Abstract
For Europeans who strive for greater justice, there is no more cruel dilemma that the tension between maximal generosity towards the weakest among insiders and maximal hospitality towards the many outsiders who are keen, indeed sometimes desperate, to immigrate into the European Union. Opening the doors wide open would not only increase competition for the jobs, housing and public services which the least advantaged insiders need. It would also threaten the viability, both economic and political, of generous welfare state institutions. And it would shake the fragile institutional framework that supports the imperfect yet exceptional combination of freedom and peace, of prosperity and solidarity which European citizens currently enjoy. Such a diagnosis may need qualification on several counts. But when endeavouring to determine what immigration policy the European Union should adopt, we should not deny or hide or minimize the dilemma it implies. Nor should we surrender to the demands it is likely to inspire to self-interested democratic majorities. We need a sensible conception of what a just world would be like and a pragmatic, no-nonsense, opportunistic approach to the measures that could take us closer to it in the messy world we live in. These measures are bound to be many. But there are at least two that deserve more attention than they usually receive: the efficient use of the diasporas present in our cosmopolitan cities and transnational interpersonal transfer schemes.
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Notes
Earlier versions of this article were presented under the title ‘The Left’s most cruel dilemma’ at the Campus of European Alternatives (Centro di Studi CISL, Florence, 22 July 2018), at the 36th annual meeting of the September Group (Columbia University, New York, 9 September 2018), at the KULeuven research seminar in political philosophy (Leuven, 5 October 2018), at a Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover (UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, 30 October 2018), and at the Conference ‘Justice and beliefs about justice in Europe’ (Central European University, Budapest, 18 January 2019). Many thanks to all those who gave me feedback on those occasions, as well as to Pablo Gilabert, Pierre-Etienne Vandamme, Yannick Vanderborght, Roberto Veneziani, Miklós Zala, three anonymous referees and especially Heliodoro Temprano for their written comments.
I present and defend these two convictions in Van Parijs (2007, 2019) and Van Parijs (1995), respectively. The strong presumption in favour of open borders that is supported by the conjunction of these two convictions has been argued for in far richer detail by many, from Joseph Carens (1992, 2013) to Ayelet Shachar (2009), Darrel Moellendorf (2009) or Kieran Oberman (2016). It has also been forcefully challenged by many, most comprehensively perhaps by David Miller (2016) and Sarah Song (2019). The aim of this paper and of the lectures out of which it grew is neither to provide a critical overview of the philosophical arguments on both sides of the issue, nor to scrutinize meticulously one of them, and even less to develop a new one. It is to explain succinctly, against the background of a broad-brush picture of the huge challenges it faces in our messy world, how this presumption can keep guiding our actions, our policies and our institutional reforms.
In the following pages, I shall challenge this simple ethical attitude by exploring diverse facets of an ethical dilemma we face in the world as it currently is. In order to present these facets, I shall have to appeal to a stylized picture of countless aspects of this world. About many of these aspects, there is a massive empirical literature, often with disputed issues. It is by no means my purpose to provide a survey of this literature, let alone to take a substantiated stance on controversial empirical issues. All I need is to be able to draw on sufficiently authoritative multidisciplinary analyses of the world as it is in order to formulate the various facets of my ‘cruel dilemma’ in sufficiently concrete and plausible terms. If some of my background factual assumptions can be shown to be excessive, this would be good news: the dilemma would be less cruel than I make it to be. But whether or not my assumptions are correct, most of them should not be understood as describing inalterable parameters, but as pointing to possible targets of meaningful human action.
Interview with Anne Sinclair, TF1, 3 December 1989: ‘We cannot host all the misery in the world. France must remain what it is, a land of political asylum […] but no more. […] You should know that in 1988 we pushed back 66,000 people at our borders. 66,000 people pushed back at the borders! In addition, there were about ten thousand expulsions from the national territory. And I expect the figures for 1989 to be somewhat stronger.’ On 13 December 1989, before the French Parliament, Rocard added: ‘Since, as I said and as I repeat—even if like you I regret it—our country cannot welcome and relieve all the world's misery, we must adopt the measures this implies’. These measures included a tightening of border control and a vigorous fight against the misuse of the asylum procedure. And again, the following month (7 January 1990), at a meeting of socialists of North-African origin, he insisted: ‘I thought long and hard before using this formula. It seemed to me that my duty was to uphold it fully. Today I say it clearly: France is no longer and cannot be a land of new immigration. I have already said it and I reassert it: however generous we may be, we cannot welcome all the misery in the world’. All quotes from Deborde (2015), which also includes videos with other prominent French politicians, all the way to Emmanuel Macron, repeating Rocard’s sentence.
See Nagle (2018) for a forceful plea, in the US context, against open borders as an instrument that serves the interests of capitalists and highly paid professionals.
See, for example, Docquier et al. (2013).
See City of Ypres (1831, pp. 129 and 136) for the quotes from the magistrates’ plea, and Spicker (2010, pp. 141–142) for the theologians’ response. In the first systematic defence of public assistance published in Antwerp a few years earlier, the humanist Juan Luis Vives (1526, p. 73), close friend of Erasmus and More, proposed another qualification. He agreed: ‘Where beggars are able-bodied foreigners, they should be sent back to their cities and villages […] with provisions for the journey’. But when they come from ‘villages and small areas afflicted and ravaged by war’, they should be ‘treated as fellow citizens’: the Geneva convention avant la lettre.
Thus, Atkinson (2015, pp. 143–144) notes that internal mobility within the European Union threatens the viability of subsidized employment and therefore recommends restricting the latter to the long-term unemployed who are registered in the United Kingdom and have paid social security contributions.
City of Ypres (1831, pp. 127–128).
See the essays in Van Parijs (2004) and Banting and Kymlicka (2017). Many more studies have been published since these volumes appeared, with diverse methodologies and with results that show—as did several contributions in these volumes—great variation from one national context to another. One intriguing study suggested, for example, that the relationship between migration and the welfare state is non-linear, with diversity (of whatever source), above some threshold, increasing rather than reducing support for redistribution (Gründler and Köllner 2018). Needless to say, there are so many factors and mechanisms at work that there is no hope for a simple general ‘law’ to emerge, only an intelligible overall tendency.
Quoted by Brown (1992, p. 139). Note that Marx’s remedy was not to kick out the Irish workers, but to allow colonized Ireland to develop so that its workers would no longer need to emigrate.
See Barry (1992, pp. 283–284) for a discussion of this asymmetry, also reflected in international law. Article 13.2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulates that ‘everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’. But there is no matching universal right to enter the country of one’s choice. The closest (yet still very remote) approximation to it is the obligation imposed on countries that ratified the Geneva Convention to open their doors to asylum seekers.
CEDEFOP (2015, p. 125).
One might hope to be able to relativize this challenge by referring to the similar challenge stemming from massive Hispanic immigration into some parts of the United States. An initially slower pace of language learning has not prevented integration, from generation to generation (see e.g. Citrin et al. 2007). However, little comfort should be derived from this analogy. Not only are linguistic distance and religious distance far smaller in the North American case. Above all, the language Hispanic immigrants are expected to learn is the most global of all, one they already have some familiarity with before migrating, one they will soon have plenty of opportunity to be (over)exposed to through a wide range of media and one they have a strong material incentive to learn because of the huge labour market it will give them access to. One might dream of compensating all these differences through an exceedingly effective educational system. Alas, for reasons to be mentioned below, the resources available for this purpose are bound to be far inferior to those routinely deployed in the relevant parts of the United States.
See Léotard and Lepeltier-Kutasi (2018, p. 12).
As mentioned by Ivan Krastev (2017, p. 295) and pointed out to me by Miklós Zala, the failure at integrating the Roma minority may also play an important role. The point of my example is not to provide a full explanation of the xenophobic dimension of Hungary’s public opinion and government policies, but only to invite people who share my cosmopolitan inclination to recognize the nature and size of this aspect of the challenge posed by migration.
See Descamps (2018, p. 1) and https://www.populationpyramid.net/hnp/population-growth/1965/
IMF estimates for 2017. http://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPDPC@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WEOWORLD. See also the figures quoted by Branko Milanovic (2018).
This perverse effect of open borders on demographic restraint was stressed by Brian Barry (1992, p. 282).
Similarly, though for a different reason, the real freedom not to work can be granted to all only if sufficiently few make use of this freedom at any particular time.
When visiting a school in Siddipet (near Hyderabad, India) in August 2019, I was given a copy of a handbook of Social Studies. Class IX (Government of Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad, 2014), in which a chapter entitled ‘Democracy: an evolving idea’ contrasted a ‘majoritarian’ and an ‘inclusive’ conception of democracy and explained, with Sri Lanka and Belgium as illustrations, that in ethnically divided societies the former was likely to lead to civil war and the latter to pacification.
Not everything in this very schematic picture is entirely consensual, of course. It only needs to be sufficiently so for my purpose. I am here relying mostly on Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion (2007) and later writings.
On these various possible effects, see Temprano (2019, pp. 5–6) and the literature surveyed there.
Audience with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Senator Eduardo Suplicy, Brasilia, Palacio do Planalto, 22 October 1996.
See Van Parijs and Vanderborght (2017, chapter 8) for a discussion of this strategy and of the Eurodividend proposal as a regional anticipation.
The plausibility of such an effect is backed by the well-established inversed-U-shaped relationship between a country’s level of prosperity and the rate of emigration: as average income increases, emigration first swells and then shrinks (see e.g. Lanati and Thiele 2017). It seems to follow that in countries most in need of the transfers, these will increase emigration rather than decrease it. The inversed U curve needs to be interpreted with caution, however. The explanation for the non-linear relationship between average income and propensity to emigrate is at least partly demographic: as countries develop, they move from high natality and mortality to high natality and low mortality and next to low natality and mortality. It is the overcrowding of the middle group of countries that then explains their higher emigration rate, jointly with the ‘youth bulge’ that accompanies rapid population growth, young people being both keener and more able to migrate (see Temprano 2019, pp. 4–5). Even if the inversed U curve could be entirely explained in this way, the channelling of more cash to the population may still have the immediate effect, in some places, of boosting emigration.
As pointed out by Brian Barry (1992, p. 287 n1).
Because climate change is mostly the outcome of what has been going on in richer countries, there would seem to be an even stronger moral case for the latter to welcome its victims as ‘refugees’ than is the case with the victims of endogenous civil war. In practice, however, hardship that can be mainly ascribed to climate change is often hard to distinguish from hardship caused mainly by other economic or political causes. Moreover, we should not be misled into thinking of global justice primarily in terms of reparatory justice (reparation for damaging the climate, for slavery, for colonization). Most fundamentally, global justice (as sketched in the opening section) is a matter of unequal distribution of real freedom, irrespective of whether today’s inequalities result from cultural differences, imperialism, earthquakes or man-made global warming.
In an interesting paper, Bauböck and Ruhs (2021) argue in favour of the first of these three formulas as the best way of achieving a ‘triple win’ (for the countries of origin and of destination and for the migrants themselves) and propose a procedure for negotiating the economic, social and political rights that migrants would enjoy. Like them, I dislike the second formula, which creates a permanent Emirates-type caste society. But because of the importance I attach to the roles to be played by diasporas, my own preference is for the third formula: only with the prospect of a long-term stay can one expect an investment in the acquisition of the local language and other aspects of integration in the host country. But I do not want dismiss entirely the first one, which could usefully be applied, for example, to seasonal agricultural work.
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Van Parijs, P. Justice and Migration. Europe’s Most Cruel Dilemma. Res Publica 28, 593–611 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-022-09548-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-022-09548-1