•  1246
    Discrimination and the Presumptive Rights of Immigrants
    Critical 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
  •  1189
    Introduction to the Ethics of Illegality
    Oregon 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.
  •  1125
    Neither a State of Nature nor a State of Exception
    Radical 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
  •  772
    Latino/a Immigration: A Refutation of the Social Trust Argument
    In Harald Bauder & Christian Matheis (eds.), Migration Policy and Practice: Interventions and Solutions, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 37-57. 2015.
    The social trust argument asserts that a political community cannot survive without social trust, and that social trust cannot be achieved or maintained without a political community having discretionary control over immigration. Various objections have already been raised against this argument, but because those objections all assume various liberal commitments they leave the heart of the social trust argument untouched. This chapter argues that by looking at the socio-historical circumstances …Read more
  •  752
    Enforcement Matters: Reframing the Philosophical Debate over Immigration
    Journal 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
  •  697
    Does Cosmopolitan Justice Ever Require Restrictions on Migration?
    Public Affairs Quarterly 29 (2): 175-186. 2015.
    In this essay, I argue that even when they appear to help, restrictions on migration are usually only an impediment, not an aid, to cosmopolitan justice. Even though some egalitarian cosmopolitans are well intentioned in their support of migration restrictions, I argue that migration restrictions are (i) not truly cosmopolitan and (ii) will not have the kinds of consequences they expect. My argument in defense of this claim begins, in section 1, by outlining a defense of migration restrictions b…Read more
  •  638
    Doing Away with Juan Crow: Two Standards for Just Immigration Reform
    APA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy 15 (2): 14-20. 2015.
    In 2008 Robert Lovato coined the phrase Juan Crow. Juan Crow is a type of policy or enforcement of immigration laws that discriminate against Latino/as in the United States. This essay looks at the implications this phenomenon has for an ethics of immigration. It argues that Juan Crow, like its predecessor Jim Crow, is not merely a condemnation of federalism, but of any immigration reform that has stricter enforcement as one of its key components. Instead of advocating for increased enforcement,…Read more
  •  623
    Latinx and the Future of Whiteness in American Democracy
    APA 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
  •  589
    The Contradiction of Crimmigation
    APA 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
  •  408
    The Political Philosophy of Unauthorized Immigration
    APA 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
  •  394
    Introduction to Special Issue
    Public Affairs Quarterly 29 (2): 135-137. 2015.
  •  386
    Immigration
    Radical 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
  •  292
    Illegal: 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
  •  291
    In this article, I raise three potential objections to Alexis Shotwell’s view of “implicit knowledge,” which she presents in her book Knowing Otherwise.
  •  289
    What 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.
  •  215
    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
  •  192
    Illegal: White Supremacy and Immigration Status
    In Alex Sager (ed.), The Ethics and Politics of Immigration: Core Issues and Emerging Trends, Rowman & Littlefield International. pp. 201-220. 2016.
    This chapter looks at the history of US citizenship and immigration law and argues that denying admission or citizenship status to certain groups of people is closely correlated to a denial of whiteness. On this account whiteness is not a fixed or natural concept, but instead is a social construction whose composition changes throughout time and place. Understanding whiteness in this way allows one to see how white supremacy is not limited merely to instances of racism or ethnocentrism, but can …Read more
  •  144
    Philosophy of Race and the Ethics of Immigration
    In 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.
  •  91
    Discrimination and Immigration
    In 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
  •  88
    A "Nation" of Immigrants
    The 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
  •  81
    José Jorge Mendoza argues that the difficulty with resolving the issue of immigration is primarily a conflict over competing moral and political principles and is, at its core, a problem of philosophy. This book brings into dialogue various contemporary philosophical texts that deal with immigration to provide some normative guidance to immigration policy and reform.
  •  68
    Crimmigration and the Ethics of Migration
    Social 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
  •  55
    Concepts as Tools Not Rules: a Commentary on (Re-) Defining Racism
    Ethical 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
  •  54
    Pragmatism 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
  •  54
    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
  •  43
    Does "Sí Se Puede" Translate To "Yes We Can"?
    Philosophy in the Contemporary World 18 (2): 60-69. 2011.
    Philosophers of the American tradition should be more proactive in their inclusion of Latino/a thinkers, even when the work of these thinkers does not directly connect back to classical tradition of American philosophy. This argument has two mterrelated parts. First, if the American philosophical tradition is committed to a social and political philosophy that begins from "lived-experience," then one area it has largely overlooked is the Latino/a experience. Second, if the contributions of the L…Read more
  •  42
    "Go Back to Where You Came From!" Racism, Xenophobia, and White Nationalism
    American 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
  •  41
    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
  •  38
    Liberalism and Open Borders
    Radical Philosophy Review 25 (1): 127-132. 2022.
  •  28
    Pragmatism in the Americas (review)
    The Pluralist 8 (2): 121-127. 2013.