Gillian Brock

Two important recent books on migration and justice argue for different approaches to how we should view borders. Alex Sager defends open borders, while Sarah Song argues for the rights of democratic communities to find their own balance between open and closed borders. While both authors present significant considerations in defence of their views, in this article I argue that a human-rights-oriented account of migration justice captures their strengths well while not sharing the weaknesses I identify with each. In addition, the approach I favour offers some progressive pathways for holding each other to account in reducing migration injustice in our actual world, in ways that are both feasible and normatively compelling.

What weight should we place on self-determination, democracy, human rights and equality in an account of migration justice? Anna Stilz and Andrea Sangiovanni offer insightful comments that prompt us to consider such questions. In addressing their welcome critiques I aim to show how my account can help reduce migration injustice in our contemporary world. As I argue, there is no right to free movement across state borders. However, migrants do have rights to a fair process for determining their rights. Democratic communities should have scope to make many migration decisions, although there are constraints on that self-determination. The migration governance oversight arrangements I favor are compatible with core requirements of agency and responsiveness that are operative in mature democracies. In responding to concerns about objectionable power inequalities that often characterize temporary worker programs, I show why addressing these issues requires various institutional protections that are well enforced. Robust migration governance arrangements can assist in formulating defensible migration policies that we can implement here and now as we aim to reduce migration injustices in our current world.

Migration often involves leaving one home and trying to build another. Normative issues abound with both aspects, however as we reflect on issues of home and migration, it is hard to go past the thought that the plight of refugees is one of the most pressing. Being a refugee might be the equivalent of being homeless in the international context. And so considering our responsibilities in relation to the homeless in our state system seems especially worthwhile, given the conference theme and the vulnerability associated with being forcibly displaced. Here I focus particularly on the plight of large-scale refugee populations fleeing violent conflict. And I am especially focused on the Syrian case, given that it currently involves the largest displaced population, though other cases will be discussed as well. I explore how we should help refugees in ways that are likely to promote the well-being of many agents that surround refugee crises. Many of these solutions may be described as development oriented. They focus on meeting a wide range of current needs of the displaced populations (such as for autonomy, work, opportunity, and community) while also preparing that population for life after conflict.

By executive order, the US adopted an immigration policy that looks remarkably similar to a Muslim ban, and threatened to deport long-settled residents, such as the so-called Dreamers. Our defunct refugee system has not dealt adequately with increased refugee flows, forcing desperate people to undertake increasingly risky measures in efforts to reach safe havens. Meanwhile increased migration flows over recent years appear to have contributed to a rise in right-wing populism, apparently driving phenomena such as Brexit and Trumpism. In this original and insightful book Gillian Brock offers answers and tools that assist us in evaluating current migration policy and in helping to determine which policies may be permissible and which are normatively indefensible. She offers a comprehensive framework for responding to the many challenges which have recently emerged, and for delivering justice for people on the move along with those affected by migration.

Philosophical theorizing about global justice has evolved into a flourishing, sophisticated, and respectable field. This was not the case about two decades ago and O’Neill’s pioneering work on these topics has been highly influential in these welcome developments. In this paper I aim to review the important role agency, need, and vulnerability play in O’Neill’s normative theorizing, as well as the importance she places on being able to allocate responsibilities, in evaluating how porous borders should be to persons who want to cross them permanently. Some of the most important questions needing resolution in political philosophy today include how to distribute responsibilities for moving towards global justice. Just how difficult this is will soon become obvious. I discuss a case study which helpfully illustrates some of the complexity. It also provides an interesting challenge for O’Neill’s work. As I show, focusing on vulnerabilities gives us a richer understanding of the nature of our ethical and political obligations in a world characterized by multiple injustices. But it also adds more challenges in our quest to assign responsibility fairly.

The lack of human resources available to address enormous contemporary healthcare needs is ‘one of the most pressing global health issues of our time’.1 The WHO has estimated the shortfall at approximately 4.3 million healthcare professionals.2 The shortages are most acutely felt in low/middle-income countries, where the scale of the problem sometimes threatens the very viability of even rudimentary healthcare systems. The shortages are exacerbated by the phenomenon known as ‘brain drain’ where, in its most worrisome forms, skilled and educated citizens from low/middle-income countries depart for high-income ones at very high rates. The data on the empirical results of brain drain are complex and there are many types of effects to consider. In Debating Brain Drain: May Governments Restrict Emigration? (Oxford University Press, 2015) we consider some of this complexity, including positive and negative effects associated with impacts on health services and outcomes, knowledge transfer, remittances, income, economic growth, human capital formation, institution building, fiscal contributions and diaspora effects. On several particular dimensions, low/middle-income countries are huge net losers from migration of health professionals. Consider, for instance, that African countries are estimated to lose …

What sort of moral importance do people's needs have? Can people's needs defensibly make claims on anyone? Recent arguments concerning the moral importance of needs adopt a distinctive approach: the importance of needs is evaluated in terms of how needs fare in contests with preferences or desires in distributive contexts. I suggest some explanations for this move, but argue that the moral importance of needs is not best evaluated using this strategy. Rather, whether needs can trump, or in other ways significantly affect property rights, is a more adequate test of their importance--indeed, is the crucial issue if needs are to have the kind of moral importance recent arguers want to claim for needs in the kinds of distributive contexts identified. ;So, can people's needs defensibly affect others' property rights? I argue that this question, once thoroughly examined, conceals some important misconceptions about property rights and the kinds of arguments by which they can be justified. I argue that claims of need can have a significant impact on property rights: people's needs can define the limits of defensible property rights in certain sorts of cases. Indeed, failure to recognize the constraints imposed by people's needs leaves one with an indefensible account of property rights. So, if according property rights and rewarding labor are to be defensible practices, there are some needs which legitimately make claims on others.

In 'Meeting Needs', Braybrooke argues that a new and improved version of utilitarianism can be constructed around making a priority of satisfying needs. In this paper I concentrate on Braybrooke's suggestion about the method for determining needs, and more generally, the method of settling issues concerning matters of need. (This emphasis is chosen since these problems are most devastating to his project as currently formulated.) I argue that Braybrooke's method is seriously flawed. Braybrooke believes that the process for settling issues concerning needs guarantees consensus and fairness. I refute this claim by showing that a number of assumptions crucial to Braybrooke's method are unwarranted. In addition, I show that these and other structural defects in the method are such that Braybrooke's account is guilty of paternalism and "fraud", despite his attempts to avoid these charges. I also indicate why similar methods are unlikely to meet with success.

Disturbing international inequalities in health abound. Life expectancy in Swaziland is half that in Japan. A child unfortunate enough to be born in Angola has 73 times as great a chance of dying before age 5 as a child born in Norway. A mother giving birth in southern sub-Saharan Africa has 100 times as great a chance of dying from her labor as one birthing in an industrialized country. For every mile one travels outward toward the Maryland suburbs from downtown Washington, DC on its underground rail system, life expectancy rises by a year – reflecting the race and class inequities in American health. Are the glaring, even larger, international health inequalities also unjust? All of us no doubt think they are grossly unfortunate. Many of us think they are unfair or unjust. Why should some people be at such a health disadvantage through no fault of their own, losers in a natural and social lottery assigning them birth in an unhealthy place? Others of us are troubled by the absence of the kinds of human relationships that ordinarily give rise to the claims of egalitarian justice that we make on each other – for example, being fellow citizens or even interacting in a cooperative scheme. Who has obligations of justice to reduce these international inequalities? And do those obligations hold regardless of how the inequalities came about? What institutions are accountable for addressing them?