Theoretical Perspectives on Migration

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LAW 342 Immigration Michael Walzer

Notes

communitarian ideas about the importance of community itself and the concomitant requirement of boundaries for any community.

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Under late 20th century pressures of globalization, control over borders has become even more important as state autonomy in other policy areas has lessened. One result of this is that state sovereignty often crops up in popular and political debates about immigration.

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rulers would abstain from interfering in the internal affairs of neighbouring states

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drawing analogies between states and different forms of social organization: neighbourhoods, clubs, and familie

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to the extent that we enjoy and desire free mobility in and out of neighbourhoods, Walzer warns us that this openness depends on a policy of closure at the state level.

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The primary good that we distribute to one another is membership in some human community.

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so long as members and strangers are, as they are at present, two distinct groups, admissions decisions have to be made, men and women taken in or refused.

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We might, of course, award the right to give birth differentially to different groups of parents,

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To tear down the walls of the state is not, as Sidgwick wor- riedly suggested, to create a world without walls, but rather to create a thousand petty fortresses.

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Historically, neighborhoods have turned into closed or parochial communities (leaving aside cases of legal coercion) whenever the state was open

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Neighborhoods can be open only if countries are at least potentially closed. Only if the state makes a selection among would-be members and guarantees the loyalty, security, and welfare of the individuals it selects, can local communities take shape as “indifferent” associations,

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But the Australian “family” held a vast territory of which it occupied (and I shall assume, without further factual reference, still occupies) only a small part.

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Britain and the United States could hardly have been required, for example, to offer refuge to Stalinists fleeing Hungary in 1956, had the revolution triumphed. Once again, communities must have boundaries

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Borders have guards and the guards have guns.

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Citizenship in Western liberal democracies is the modern equivalent of feudal privilege—an inherited status that greatly enhances oné’s life chances.

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The theory only makes sense, it is said, in a situation where people already share liberal-democratic values. But if we presuppose a context of shared values, what need have we for a “veil of ignorance”?

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the effect of immigration on the particular culture and history of the society would not be a relevant moral consideration, so long as there was no threat to basic liberal democratic values.

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no one would be willing to risk the possibility of being required to forego some important right or freedom for the sake of an ideal

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If freedom of movement within the state is so important that it overrides the claims of local political communities, on what grounds can we restrict freedom of move- ment across states?

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ignores the familiar distinction between public and private, a distinction that Walzer makes use of elsewhere.

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in thinking about what open states would be like, we have a better comparison at hand. We can draw upon our experi- ence of cities, provinces, or states in the American sense.

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The extension of the right to immigrate reflects the same logic: equal treatment of individuals in the public sphere.

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Any approach like Walzer’s that seeks its ground in the tradition and culture of our community must confront, as a methodological paradox, the fact that liberalism is a central part of our culture.

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Open borders would threaten the distinctive character of different political communi- ties only because we assume that so many people would move if they could.

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a globalizing world, we see dramatic increases in the international movement of goods, rvices and capital but next to no growth in the international movement of people.

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the proportion of the world’s population at is made up of migrants has actually decreased since 1965 from 2.4 to 1.97%.

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estimated that the elimination of all global restric- ons on labour mobility could result in a net doubling of worldwide annual GNP.

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neoclassical economic theory suggests that an optimal immigration policy would be not to have one at all.

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narrow, nationalistic welfare function

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pragmatically unimportant because immigration ultimately benefits both insiders and outsiders,

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The data are peculiarly at odds with prevailing public attitudes

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increased numbers of immigrants have … played little observable role in reducing wages or in increasing unemployment.

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at some threshold rate of immigration—perhaps an order of magnitude higher than now prevailing—it is reasonable to expect that negative congestion externalities and adverse labour market or fiscal effects may cause the current net benefit to become a net domestic welfare loss.

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expatriate remittances, particularly from skilled workers who earn higher salaries than the average migrant, constitute an important source of funds for develop- ment in their home countries”

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While the educational qualifications of recent immigrants tend to be higher than prior generations of immigrants they have increased less rapidly than the educational qualifications of the native-born.

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rigidities or protectionism in domestic educational and professional institutions in evaluating and recognizing foreign credentials and work experience and difficulties faced by domestic employees in the same regard increasingly penalize skilled immigrants.

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inefficient domestic labour market rigidities.

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“there is no evidence at all suggesting a decreasing relation between growth in income per capita and migration in developing countries”

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If the disease at issue is communicable, then it may make sense to in effect “quarantine” the would-be migrants in their country of origin by denying them entry so as to prevent exposure to the native population in the destination | country and therefore preempt a greater number of people from becoming infected worldwide.

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From a global welfare perspective, the use of a point system is more difficult to assess

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ceteris paribus, criminal activity is likely to be initially at a lower level in the more advanced developed economies. This makes criminal activity more remunerative and more tempt- ing to engage in on the margin because of the higher rents available.

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illegal immigrants are almost certainly net contributors fiscally because they generate considerable tax revenues for host governments through property taxes, sales taxes, and mandatorily withheld in- come taxes, while remaining ineligible for most social programs.

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It appears that not all immigrants benefit from migration as seen by appreciable return migration, and some migration is of course involuntary.

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The effect flows almost exclusively from the greater size of the population that immigration brings. Scale economies result,

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Immigration clearly increases the size of the economy (as measured by GDP), but the relevant issue for most policy purposes is its per capita effect,

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ard suggests that in gateway cities with large immigration flows, such as Miami or Los Angeles, the new immigration of the 1980s may have depressed wages and employment rates by at most about 1 to 3 percent in 1990.

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women arrive as migrants on the basis of their egally defined relationship of dependence.

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Women and men are approximately equally represented in the international population of refugees and other persons of concern to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Despite this, however, admission figures for refugees and asylum seekers in the United States, Canada, and Aus- tralia show that more men than women are admitted.

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Demand exceeds supply of female citizens of affluent states willing to provide these services either as unpaid labor or for the wages and working conditions offered in the market. By and large, this has not led to a decline in the demand for commercial sex, a systemic redistribution of unpaid domestic labor between the sexes, or an increased market valorization of “women’s work” Instead, mi- grant women from poor countries are recruited to top up the deficit at low cost.

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There has been a prodigious rise in the use of deportation by liberal democratic states in the last two decades.

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The rejection of an application for citizenship does not have deportation as its corollary; that is there continues to be an acceptance of residence even if one’s membership in the polity is rejected.

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membership theory, which limits individual rights and privileges to the members asocial contract between the government and the people, is at work in the convergence criminal and immigration law.

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criminal penology began to embrace sovereign power as a basis for policy- making,

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