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61"Go Back to Where You Came From!" Racism, Xenophobia, and White NationalismAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 60 (4): 397-410. 2023.There are two competing ways of understanding nefarious expressions of nationalism in countries like the U.S., either as xenophobia or racism. In this essay, I offer a way of capturing what is attractive in both accounts: a way of thinking about the xenophobia of U.S. nationalism that does not miss or minimize the role that race plays in condemning such expressions, but at the same time does not risk overextending the definition of racism. To do this, the essay makes a case for decoupling and sl…Read more
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268The Undermining Mechanisms of ‘Rule of Law’ Objections: A Response to Song and BloemraadThe Ethics of Migration Policy Dilemmas Project. 2022.In their article, “Immigrant legalization: A Dilemma Between Justice and The Rule of Law,” Sarah Song and Irene Bloemraad address rule of law objections to policies that would regularize the status of undocumented immigrants in the United States. On their view, justice requires that liberal democratic states (i.e., states that are committed to individual liberty and universal equality) provide pathways for undocumented immigrants to regularize their status. We do not disagree with Song and Bloem…Read more
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12Until recently, much of the philosophical literature on refugees has focused on what Serena Parekh (2020) in No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis, calls the “first refugee crisis,” i.e., the refugee crisis as experienced from Europe, understood as the arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers and the political handling of this situation. This literature has therefore dealt primarily with questions about who really counts as a refugee and when states acquire obligations to admit non-c…Read more
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21Illegal: How America's lawless immigration regime threatens us all (review)Contemporary Political Theory 20 (3): 131-134. 2021.
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70Concepts as Tools Not Rules: a Commentary on (Re-) Defining RacismEthical Theory and Moral Practice (3): 1-6. 2021.In (Re)Defining Racism, Alberto Urquidez argues that conflicting philosophical accounts over the definition of racism are at bottom linguistic confusions that would benefit from a Wittgensteinian-inspired approach. In this essay, I argue that such an approach would be helpful in disputes over the definition of metaphysically contested concepts, such as “race,” or semantically contested concepts, such as “racialization.” I disagree, however, that such insights would prove helpful or do very littl…Read more
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47Socially Undocumented Oppression: "Goldilocks” Liberalism or Something New?Philosophy Today 64 (4): 973-977. 2020.In her book, Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice, Amy Reed-Sandoval discloses and criticizes a kind of oppression that is uniquely suffered by a group she identifies as "socially undocumented." The problem with her account is not with the identification of this group nor in her conclusions or recommendations, but in taking an overly constrained version of liberalism as her starting point. This non-radical version of liberalism does not have the necessary resources to properly…Read more
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4Three Reasons for Knowing Other than Knowing OtherwisePhaenex: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture 8 (1). 2013.
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83Crimmigration and the Ethics of MigrationSocial Philosophy Today 36 (1): 49-68. 2020.David Miller’s defense of a state’s presumptive right to exclude non-refugee immigrants rests on two key distinctions. The first is that immigration controls are “preventative” and not “coercive.” In other words, when a state enforces its immigration policy it does not coerce noncitizens into doing something as much as it prevents them from doing a very specific thing (e.g., not entering or remaining within the state), while leaving other options open. Second, he makes a distinction between “den…Read more
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338Illegal: How America's lawless immigration regime threatens us all (review)Contemporary Political Theory 20 1-4. 2020.Book review of Elizabeth F. Cohen's Illegal: How America’s lawless immigration regime threatens us all
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13Guest Editors’ IntroductionRadical Philosophy Review 23 (1): 1-3. 2020.This article summarizes the events at the 2020 Radical Philosophy Association Biennial meeting, introduces the conference themes, and looks at how the articles in this journal volume take up those themes.
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59Latinx Philosophy and the Ethics of MigrationIn Robert Eli Jr Sanchez (ed.), Latin American and Latinx Philosophy: A Collaborative Introduction, Routledge. pp. 198-219. 2019.This essay argues that Latinx philosophers are not only already providing important and original contributions to standard open-borders debates, but also changing the very nature of the ethics of migration. In making this case, the essay is divided into two parts. The first summarizes some of the important and original contributions of Latinx philosophers to the standard open-borders debate. Among the highlights are Jorge M. Valadez’s “conditional legitimacy of states” argument; José-Antonio Oro…Read more
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313What Do We Owe The Forcibly Displaced? (review)Global Justice : Theory Practice Rhetoric 11 (1). 2018.This is a review of Serena Parekh's book: Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement.
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17A “Nation” of ImmigrantsThe Pluralist 5 (3): 41-48. 2010.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A "Nation" of ImmigrantsJose Jorge MendozaIntroductionIn "Nations of Immigrants: Do Words Matter?" Donna Gabaccia provides an illuminating account of the origin of the United States' claim to be a "Nation of Immigrants." Gabaccia's endeavor is motivated by the question "What difference does it make if we call someone a foreigner, an immigrant, an emigrant, a migrant, a refugee, an alien, an exile or an illegal or clandestine?" (Gabac…Read more
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626The Contradiction of CrimmigationAPA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy 17 (2): 6-9. 2018.This essay argues that we should find Crimmigration, which is the collapsing of immigration law with criminal law, morally problematic for three reasons. First, it denies those who are facing criminal penalties important constitutional protections. Second, it doubly punishes those who have already served their criminal sentence with an added punishment that should be considered cruel and unusual (i.e., indefinite imprisonment or exile). Third, when the tactics aimed at protecting and serving loc…Read more
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424ImmigrationRadical Philosophy Review 15 (2): 359-364. 2012.In her book, The Ethics and Mores of Race, Naomi Zack offers her readers a critical and historical examination of philosophical ethics. This comprehensive and illuminating examination of philosophical ethics concludes by yielding twelve requirements for an ethics of race. While these twelve requirements are not in-themselves an ethics of race, the hope is that these requirements will be sufficient to finally allow us to explicitly engage in ethical treatments of race. My view is that Zack’s a…Read more
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94Discrimination and ImmigrationIn Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Discrimination, Routledge. 2018.In this chapter, I outline what philosophers working on the ethics of immigration have had to say with regard to invidious discrimination. In doing so, I look at both instances of direct discrimination, by which I mean discrimination that is explicitly stated in official immigration policy, and indirect discrimination, by which I mean cases where the implementation or enforcement of facially “neutral” policies nonetheless generate invidious forms of discrimination. The end goal of this chapter i…Read more
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149Philosophy of Race and the Ethics of ImmigrationIn Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff & Luvell Anderson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, Routledge. 2018.In this chapter I attempt to provide a general overview of the philosophical literature on immigration from both an ethics of immigration and philosophy of race perspective. I then try to make the case that putting these two literatures into conversation would be fruitful. In particular, that it could provide an underappreciated argument for limiting the discretion states are normally thought to enjoy with respect to immigration.
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658Latinx and the Future of Whiteness in American DemocracyAPA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy 16 (2): 6-10. 2017.Given the oncoming demographic changes—which are primarily driven by the growth in the Latinx community—the United States is predicted to become a minority-majority country by around 2050. This seems to suggest that electoral strategies that employ “dog-whistle” politics are destined for the dust-bin of history. Following the work of critical race theorists, such as Ian Haney-Lopez and Derrick Bell, I want to suggest that pronouncing the inevitable demise of dog-whistle politics is premature. Th…Read more
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800Enforcement Matters: Reframing the Philosophical Debate over ImmigrationJournal of Speculative Philosophy 29 (1): 73-90. 2015.In debating the ethics of immigration, philosophers have focused much of their attention on determining whether a political community ought to have the discretionary right to control immigration. They have not, however, given the same amount of consideration to determining whether there are any ethical limits on how a political community enforces its immigration policy. This article, therefore, offers a different approach to immigration justice. It presents a case against legitimate states havin…Read more
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1162Neither a State of Nature nor a State of ExceptionRadical Philosophy Review 14 (2): 187-195. 2011.Since at least the second half of the 19th century, the U.S. federal government has enjoyed “plenary power” over its immigration policy. Plenary power allows the federal government to regulate immigration free of judicial review and thereby, with regard to immigration cases, minimize the Constitutional protections afforded to non-citizens. The justification for granting the U.S federal government such broad powers comes from a certain understanding of sovereignty; one where limiting sovereign a…Read more
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457The Political Philosophy of Unauthorized ImmigrationAPA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy 10 (2): 2-6. 2011.In this article, I broadly sketch out the current philosophical debate over immigration and highlight some of its shortcomings. My contention is that the debate has been too focused on border enforcement and therefore has left untouched one of the more central issue of this debate: what to do with unauthorized immigrants who have already crossed the border and with the “push and pull” factors that have created this situation. After making this point, I turn to the work of Enrique Dussel and ar…Read more
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1281Discrimination and the Presumptive Rights of ImmigrantsCritical Philosophy of Race 2 (1): 68-83. 2014.Philosophers have assumed that as long as discriminatory admission and exclusion policies are off the table, it is possible for one to adopt a restrictionist position on the issue of immigration without having to worry that this position might entail discriminatory outcomes. The problem with this assumption emerges, however,when two important points are taken into consideration. First, immigration controls are not simply discriminatory because they are based on racist or ethnocentric attitudes a…Read more
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93A "Nation" of ImmigrantsThe Pluralist 5 (3): 41-48. 2010.In "Nations of Immigrants: Do Words Matter?" Donna Gabaccia provides an illuminating account of the origin of the United States' claim to be a "Nation of Immigrants." Gabaccia's endeavor is motivated by the question "What difference does it make if we call someone a foreigner, an immigrant, an emigrant, a migrant, a refugee, an alien, an exile or an illegal or clandestine?" . This question is very important to the immigration debate because, as Gabaccia goes on to show, "[t]o ponder this questio…Read more
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1231Introduction to the Ethics of IllegalityOregon Review of International Law 11 (1): 123-128. 2009.In this article I use the tropes of El Cucuy (the Mexican version of the boogyman), La Llorona (the wailer), and La Migra (the border patrol) to provide the beginnings of an ethical critique of the treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States.
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61Pragmatism in the Americas ed. by Gregory Fernando Pappas (review) (review)The Pluralist 8 (2): 121-127. 2013.At the University of Oregon, where I received my PhD, one of the requirements for advancing to doctoral candidacy was the completion of a History Paper. The History Paper challenges the student to bring together two philosophers from different philosophical traditions on a similar question and/or topic. The two philosophers that I chose for my History Paper were Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel and the American philosopher John Dewey. As I began work on this project, I quickly realized …Read more
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322Three Reasons for Knowing Other than Knowing Otherwise: A Reply to Alexis ShotwellPhaenEx 8 (1): 267-275. 2013.In this article, I raise three potential objections to Alexis Shotwell’s view of “implicit knowledge,” which she presents in her book Knowing Otherwise.
APA Western Division
Seattle, Washington, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Immigration |
Philosophy of Race |
Latin American Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |
Colonialism and Postcolonialism |
Global Justice |