your self-determined, because
unless you have the right to reject
potential suitors—in fact, all suitors—
you don't have freedom of association and
you don't have the right to self-determination
So on that ground, I think we good,
and so then it becomes
interesting if we start looking at
different cases…if
there are other reasons why. Granted
Norway has a right to self-determination,
but it's not an absolute right, it's
a presumptive right, and when you look at
the real world, it's got to be outlaid by
more compelling considerations. So if Kit
goes to University of North Carolina
rather than NYU, it’s just not that big
of a
deal….he's a middle class,
able-bodied white guy, he's going to be
fine. We don't have real justice concerns
about NYU excluding people like Kit.
When we look at the horrific global
inequality, such that the
difference between people born in Norway
versus people born in Chad, for instance,
then we can't be so sanguine about
Norway excluding outsiders. So it
looks like distributive justice, unless
we just somehow fetishize
self-determination,
it looks like the global distributive
justice is going to trump
self-determination.
I'm very tempted by this suggestion,
but I think it’s wrong. And to see
how it’s wrong, think about how we deal
with inequality in the domestic context.
So we read headlines now about
people like Jeff Bezos making 12 billion
dollars in one day when Amazon’s stock
goes up, and we might think…that’s not
economic justice,
that ain't right, that he's got so much
and so many of us have so little. Do
we infer from that, that if anyone wants
to she can join Jeff Bezos’s family? No.
If we think there's economic
Injustice, we think Jeff Bezos has to
share that money, and as long as he
distributes by the appropriate amount to
others as distributive justice requires,
then he's entitled to maintain this
freedom of association. So this is
how we handle it in the domestic realm, we
would
never say the very poor get to join Bill
and Melinda Gates in their family;
we think instead, whatever the duties of
distributive justice are, as long as
people like Gates and Bezos
distribute the money then they're
entitled to retain their rights of
freedom of association. In other words
the duties of distributive justice and
the rights of freedom of association are
sustainable are distinct and can be kept separate.
So I
think if we can do it domestically, we can
do it globally.
So it may be that…there
is unbelievably egregious injustice
that Norway has so much and Chad has so little
or that Norwegians have so much and Chadians
have so little but that doesn't mean
that these duties of distributive
justice have to come in the currency of
opening borders. As long as the
Norwegians are willing to distribute the
funds in however justice dictates, then
they would be entitled to keep their
borders closed.
What about refugees?
Surprisingly, I want to say the same thing.
Refugees are absolutely…so Joe’s talk
was
brilliant and heartbreaking—he's
right that the status quo is a moral
abomination, but it's not
clear to me that the only way to fix
this is opening borders. So if you
have people who need refuge elsewhere,
one way is to open your borders and give
them refuge in the country, but what
they're entitled to is refuge, not
necessarily immigration. And if you can
give them refuge elsewhere, that's
permissible, and it might even be
preferable, certainly, if you give them
refuge in their home country…
so there was a time for
instance when…
there were worries that Saddam
Hussein’s Ba'athist regime was going to
gas
the Kurds in northern Iran. One response
would have been to say, okay, all you Kurds
are
welcome to come to United States; another
thing is to say, all right we're going to
interfere with Iraq, and we're going to set
up
a safe haven with a no-fly zone,
to make sure that Kurds have refuge
where they live. Now some people think
that's better,
and that's preferable, I'm just
saying it's permissible—you have to do
something, you have to do your share on
behalf of refugees, but that share
doesn't have to come in the currency of
open borders. Thank you.
I’ll collect…two
or three questions
to begin with, Michael, why don't you start…
Go ahead.
That was just so fascinating…
you could take one other question
cultures that are more neatly inseparable
specifically, because it requires, inherently,
not just
but also necessarily
I know people with whom I want to associate
Who are unauthorized immigrants
Some of whom I want to employ, some of whom
I want to have social relationships with,
And exclusion policy
interferes in my ability to
now in the United States since the Trump
era there's no judicial review,
legislative decision,
as long as being able to impose their
expert system. This could be a problem
that all of our something that
language we want to preserve the French
language in Quebec and so this is a
relevant consideration when we have
debates about who Quebec should be
required to let in and preserving the
language and so I think that would be a
really important but I would want to
scrutinize well be cause often these thinly
veiled or not-so-veiled cultural
arguments are really about racial
arguments, about not wanting members of X
group in…and I think
those are reprehensible from a liberal
democratic point of view, sure, I so
culture but also as a kind of weapon not
you but one might in fact be
much less precise entity and
separable entity
Do you want to stop and then others
might want to jump in to respond to
Michael's question? Yes, so
I spend a lot of the book criticizing
the cultural argument for the state’s
right to control immigration, and
precisely for the reasons that you
articulate—that I believe that cultures
are hybrid and pluralistic and not
neatly bounded and….so I would
want to scrutinize how the cultural
impact argument is used in regular
political discourse about…how it's going
to
irreparably harm our way of life, and so
I think that the question we can look at…
concrete types of policies like language,
we want to preserve the French language
in Quebec and so this is a relevant
consideration when we have debates about
who Quebec should be required to let in
and preserving the language, and so I
think that would be a really important
but I would want to scrutinize well, because
often these thinly veiled or
not-so-veiled cultural arguments are
really about racial arguments about not
wanting members of X group in and so I
would…and I think those are
reprehensible from a liberal democratic
point of view sure…so Lauren's right
partially there's a conflict so you
can't have collective freedom of
association and individual freedom of
association, one's got to prevail and as
you mentioned our legal precedent is
that the group always prevails if you're
an unflinching libertarian it's going to
be the individual who always prevails
I'm inclined toward neither. I think it's
an open case, and what I'm inclined to
say is that in most cases it's the
collective, and you have to give the case
for why collective self-determination is
so important to freedom of association but
that doesn't mean it's always going to
prevail and one exception, as a couple of
the panelists have noted, it's very
likely to be family reunification. If
you've got family
members, their freedom of association
seems to be…is going to be more
compelling than the groups, and so that
would be a case not speaking legally, but
morally, where I would say the individual
freedom of association should prevail
over the groups, and…
is become the less should be
interference and prevalence on this so
as you said, the family, you said the
party, no, but say that you given another
example which is, I was admitted, even
when you really wanted me but I was a
foreign citizen and the US government
told me that you come from a country
that is not the right one,
how would you react to that? This is a
contract between…or you were
hired by a firm in the United States,
they wanted you as a worker, a
corporation, a company that really wants
to end the US says no, so government
putting a lot of exception…to
deal with this, because it ultimately
seems to me that there is a fundamental
problem. And finally, the thing that I
want to add to this, is that some country’s
limit the internal movement of their
citizens. So China put massive
restriction on where their own city
… at least it did, it’s
changing and we consider this is
human rights, it's not a right of
citizenship, it's a right for any person.
Who was within the country has the right
of free mobility within that country.
Well, why would that be in an
international human rights document? It's
because it's the freedom to move freely…
for an individual to move freely within
a territory, it's seen as something
fundamentally important, even though the
states like as China thinks it has good
reasons to want to restrict mobility for
the benefit of society's whole, the
argument is no one of these
things that ought to be more important
…that you ought to respect so once you
see that kind of moral claim, so I'm not
an absolutist about anything, including
since you haven't so there are people
who are kind of libertarian
individualist that's all that matters
that's not my own view actually I'm
quite sympathetic to the idea that
collectives matter and collective
identities matter..but the
issue is how one decides the relative
claims of the collective than the
individual, and it seems to me that one
of the difficulties with some of the
arguments here is that they abstract
from the existing reality so imagine
a world… so it seems to me that if one
wants to just say Sahar was doing…but
collective self-determination of other
people you can't abstract from the
relative relationships among peoples
today, their relative positions in the
world and talk about whether or not you
think that overall organization is
itself justifiable, so now Kit was
going to address that by saying, well we
will have you, you have to provide
something for the others. So take
the issue of internal mobility that you
mentioned that's constructed in
international human rights documents as
a fundamental human right, it's not a
right of citizenship, it's a right for
any person who was within a country has
the right of free mobility within that
country. Well, why would that be
in an International Human Rights
document? It's because it's the freedom
to move freely…for an individual to move
freely within a territory…it's seen as
something fundamentally important even
though the states like as China thinks
it has good reason
to want to restrict mobility for the
benefit of decided whole, the argument is
no this is one of these things that
ought to be more important be that you
ought to respect so once you see that
kind of moral claim so I'm not an
absolutist about anything, including
freedom of movement, but it seems to me
the general claim ought to be just as we
have strong reasons to believe that
freedom of movement within a country
within normal constraints about public
order and so on and so forth is to be
regarded as a fundamental right to be
restricted only in severe circumstances
with exceptional reasons so to movement
across borders ought to have the same
sort of status and that would be true
even if the background economic
circumstances that make movement so
urgent. So my ideal is not a world in
which millions of people are moving from
one place to another, my ideal is a world
in which everybody is happy, has the
opportunity to have a good life at home, not
some people but everybody is free to
move, and the fact that they
don't is itself an indicator of why the
background arrangements are just
non ethnic that's really
based on shared values shared principles
the Constitution and more pluralistic in
that sense and I think that's the…
so this was a question about the
definition of political communities and
the analogy to families so Sahar
mentioned marriage as an analogy case
and then Sara mentioned some of Michael
Walzer's work about a national family so
if we look at the history of how the
political community, for example in the
US, formed it's rare to think of an
analogy to a family or a bloodline or an
ethnicity so I wonder how this concept
of a political community differs in a
country that has a history of immigrant
settlement. So I'll quickly answer that
these…I have a fairly brief
response to it I didn't mean to suggest
that states were like marriages. I meant
to suggest quite the opposite, that they
were not based in family relationships,
they don't have the same kinds of
interests at stake in selecting members,
so I think…it's
a very good question though, so I brought
up this notion of states are like a
national family, and discussing Walzer
and he has this terrific line, Greeks
driven from Turkey, Turks driven from
Greece, what our state's for but to
sustain culturally distinctive ways of
life that they're, these peoples are
these cultural families are searching
for political forms to sustain their way
of life and I think you're right that
runs up against there are different
traditions of conceiving of political
community and in the US. I think we
fancy ourselves to be in the more civic
tradition that is non-ethnic,
that's really based on shared values,
shared principles, the Constitution and
more pluralistic in that sense, and I
think that's the ideal that I think we
should aspire to…in reality we've
had racial ethnic right that those have
been very constitutive of the identity
of the political community and I
think that we want to continue to aspire
to something that's more ideals-based
but yes absolutely I think that that's
of the problems with embracing ethnic
based conceptions of political community
It seems to my…
philosophically poorly-trained
mind that their arguments based on self-
association…they seem to assume that we
know what the unit is that self
associating whereas national borders
both arbitrary and recent, you were
actually just talking back week so acted
turkey and vice versa that would just be
one example so I guess I would like to
ask Kit why we're confident that
current national borders enclose the
right groups that have the right to
freedom of association. I can't speak for
Turkey but I can say I am NOT confident so
yeah I'm not defending the status quo
I'm not saying existing states have the
right to exclude outsiders I'm saying
legitimate states are entitled to
self-determination one component of
which is freedom of association I feel
pretty confident saying Norway is
legitimate and so I'm happy to use the
example of Norway and Sweden there,
aren't that many states I'm that
confident, so is the United States
legitimate or not? I'm not sure if I'm
in Vegas and you make me bet, I bet not,
and I can give you my reasons right but
yes so I'm not defending the status quo,
and I'm not saying every state that
happens to currently exist is entitled
to political self-determination, yes
so I wanted to follow up a little bit
with Kit in terms of the question of
refugees and how you deal with refugees,
if one of the important principles for a
nation state is self-determination and
the way in which you exclude refugees is
to provide some other alternative then
by definition, aren't you deciding for
someplace else how those refugees will
be handled and denying that other
location or nation some degree of
self-determination because you have
placed your own desires of exclusion
above their determinations, or their
inability to deal with the refugee
situation? And then, for Professor Song,
for Sarah, how…again I keep coming back
to, how do you define culture as an
institution that sometimes draws
political boundary lines around the
concept of a community of interest. It's
very, very permeable, it's variable and
it's sometimes self-defined and
sometimes not…
the thing about ethnicity, race, religion
and why they keep on, I think, coming back
to haunt us is that in most instances,
not exclusively, but primarily, they are
objectively determined. You either are, or
are not a Catholic; you either do or do
not have that skin pigment; you either do
or do not have blonde hair, and whether
you share a cultural basis is something
which is much harder to determine and
changes over time so I challenge the
idea of using culture because all too
frequently it becomes a substitute for
what we don't want to admit, which is our
reliance too frequently on race or other
quote objectively perceivable factors
so I the notion of culture isn't that
important to the moderate
cosmopolitan view that I want to espouse.
I think what's getting me into trouble
is that last slide where I said cultural
impact…I think that we need to demand
specificity when someone says, oh I'm
really worried about the cultural
effects of this kind of immigration
policy on our country…what do you mean?
Are you talking about impacts on the
Language? Are you talking about religion?
Are you talking about what kind of
restaurants we can have in our
neighborhood?...that we need to
demand specificity and we need
to smoke out the kind of racial
assumptions that might be embedded in
some claims about the so-called cultural
impacts categories or economic
assumptions. Okay so the truth is that
there's not as much space between Joe
and my's views as you might think
but I recognize that I was invited here
not to minimize the space between Joe
and me but to emphasize it, that I am…you
know, if you're gonna have Joe, you got to,
you know, wheel out Michael Blake or
David Miller or Kit Wellman, right, so
that's my role, so I tried to emphasize
the differences. So let me…but I'm not
I'm not taking back anything I said I
believe everything I said but so let me
say okay so Joe and I agree that Norway,
that the status quo is unjust, right,
and that Norway is not doing enough.
That's where we agree. Now please
understand I'm not exhorting Norwegians
don't let anyone in. I'm not anti-
immigration, I think the world would be
better with more open borders and
I would urge legitimate states to have
more permissive immigration policies, but
what I do emphasize is that legitimate
states get to make the choice, it's their
right. Okay so I say of Norway,
you're not doing enough you either need
to open your borders to your fair share
of refugees or you need to help refugees
in some other ways it could be
preemptively…
you could have done all kinds of work to
make sure that people didn't become
refugees it could be you
people refuge elsewhere it could be that
you pay another country an enormous sum
of money from your north oil fund right,
so that they'll take them in, okay there
are any number of ways that that you can
pay your fair share all right now you
say well if you're letting Norway make
that decision
isn't that undermining the
self-determination of others? I don't
think so
it's dramatically impacting other people
but I don't think it's denying them
self-determination right so if George
Clooney were to propose to me, it
dramatically impacts him whether I
accept his hand in marriage or not, okay,
but if I say no, I'm not denying him
self-determination because his self…
his right to self-determination does not
include the right to have me in
matrimony. The gentleman in the back, yes,
Justify States expelling undesirable
natives yeah this is my problem not hers
I'm trying to let my panelists
get it but this is really my problem
yes I'm not against divorce and I'm not
against clubs expelling members now the
interesting thing about state’s right is
the states have to operate in a way that
respects the basic rights of their
constituents so we talked about free and
equal
I think Norway has to ensure that all
Norwegians are treated as free and equal
right but that's very different from
saying Norway has to treat all citizens
if there is that they're free and equal
and one important right is an occupancy
right all right
so Norwegians don't get to say of people
who have an occupancy right we're going
to form the state here and we're going
to decide these are the characteristics
we want you don't have this
characteristic so you don't get to be in
the group and you can remain because you
can't have second-class citizenship if
they're going to remain they have to be
full citizens so then you want to say
okay well then you just have to get off
of our territory but if they have
occupancy right you can't ask them to
leave so Norwegians have no choice but
to treat everyone with occupy occupancy
rights in their territory as free and
equal citizens so I have a but
the opposite which I certainly have
preference but I think that legitimate
states have wide discretion and they
would be not violating rights if they
weren't as permissive as I'd like them
to be or they use different criteria now
it gets one of the things that came up
with several of the panelists is what if
they exclude based upon ethnicity or
race or things like that that right from
our very first talk looked like it's got
to be wrong and there may be limits
on the criteria that can be used but
there's my view is that there's still
room for broad discretion within those
limits can I just say something briefly
but notice Kit’s references to legitimate
states presupposes the legitimacy of the
international order in which those
states are existing and that's precisely
what I want to challenge. That's one of
the key differences between us, so I was
going to say we have officially only 5
minutes left I think we can go over that
a little bit since we started slightly
late just kind of unilaterally decide
this is fine but I do have at least four
people on the list so I'm going to
suggest we'll combine two questions at a
time so how about Arden and then…
after that I have
Terry and Jess, thank you. So this
question is first…so I
thought I heard an account in Sahar's
talk that could maybe be used to attack
the analogy presented in Kit’s talk, so
I'm not sure about the thing about power,
but there was this idea of certain
associations having interests and,
you know, we think it's okay to
discriminate in who you marry based on
all kinds of demographic categories like
gender and sex and maybe sexual
orientation and like, that's totally fine,
because they are relevant to a
legitimate interest of a marriage, and so
I was wondering if you could say that,
and why NYU could exclude you because it
has a legitimate interest in a high
caliber student body, but that countries
can't exclude countries, can't exclude
members based on race or religion if
it's not illegitimate, if they don't have
a legitimate interest in racial homogeny,
or a religious…and so that they
can only exclude and they can't exclude
them based on reasons that aren't
relevant old the arbitrary and so that
they have to give a justifying reason in
terms of a legitimate interest I'm not
sure that would be counter to it you
think it I'm just curious if that would
be something either do you would be
friendly to. Well I'm curious, so do you
mind if we just take the second question
first? Thank you, Bill. Sarah you mentioned
in passing and Development Assistance as
kind of a compensation for restrictions
on migration and then Kit, you mentioned
outside military intervention such as
with the Kurds in Iraq the problem, and
this is a very popular argument right
now of development assistance and
intervention so-called humanitarian
military intervention as a kind of
compensation for restricting migration
the problem with it is first of all
migration is empirically far more
effective at achieving
gains and material income and freedom
from violence than those two options are
and second both foreign aid and military
intervention don't have a good mechanism
for set of consulting the
preferences or the wishes of those that
they're intending to benefits so
basically you're taking away from people
something they do want which is to
migrate and giving them something they
have not been consulted on and did not
ask for in the form of military
intervention or foreign aid
so thank you for asking a question of
Kit that I also want to ask, so you said
that you sort of agree that
racial and ethnic exclusions are
off-limits
why just those two could you say a
little bit more about why you think
those are the relevant constraints on
freedom of association and not say
skill-based or gender base constraints?
so I don't agree
I don't know so the way this the way
this debate goes is that there are two
individuals Michael Walzer and Joe
Carens, who were way out in front of
everybody else right when no one was
considering these things, Walzer in
chapter two of “Spheres of Justice” says
membership is hugely important. Here's
what I have to say, and it might be right
it might be wrong, it's brilliant
okay and but one of the things as he
talks about white Australia and he says
why dost rally has a choice they can
either cede some of its territory and
become little Australia and remain white
since it doesn't need all the territory
or it can open its territory to non
blacks and everybody in the discipline
went oh really,
really, you're gonna allow a little white
Australia and that was my reaction like
everybody else's…what has ensued is a
lot of people, including Sahar, saying all
right this is really tough actually, and
and so I would be thrilled if someone
could come up with a conclusive refuse
of reputation of Walzer. I have no
interest in defending white Australia.
What I've come to in thinking about this
is that he's actually…it might not be
wrong. That doesn't mean that NYU can
exclude blacks so I'm confident in
a footnote in Joe's paper he talks about
what you've got a conflict between
freedom of association
and something and I think he's right
into probably a quality it's probably a
quality it's all as a quality would you
okay so what you have is the United
States has a requirement to treat all of
its to ensure freedom and equality among
all amongst all of its citizens and
given the horrific racist injustice we
can't let powerful institutions like NYU
exclude people on the basis of race
that's absolutely right whether that
extends to States is less clear so I so
I do think so I want to just raise a
potential objection to what I said about
the analogy from the domestic context
states and then say something in
response to Kit if I can, so a potential
objection to what I said is, well, look
but the reason why businesses have
obligations to non-members not to
discriminate against them…is
because they share the same society and
as such they have various kinds of
egalitarian or other sorts of
obligations to them including not to
deny them on the basis of traits like
race but we just don't have those sorts
of obligations or states don't have
those obligations to people outside of
their states and I think what's
actually required for saying that we
must not discriminate on the basis of
characteristics like race it's not
really seni Carnot's kind of robust
egalitarian machinery we just need to
recognize the basic moral personhood of
every person and I think this is
something we're not I'm not suggesting
that states have the robust
distributive obligations I do have some
thoughts about that but I haven't said
anything about that and we don't need to
in we don't need to invoke that entire
machinery I think to say why it's wrong
that states may not select on the basis
of traits like race and Kit, my
understanding of your view is the reason
why states must not do that is has to do
with respecting regard for their own
citizens but that just that's just to me
can't be the right explanation that
bright explanation has to be something
about what they're doing to the non-mo
good so it looks like it's at least one
thought too many are you kidding me Kit,
you've got to resort to this elaborate
thing and the reason why I do think you
need an elaborate explanation is
precisely what you acknowledged oh when
it comes to romantic relations I'm not I
agree it's deplorable if somebody wants
to reject a potential suitor on racial
ethnic grounds but I'm not sure it's a
rights violation right so if like me and
I think like you want to say
deplorable but not a rights violation if
somebody excludes based of romantic
partners based on ethnicity right
it is a rights violation if an
institution like NYU within a context of
historic and ongoing injustice racial
injustice excludes based on race or
ethnicity, right, then you want to look at
the arguments you have to do the extra
thought which may strike you as one
thought too many but the extra thought
to explain why it is that NYU may not,
and every time I look at those extra
thoughts they don't apply, or at least
they don't apply neatly to states, did
one of you want to reply to two builds
observations
yes development assistance as a second
best or not very good and that we lack
institutions for example if we give
foreign aid and so why not I I think
that open borders is also second best I
think I want what I'm trying to argue is
that we have membership based
obligations but we also have global
obligations and then the question is
what are the best mechanisms are ways to
discharge our obligations to all of
humanity but III do think that
immigration restrictions are tied to
genuine efforts to improve the
conditions of those outside our borders
and so it's helpful to hear from
economists that Development Assistance
is deeply flawed but I also worry
that open borders I mean are their
economic forecasts of who would move and
would it really genuinely
the most destitute and the worst off
that also seems to be a less than
ideal solution and so we're left with
all of these second faster third you
know third worst options but it is
something absolutely that the normative
argument hinges on there being effective
ways to actually discharge our global
obligations and right now we're in a
muddle so Terry and Jess can ask you to
both be really quick…
as you can
GDP now it's inconceivable they might
claim that you have in fact inflicted
I hear a strain to try to be universal I
want to be very specific for the for
very good and very bad reasons we
created a multicultural country it is
not going to alter the nature of the
United States for any immigrate
immigrants to come that is the
basis of what we exist we also did some
terrible things right slavery the
Chinese immigration act turning away the
st. Louis we agreed as a society that
these things were wrong does it not
create an obligation upon us to keep our
borders as open as possible because it
will not alter us and we have an
obligation to right the wrong that we
committed as a society I have a kid
about Norway and Chad it seems to me you
raised the issue of integration versus
redistribution and one way to write
integration is to undertake
redistribution and they are of course
related they are both economic questions
and there are questions of economic
justice so if we look at it this way
when how much redistribution do you have
in mind it would have to be a lot if
you'd redistribute enough nobody in Chad
will want to go to Norway or the other
way around everybody's happy where the
but that will take a lot and if you were
to do that or even come close
wouldn't you be infringing on the rights
of the Norwegians who would have to give
a third of their GDP now it's
inconceivable they might claim that you
have in fact inflicted much more damage
just as much damage as immigration would
and destroy their economic the economic
basis of their society so replacing
immigration with the distribution it's
like this two sides of the coin
I wonder if aren't you maybe under an
obligation if you're going to say no
regression but the distribution to
explain how much and to get it into the
details of it I think I can quickly and
unsatisfactory answer all three of these
so even if we assume that the United
States has a legitimate country there's
no question that has massive remedial
obligations based upon the injustice its
perpetrated it's a secondary question
whether those obligations have to be
paid in the currency of open borders I
don't know what precisely the demands of
district global distributive justice are
right and I'm sorry to disappoint you my
claim is going to be whatever they are
they can be paid either with open
borders or otherwise oh but the
otherwise doesn't work all right so you
can't do that having just publicly taken
a stance against Karin's on immigration
I'm not going to go toe to toe with Bill
easterly on what kind of foreign aid
works
I'll just concede that I do have same
concerns that Sarah has but I'll just
concede this my argument is contingent
if you can give people refuse
satisfactory refuge elsewhere right or
in some other way then you're permitted
to do it right, if it turns out that
fancy folks like you show that in this
case or in many cases, or even all cases,
the only way you can make sure their
human rights are satisfactorily
protected is by allowing them to
immigrate then they have a right to
immigrate too.
All right, good, in that case please join
me in thanking our speakers.
