Andreas Niederberger

This chapter discusses the position of migration ethics within political science. The epistemological and methodological commitments of political science seem to prevent it from including ethical considerations, or to fully acknowledge the normative grounds and framing of the empirical work. The role of ethics, morality, values or even more generally, ideas in explaining migration patterns and behaviour, appears small or irrelevant. However, various attempts to bridge the gap between political science and migration ethics have been made. I identify four strategies that have been adopted: drawing policy recommendations based on ethical standards from an empirical analysis; fact-checking of migration ethics and norm-checking of the political science of migration; considering moral values, especially as a causal determinant in policy making; studying values empirically. Finally, I argue that pragmatist approaches, bridging empirical and normative inquiries are necessary to do justice to the multifaceted nature of migration issues.

Migration studies is the multi- and interdisciplinary field devoted to examining and explaining causes, experiences, and impacts of human mobility. Researchers studying migration face a plenitude of ethical challenges, especially in studies on or with “vulnerable populations”—people that are in dire legal, economic, or psychological circumstances, or of young age. However, there are more general normative imperatives deriving from the field’s traditionally close relationship to the nation-state system and the international refugee regime. Because migration studies is an academic field with direct societal relevance, its research findings often have the potential to influence policy decision-making, which renders migration scholars in a powerful position to exert influence on how societal resources are distributed. Although these circumstances clearly call for a strong ethical framework throughout the research process, from proposal writing to dissemination, normative considerations have only been observed in some parts of the field. Ethical considerations are most pronounced in methodological inquiries, and issues of representation and labelling as well as the researcher’s positionality have also received significant attention. Nonetheless, many ethical considerations remain generally implicit rather than explicit. However, a growing “critical” and “reflexive” migration scholarship has been increasingly calling into question the close relationship between academia and the nation-state and pointing at the pitfalls of unreflexive scholarship. The focus of these migration scholars on power inequalities in the production and dissemination of knowledge, as well as on the effects of policy-oriented research, can be read as an ethical imperative for good scholarship.

Cultural studies rarely addresses ethical questions directly, but it does very often imply ethical questions. In this paper, after a concise introduction to cultural studies, normative issues and their relation to migration ethics will be discussed. Cultural studies is presented as an approach and as an interdisciplinary research field that has been extremely important for migration studies in recent years. It presents a field of interdisciplinary critical studies on culture and society, focusing on how culture(s) is or are interwoven with nearly every aspect of social life and how these are related to power relations. This explains why cultural studies is fruitful for discussing various ethical questions about migration. This is especially the case with regard to the definition of culture, the claim to present critical social theory, the importance of empirical research and research approaches. I will argue for stronger integration of cultural studies and postcolonial theories into migration ethics.

This paper deals with the ethical dimensions of the economics of migration. The first section presents the main research topics found in the economics of migration around three questions: Why do people move? Which kinds of people are moving? What are the consequences for countries of origin, transit and, above all, destination? The section summarises the main methods used and briefly addresses influential controversies. The second section deals with ethical issues in the economics of migration. It identifies normative presuppositions at work in economic research, especially in its attempt to evaluate the impact of migration. Self-reflectivity requires the consideration of at least four distinct levels: subject matter, institutional frame, temporal frame and personal frame. The third section addresses, conversely, the use of economic arguments in the ethics of migration. It highlights two main issues: the use of economic arguments for the sake of justifying the state’s competence to control immigration (as part of protection arguments) and their use for the promotion of free movement in the context of reflections on global justice. The paper concludes by outlining promising synergies for ethicists in engaging more deeply with economists’ work on migration. With regard to the importance of these economic insights for public discourses, ethicists have a vested interest in better anchoring their ethical expertise within economic research.

sociologySociological positions draw on ethical debates in other disciplines and the public sphere, but they import their arguments, rather than translating them into a specifically sociological agenda. It is therefore difficult to find sociological research that debates normative concerns. Nonetheless, migration research often follows normative agendas at least implicitly. The chapter outlines four research approaches in migration and refugee studies with a focus on their normative assumptions. Scholars who work (a) within rational choice theory or who (b) study the functioning of the state define sociology in a manner that avoids normative agendas. Both approaches base research questions within the context of the state. The (c) transnational approach to migration studies criticises this as methodological nationalism. Critical migration scholars (d), on the other hand, do not shy away from normative agendas. Rather, they start their research by criticising generally held assumptions and use ethical positions as yardsticks for assessing the value of specific research agendas. Options for a future collaboration between migration ethics and sociology are thus found on the fringes of migration sociology. The last part of the chapter considers how specific sociological research agendas connect at least indirectly with ethical debate.

Imaginations of nationalism constitute an important aspect of migration ethics. Although nationalism is frequently invoked in the discourse on the ethics of immigration through reference to concepts like national identity, it is unclear whether national identity and immigration are incompatible. In this chapter, I discuss the relationship between nationalism and immigration. Specifically, I analyse two approaches to migration where nationalism plays a critical role. The first approach is the framing of immigration ethics in contemporary political theory and the second is populist sensational discourses. The critical role of nationalism manifests in the first approach through methodological nationalism. In the second case, nationalism plays a crucial role due to the influence it exerts on public opinion and policy. I show that nationalism inspired arguments about migration are unsatisfactory because they focus on a very narrow aspect of migration. The desideratum for further research I propose is therefore that theorists of migration should be more critical about the concept of nationalism. They should theorise migration from a standpoint that considers nations and borders as factors that have histories that are interlinked with broader social and political developments.

The concept of the stranger is central to the question of migration in European social and political history. In antiquity, state-building societies had strong social boundaries, and cities were very careful about who was allowed to cross the borderlines of their territory. In early modernity, after the end of the Middle Ages, the territorial state and the idea of territorial sovereignty became key factors in the management of migration of individuals—both citizens and foreigners—across borders. This paper will elucidate the concept of migration and explain its evolution in European social and political history from antiquity through the Enlightenment. The cosmopolitan concept of world citizenship is introduced as an attempt to overcome the dichotomic distinction between citizens and strangers which emerges with the territorial order of states.

Migrants make an important contribution to the historical formation and identity of Latin America. Over time, a culture of hospitality has been established and cultivated in the region. This fact does not exclude contradictions and ambiguities regarding migration ethics there. This chapter presents the main facts that have marked the history of migration in Latin America, particularly in South America including both voluntary and forced migration. There have been different developments in the perceptions and treatments of both types of migration because international law and the international organisations mandated to deal with the issue (UNHCR, IOM, OAS) have developed different regimes and levels of commitments and obligations towards them. Although international, regional and human rights organisations have claimed that a human rights approach is applied to migrants in general, a broad concept of forced migration, including the right to asylum, protection policies and refugee integration, has seen a peculiar development in Latin America, with a more profound impact on migration ethics. In this regard, the notion of “solidarity” was expressed and adopted in the Cartagena Regime applied for refugees in the region. This paper is divided into six sections: (1) From Independence to World War II; (2) The OAS and the 1951 Geneva Convention; (3) The Cold War (1947–1989), the Emergence of Authoritarian Regimes and their Impacts on Migration; (4) From the Post-Cold War Era to the Era of the War on Terror (1990/2001–); (5) Contemporary Issues Concerning Globalisation, Regionalism, Migration and Its Contradictions; (6) Future Research, Relevance for Current Migration Ethics.

This chapter examines the historical path that has led to the status quo of migration in East Asia, focusing on Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong as major migrant destinations. I illustrate the three-layered structure of migration in this region in the following way. (1) What divides this region is the legacy of colonialism and the ongoing effects of the Cold War: these have greatly influenced the status of intra-regional migrants. (2) The developmental states, in which rights may be sacrificed for economic growth and order, have sponsored guest worker programmes that recruit temporary labour migrants, who are denied rights such as family reunification and access to permanent residence. (3) Feminisation of migration in this region is characterised by the importance of marriage migrants as well as domestic and care workers because marriage has become one of the very few legal channels for people seeking to settle in these societies. It has been said that strict immigration controls in East Asia are based on the ethno-nationalist ethics that justify restrictions on the rights of migrants, but a careful look at the three-layered structure reveals that ethnic nationalism is not the basic principle underlying them. What determines migration ethics in this region are the logics of economically motivated developmental states and geopolitical confrontations surrounding postcolonialism and the Cold War.

In this chapter, I identify and examine what I take to be the normative foundations of Migration Ethics. In Sect. 1, I argue that those foundations are derived from liberal democratic theory, with the Moral Equality Principle as key. In Sect. 2, I explore the implications of the Moral Equality Principle for Immigration Ethics. I also identify the Rationality Principle, that ethical disputes should be settled by rational argument and evidence. I argue that the force of these two principles places work in Migration Ethics in four possible boxes: (1) immigration controls cannot be morally justified—an open borders position; (2) they can be morally justified, but not by appeal to ideas of nation and nationality as these cannot be rationally grounded; (3) the ideas of nation and nationality can be rationally grounded and so can provide a moral justification for immigration controls; (4) the Rationality Principle must be set aside or compromised in some way in order to provide a moral justification for immigration controls. All work in Immigration Ethics, I suggest, fits into one of these boxes. In Sect. 3, I explore the implications of the fourth approach, examining the extent to which political theorists can endorse the suspension of the rationality requirement in putting forward ethical arguments. Finally, in Sect. 4, I examine future challenges for Immigration Ethics, identifying three in particular: the first is deeper engagement with empirical scholarship; the second is to look at issues of migration outside of the context of the Global North; and the third is to give greater attention to forcible displacement and the range of forms it can take.

Originating with the Copenhagen School of security studies in international relations, the concept of the “securitisation of migration” refers to the social and political processes through which migration, as a public issue, acquires security character. This article reconstructs central tenets of the Copenhagen School’s speech act theory of security and discusses how it has been applied to the case of migration. While the Copenhagen School understood the securitisation of migration as the discursive construction of a threat to communal identities, subsequent accounts have emphasised the prevalence and, sometimes, discourse-independence of the material practices of securitisation. In doing so, they have substantially re-interpreted central tenets of the Copenhagen School’s securitisation theory, including the role and requirement of an audience for securitisation to take place and the forms of threat construction at work in the securitisation of migration. The article concludes by discussing the implications of the securitisation of migration for migration ethics. It argues that they depend on whether one understands the securitisation of migration as a theoretical framework or a social and political condition. Read as a theoretical framework, the securitisation of migration provides a way of classifying security arguments at work in migration ethics according to formal criteria. Read as a social and political condition, it makes a point about the presuppositions within which debates about migration ethics are situated in public.

The following entry will outline the central arguments in favour of and against the right of the state to revoke citizenship. According to those who defend the right of states to revoke citizenship, we must understand the relation between citizens and their state in terms of a contract, according to which each party has particular duties to carry out. Where someone has committed a particular set of crimes, they can be understood to have violated the terms of the citizenship contract, and are thereby no longer entitled—by their own actions—to the protection offered by the state. A second defence recommends revocation as an appropriate and fitting punishment for a particular subset of especially egregious crimes, including terrorism, since anyone who commits these crimes attacks the foundations of the state and correspondingly deserves to be excluded from its protection. There is a much wider range of arguments against the right to revoke, perhaps reflecting that none seems to effectively rule it out absolutely. According to those who oppose the right of states to revoke, the laws are problematic because they are likely to generate statelessness; because they are a violation of the equality to which democracies are committed; because they are likely to be arbitrarily applied; because they are a violation of democratic principles more broadly; and because they represent an abandonment of a collective, global, responsibility to fight terrorism.

Human mobility poses a major challenge for social and normative theories developed during the age of nation-building. Many of these theories suffer from the cognitive biases of sedentarism, presupposing that populations are largely immobile, and of methodological nationalism, assuming a state-centred view of culture, territory, and human relationships. This raises conceptual issues for social theories that attempt to understand migration (a transnational phenomenon) through categories that presuppose largely homogenous, sedentary populations and rigid state borders.These cognitive biases create normative challenges by treating mobility as exceptional and pathological, in need of regulation and restriction. This perspective conflicts with widely recognised rights to mobility and with the fact that humans are a mobile species. People move in response to violence, persecution, and the inability to satisfy basic needs, as well as for reasons of family unification and economic interests. The use of force to prevent people from exercising their rights and from accessing important goods requires moral justification. This in turn suggests the need to situate mobility in a broader theory of global justice, as well as post-national social theory.

Do states have a moral right to restrict immigration as they see fit? Or should individuals be free to cross international borders and settle in whatever country they choose? Those who defend a right to exclude base their arguments on principles of freedom of association, associative ownership, freedom from imposed obligations, communal independence and national self-determination. In the opposite camp, a right to international freedom of movement is defended by way of an analogy between international and domestic mobility, and on comprehensive theories of justice ranging from libertarianism to liberal egalitarian contractualism. Finally, there are views that criticise the right to exclude without endorsing a universal right to freedom of movement. These include the view that immigration restrictions should be evaluated with an eye to global distributive concerns, and the view that immigration restrictions would have to be sanctioned by a global demos to be legitimate. This chapter gives an overview of this controversy about the justifiability of restrictions on immigration. It closes with some desiderata for future research on the duties of various agents under non-ideal circumstances.

In the political domain, integration refers to the sociological process on which the social cohesion of a civic community depends. As such, integration has a functional dimension—i.e. the coordination of individual actions—as well as a normative component—i.e. the principles, values and culture that ground and motivate the citizens’ sense of belonging. Migration raises specific issues with regard to integration, related both to the impact of immigration on social cohesion and to the political conditions of migrants’ access to citizenship. In political theory, the connection between migration and integration therefore focuses on the fair terms of integration for immigrants in liberal democracies. Section 1 of this paper specifies these issues and places them in their intellectual background, going back to the nineteenth century’s philosophical distinction between the “ethnic vs. civic” conception of the modern nation and to the twentieth century’s sociological works on nations, nationalisms and interethnic relations. Section 2 analyses three prevailing normative models of integration in political theory: integration as assimilation, as multicultural recognition or as national civic inclusion. Section 3 questions the theoretical limits of such models that are focused on long-term immigrants and their possible naturalisation; it calls for future research that reassesses the fair terms of integration by addressing more precisely the changing features of international migration, the emergence of transnational citizenship and the issue of refugees.

Who has the right to control the border? Should borders be open or closed? What even is the border? And how should philosophy approach an issue which raises fundamental philosophical questions at the most general level whilst impacting the lives of so many in the most political and concrete manner? These are some of the questions at the heart of the contemporary debate on migration and borders, which this article follows. Section 1 presents the ways in which the philosophical debate on migration and borders has typically been framed, drawing out the distinction between the legitimacy of migration control and the right or wrong of closed or open borders. Section 2 explores the normative positions that have been taken in this debate, and includes a discussion of approaches that have looked more closely and critically at what the border actually is. This section passes fluently into Sect. 3, which explores areas of future research.

In this chapter, I explore the implications of historical injustice for contemporary debates surrounding the ethics of migration, questioning how, if at all, states should respond to historical injustice in their various migration and asylum policies. In Part I, I map out some of the interrelations between migration and historical injustice during the various stages which migrants may pass through, including emigration, admission to another state’s territory, migrants’ acquisition of membership, and repatriation. I suggest that migration and the processes surrounding it may both compound historical injustice, and potentially offer an important form of reparation for that injustice. In Part II, I examine theoretical debates surrounding migration and historical justice, surveying work that applies principles of reparative justice to the ethics of migration and asylum. This work suggests overall that, while migration may play a potentially significant role in redressing historical injustice, and states often should use their migration and asylum policies to offer reparation to those affected by the legacies of historical injustice, there are various theoretical and practical complications surrounding this line of thought—for instance, surrounding issues of causality, responsibility, state capability, and the prioritisation of migrants for entry—which need to be addressed in order for these arguments to fully succeed. I conclude by identifying additional aspects of this controversy which merit further research and analysis, such as the need for greater engagement with empirical evidence to begin to ascertain the reparative duties of actual states towards migrants in practice.

In this article, we argue that gender is relevant to the moral evaluation of migration policies concerning (a) immigrant admissions, (b) the status of migrants (documented and undocumented) in receiving countries, (c) refugee admissions, and (d) border enforcement and undocumented migration. We draw on existing feminist and other philosophical work to make the case that gender ought to be treated as a significant category of analysis by theorists writing on migration ethics in each of these four areas. We conclude by considering what policies gender justice requires in the area of international migration and propose several questions we believe philosophers are especially well equipped to address.

Many forms of contemporary migration appear to be reactions to global injustices. Theories of global justice, yet, have not paid much attention to migration for a long time and sometimes even see migration as a phenomenon that reinforces global injustice. This article first reviews some recent approaches that have been developed to justify claims to migration on the basis of principles of global justice or violations of such principles. These approaches, though, show difficulties in adequately responding to empirical migration, the impact of development aid or the factors that lead to current injustice. Against this background, the article asks whether the opposite position, namely, to prove that migration is undesirable due to demands for global justice, is more convincing. It turns out that here, too, migration is ultimately not rejected for reasons of justice, but because it does not help to alleviate the suffering caused by injustice. In a third step, the proposal to distribute the costs of forced migration in a globally fair manner is briefly examined. Given its difficulty to properly address global injustice as the main reason for forced migration, the article ends with a call to approach migration against the backdrop of a theory of global justice that focuses on the distribution of opportunities to exercise control over the global conditions.

It is widely assumed that states have the right to exclude non-citizens through systems and mechanisms of border control. States routinely enact and enforce migration policies designed to control their borders. In recent years, there has been mounting pressure for states to make their immigration policies more restrictive than ever before. In this chapter, I discuss the ethical standards that states should be held to while exercising their right to exclude, especially with regard to migration policies that are widely regarded as uncontroversial, even desirable. While it may be argued that states do not have a right to exclude non-citizens, I will assume what Joseph Carens refers to as “the conventional view”, under which states do have such rights (2008). In particular, I am concerned with the ethics of selection (how states select non-citizens for admission) and the ethics of enforcement (how states enforce the exclusion of non-citizens who have not been granted admission). In the first case, I consider the permissibility of various forms of discrimination, including racial, health, and skill-based discrimination, the prioritisation of family migrants, and citizenship-by-investment schemes. In the second case, I examine states’ use of detention and deportation and how they stand in need of ethical justification, particularly because of, especially with regard to the coercive force they subject non-citizens to. I conclude by suggesting that theorists pay closer critical attention to concrete processes of immigration selection and enforcement.

Post-apartheid South Africa has witnessed a number of xenophobia related incidents directed mainly against African immigrants. There have been as many attempts at explaining the underlying cause of these incidents. These explanations have ranged from those who seek to dispute that this violence is xenophobic to those who seek to explain it in terms of the complexities of migration and discrimination attached to it. An undertheorized aspect of xenophobia is how it represents Africa’s failure to integrate economically, culturally, socially, politically as a unitary block with a shared identity, history and common future. Whatever the reasons for that failure, they must be understood to be a betrayal of African goals of political unity, material prosperity, and social stability. One way of overcoming this failure is to take seriously the founding principles of newly independent African leaders who sought to chart ways of finding a route to continental unity and co-operation. South Africa, beset with its own internal problems does, however, present itself as a viable alternative to the permanent state of failure of most sub-Saharan African countries. Young and old people who dare and wish to escape the trap of their countries see South Africa as a lifetime opportunity that will provide refuge to their troubled lives. South Africa has become a microcosm of the tensions caused by Africa’s failed politics, economics, and social cohesion. Understanding xenophobia in South Africa requires going beyond the attitudes and behaviour of poor, frustrated, and disempowered South Africans who lash out at similarly disempowered fellow Africans.

In this chapter, I discuss the relevance of theories of rights for the ethics of migration by focusing on issues of entry (mostly leaving aside questions of membership, for the sake of concision). In the first section, I introduce the main elements of the analysis of the concept of rights. I discuss the special weight of rights, the connection between rights and obligations, the basic constitutive elements of rights, and the competing will theory and interest theory of rights. In the second section, I show how disagreements between the interest and will theory of rights shape debates about the right to immigrate and the right to exclude. This section also draws attention to the elements constituting the right to immigrate and the right to exclude, as well as to their corresponding duties. In the final section, I suggest that legal philosophy can shed further light on debates about migration regarding rights restrictions and rights differentiation.

Until recently political philosophy addressed the normative issues of justice, freedom, democracy and citizenship mainly within the frame of reference of a bounded state. Growing awareness that these issues transcend this frame, and the increased political salience of international migration have brought discussions of migration to the fore. Fundamental issues include the justification for and constraints on states’ control over entry to and residence within their borders, the grounds for awarding or withholding citizenship, and the relative weight of the claims of states and citizens vis-a-vis outsiders in general and special cases such as refugees, family members and stateless persons. There is a tension between liberal approaches based on universal individual freedom and equality, and those based on communal commitments or democratic self-determination, sometimes framed as a tension between justice or human rights, and community or democracy. It is also contested whether political philosophers should aim to provide foundational ideals, critical norms or concrete policy guidance, to what extent appropriate answers depend on particular contexts, and what count as salient contextual considerations. Areas requiring further research include (a) articulating more precisely what may be distinctive about territorial jurisdiction and self-determination for the justification and limits of states’ rights to control boundaries and to determine the citizenship status of individuals, (b) transcending methodological nationalism to consider the treatment of migration, participation and membership issues at sub-national, transnational and supranational levels and (c) addressing the particular implications for justice of the increasing and diverse migration likely to accompany climate change.

This article discusses migration ethics in the context of applied ethics. The first part offers a characterisation of applied ethics. In the second part, the article summarises the three standard methods of applied ethics and discusses whether and to what extent these methods are employed in migration ethics. The third part draws attention to the fact that migration ethics as a field has not yet begun to reflect on its own methods. The final part argues that to develop its methodological foundations, applied ethics might benefit from consciously incorporating the methods of political philosophy for conceptualising and resolving moral disagreements.

Ideal and non-ideal theory refer to distinct, but not necessarily mutually exclusive, ways of engaging in ethical theory, political philosophy and political theory. Ideal theory concerns the justification of some ideal normative requirements—ideal principles of social justice, for example. Non-ideal theory, by contrast, refers to the grounding of normative requirements in situations in which the ideal normative requirements are not met or are violated. Some ethicists, philosophers and theorists defend a complementary understanding of the relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory. Others, by contrast, maintain exclusive understandings of ideal and non-ideal theory that view them as theoretical endeavours which are independent from and compete with each other.This article shows the importance of the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction in the ethics of migration by focusing on the open v. closed borders debate. It illustrates that both ideal and non-ideal theoretic argumentations can be employed to either defend or reject states’ moral right to close their borders. In addition, the article explains positions that combine an ideal theoretic argumentation in favour of open borders with a non-ideal theoretic argumentation in favour of closed borders and, vice versa, positions that combine an ideal theoretic argumentation in favour of closed borders with a non-ideal theoretic argumentation in favour of open borders. In this way, the article reveals that clarifying the precise use of ideal and non-ideal theory is necessary in order to properly understand and assess the various positions in the ethics of migration.

Migration and democracy are in a tense relationship. On the one hand, migrants have, in terms of human rights, the same legitimate claim to equal moral consideration as every citizen of a state they wish to enter. On the other hand, citizens of democratic communities have the de facto right to prevent migrants from entering their territory and to exclude them from political membership. In the following article, this tension is described against the background of four different normative models of democracy—liberal, communitarian, deliberative and agonistic—which are introduced and also discussed from a transnational or cosmopolitan perspective in the first section (I). Taking into account these different approaches in democratic theory, the second section (II) discusses three systematic questions central to the research field, namely (a) the question of the legitimacy of territorial exclusions, (b) the question of the possibilities of political membership and (c) the question of the connection between democracy and refugee protection. Finally, in a brief outlook (III), the paper argues for further research to reflect the relationship between migration and democracy more strongly from a cosmopolitan perspective, combining insights from theories that attempt to establish a legitimate global democratic order with radical democratic and deliberative elements. This could open up a perspective on migration in which migration both calls the democratic “we” and its boundaries permanently into question and thereby pushes forward processes of democratisation of borders and boundaries towards a more inclusive and more legitimate democratic order.

Climate change mobility poses questions that point to the core of global and climate justice and developments in the twenty-first century. This paper shows the main ethical aspects of the debate on climate change mobility as well as the developments since its beginnings in the 1980s and presents its most important features and pitfalls. It shows how questions such as whether and how to measure and identify direct interrelationships between environmental change and migration decisions were heatedly discussed and how some of these questions linger on into the present. The main framings and concepts to which the debate is related, such as climate justice, security issues and climate change adaptation, are presented and discussed. Furthermore, the paper illustrates the main normative aspects related to questions of voluntary or forced migration and the safeguarding of the rights of environmental migrants, as these have always been central to the discussion. Theoretical impulses for the debate are brought up, such as climate justice aspects linked to climate mobility and questions of citizenship and de- and reterritorialisation.

This chapter surveys work on three core topics in the interdisciplinary literature on ethics and international refugee law (IRL). First, it provides an overview of the most discussed issue among authors evaluating IRL from an ethical standpoint: i.e., whether the United Nations’ 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees justifiably limits its definition of a “refugee” to people who have fled their countries on account of fear of persecution. While some authors maintain that this definition is ethically sound, others contend that it inappropriately excludes forced migrants who have fled their countries due to threats besides persecution, people who have not left their countries, or both. A second area of dispute covered by the chapter concerns the ethical foundations of IRL. Here too, controversy centres on the Convention’s definition of a refugee, with authors dividing not only on the question of whether its restrictions with regard to persecution and alienage are justified, but also with the question of what moral judgements are implicit in conceiving of refugeehood as so-restricted. Finally, the chapter discusses work on the very connection between IRL and ethics as that topic arises within the context of the broader controversy between natural law and legal positivist approaches to the relationship between law and morality.

In this chapter I advance the view that migrants, refugees and tourists are individuals who move to pursue fundamental interests. Movement across international borders is the common feature in their life projects. I suggest that distinguishing between broader categories of movement, movement out of need, forced movement and movement out of choice, helps us to reflectively grasp the distinction between moral and political arguments about migrants, refugees and tourists. When advanced at the level of public discourse, I call them political arguments; and when in political philosophy, moral arguments. I will suggest ways in which moral arguments are instrumentalised politically, and political arguments moralised—both rhetorical strategies which obfuscate, rather than help our understanding of the complex field of migration and movement processes.