Désirée Lim

Skill-selective immigration policies, through which states favor the admission of highly skilled migrants over low-skilled migrants, are a familiar component of the immigration landscape. Wealthy Western states, such as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, have explicitly declared their desire to attract the “best and the brightest.” On the other hand, attitudes toward low-skilled migrants could not be more different. They have consistently been portrayed as dangerous and undesirable, a drain on social welfare, and economically threatening to citizens. This book argues that we ought to rethink this stance. Beginning from the widely shared principle of equal respect for all persons, it proposes that equal respect requires the recognition of each person’s pro tanto right to social equality, regardless of their citizenship status. Even if states have the right to exclude noncitizens, they cannot do so in a way that is demeaning or subordinating to excluded persons. The right to social equality gives us a richer picture of why certain instances of immigrant selection, such as the United States’ recent ban on citizens from Muslim-majority countries, are unjust. However, it also has troubling implications for skill-selective immigration policies, as they are currently practiced: the book reveals that they ought to be regarded as a form of wrongful discrimination. Drawing on the framework of social equality, the book goes on to consider the problem of colonial injustice and how it may be reproduced by skill-selective immigration policies, as well as migratorial disobedience.

Academic institutions have introduced diversity-related procedures in no small part due to increasing pressure from activist groups like the ‘Decolonise Academia’ movement. However, it is unclear how successful these procedures have been in achieving their purported aims, and more than that, how aligned they are with the goals of said activist movements. In my paper, focusing on the epistemic dimensions of ‘decolonising academia’, I highlight a crucial distinction between procedural and substantive forms of epistemic justice, emphasising that current procedural modes of epistemic justice may lead us down the wrong path, worsening pre-existing ‘epistemic woes’ rather than ameliorating them. More concretely, I provide an elaborated diagnosis of how the problems of elite capture, virtue-signalling, and credibility excess can obstruct substantive epistemic justice in educational institutions even if procedurally just norms have been implemented. I conclude with brief remarks on how these three woes can be addressed, underscoring the importance of procedural reform.

Calls to defund the police gained prominence with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and take various forms. Depending on what will be defunded, the idea has attracted support from different parts of the political spectrum. The politicized nature of the debate often cuts short reflection on how best to assess proposals to defund the police. This article takes up that task. It begins by developing a typology of defund measures: abolitionist cuts, abolitionist reallocation, disaggregative cuts, and disaggregative reallocation. It then outlines a framework to evaluate policing and defund measures, drawing on criteria from the ethics of defensive force. Since policing relies on force, it faces a high justificatory bar and must satisfy the principles of just aim, proportionality, and necessity. The state should not fund unjustified forms of policing that violate those principles. Different violations, though, demand different policy responses.

This paper examines how everyday practices of ‘bordering’, as conceived by Yuval- Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy (2019) as the ongoing proliferation of border sites where migrants are assessed to be fit for inclusion or exclusion, may violate moral respect by subjecting migrants to a wide array of discriminatory treatment, leading to what I call ‘status-harms’. Section II begins by providing an overview of bordering and the various forms it has taken, such as internal immigration checkpoints or even online visa application processes. Section III develops an account of comparative and non-comparative status-harms and why they constitute violations of moral respect. There, I pay special attention to comparative status-harms by proposing three conditions under which a comparative status-harm can be said to have occurred: (a) if an individual or group is singled out for disadvantageous treatment that others are not subjected to on the basis of a socially salient attribute, (b) if the attribute marks them out as inferior relative to those who are not affected thus, and (c) ascriptions of inferior status occur within a morally objectionable social hierarchy where they are targeted by hostile norms and practices centred around that attribute. I then consider how discriminatory practices of bordering routinely imposes status-harms on migrants. Section IV draws a distinction between two types of discrimination that migrants may be subjected to at border sites, which I term policy-based discrimination and procedure-based discrimination, and explores their relationship to the comparative and non-comparative status-harms suffered by migrants. I conclude in Section V.

This chapter argues for a structural injustice approach to the governance of AI. Structural injustice has an analytical and an evaluative component. The analytical component consists of structural explanations that are well-known in the social sciences. The evaluative component is a theory of justice. Structural injustice is a powerful conceptual tool that allows researchers and practitioners to identify, articulate, and perhaps even anticipate, AI biases. The chapter begins with an example of racial bias in AI that arises from structural injustice. The chapter then presents the concept of structural injustice as introduced by the philosopher Iris Marion Young. The chapter moreover argues that structural injustice is well suited as an approach to the governance of AI and compares this approach to alternative approaches that start from analyses of harms and benefits or from value statements. The chapter suggests that structural injustice provides methodological and normative foundations for the values and concerns of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The chapter closes with an outlook onto the idea of “structure” and on responsibility. The idea of a structure is central to justice. An open theoretical research question is to what extent AI is itself part of the structure of society. Finally, the practice of responsibility is central to structural injustice. Even if they cannot be held responsible for the existence of structural injustice, every individual and every organization has some responsibility to address structural injustice going forward.

Low-skilled migrants in wealthy receiving states are routinely subordinated across a range of social contexts. There is a rich philosophical literature on the inferiorizing effects of “crimmigration”—that is, the growing criminalization of unauthorized migrants and the state’s use of uniquely harsh law enforcement methods against them. Yet there is less interest in the existing racialized division of migrant labor. Low-skilled Latino/a/x migrants disproportionately perform “dirty” and “difficult” work that citizens do not wish to perform. Theoretically, this division of labor is compatible with a more permissive immigration system that legally admitted far larger numbers of low-skilled migrants to continue “doing the dirty work.” Indeed, many have assumed the desirability of such a system. Against this, I argue that “crimmigration” and the racialized division of migrant labor cannot be conceptually disentangled. Rather, they are mutually constitutive in reproducing background conditions that constrain the social equality of low-skilled migrants, as well as others perceived to be such. “Crimmigration” has not only excluded migrants, but enabled states to include them on socially unequal terms: as an instrumental and fungible source of cheap labor. Drawing on Alasia Nuti’s valuable observation that “banal” historical mechanisms like stereotypes and social scripts can play a crucial role in maintaining present-day injustice, I show that stereotypes of migrants as workers in low-skilled occupations, as well as the expectation that they continue to take on those jobs, also profoundly undermine immigration justice.

To what extent can sovereign states limit or exercise discretion over migration into their territory? Furthermore, once migrants have been admitted, what rights are they entitled to? Joseph Carens’s The Ethics of Immigration, a much-awaited synthesis of his influential previous work on the topic, answers these questions both carefully and forcefully.Throughout, Carens assumes that his audience, like him, is motivated by what he terms ‘democratic principles’ : a web of assorted beliefs that together reflect a basic commitment to the equal moral worth of individuals. This allows him to establish a ‘shared understanding’ between those with a permissive attitude towards immigration, and those with a considerably more restrictive view, rather than accepting the myth that both positions are irreconcilable from the ground up. After all, as Carens notes, ‘there is already a wide area of agreement about immigration among democratic states in Europe and North America, an agreement that is ..

The current European ‘migration crisis’ encompasses increasing rates of migration and the accompanying failure of migrants, including both economic migrants and refugees, to integrate. In this paper, I focus on a normative analysis of the entry fee immigration system, providing both an internal and external critique. In the internal critique, I take for granted that states are best understood as clubs. However, states seem to share greater similarities with clubs that are too exclusive to allow membership to be purchased. In the external critique, I argue that imposing a substantial entry fee on club membership is impermissible if exclusion from membership deprives non-members of basic rights and interests, even if measures are taken to equalise their ability to pay. The upshot of the internal and external critique, I believe, is that membership ought not to be contingent on the payment of a fee, or more generally, the acceptance of current members.

It has been suggested that states have no right to directly discriminate against would-be immigrants on grounds of race or sex. However, while the discourse on cases of wrongful discrimination has largely focused on discrimination on grounds of gender, race, and sexual orientation, states frequently engage in discrimination of a different kind when it comes to admissions and naturalisation policies. It is assumed that the anti-discrimination principle does not include cases of talent-based discrimination, and that these fall well within the rights of states. I wish to suggest, to the contrary, that selecting immigrants on the basis of talent is a form of wrongful discrimination. First, with reference to Deborah Hellman’s expressive theory of discrimination, I explain what is wrongful about particular forms of state discrimination between would-be migrants. Next, I tackle the issue of immigrant selection on grounds of talent, which I refer to as ‘talent-based selection’. Unlike gender or race-based selection, it is generally not regarded as wrongful discrimination, for the reason that it does not express disrespect in the same way that sexist or racist selection criteria does. I argue that this assumption is mistaken, as talent-based discrimination does involve the expression of disrespect. In the present context, it has the expressive effect of reproducing demeaning stereotypes about low-skilled foreigners. Finally, I anticipate four objections to my conclusion.