The Duty to Disobey Immigration Law

Moral Philosophy and Politics 3 (2) (2016)
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Abstract

Many political theorists argue that immigration restrictions are unjust and defend broadly open borders. In this paper, I examine the implications of this view for individual conduct. In particular, I argue that the citizens of states that enforce unjust immigration restrictions have duties to disobey certain immigration laws. States conscript their citizens to help enforce immigration law by imposing legal duties on these citizens to monitor, report, and refrain from interacting with unauthorized migrants. If an ideal of open borders is true, these laws are unjust. Furthermore, if citizens comply with their legal duties, they contribute to violating the rights of migrants. We are obligated to refrain from contributing to rights-violations. So, citizens are obligated to disobey immigration laws. I defend the moral requirement to disobey immigration laws against the objection that disobedience to the law is excessively risky and the objection that citizens have political obligations to obey the law.

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Javier Hidalgo
University of Richmond

Citations of this work

The ethics of resisting immigration law.Javier Hidalgo - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (12):e12639.
Justifying Resistance to Immigration Law: The Case of Mere Noncompliance.Caleb Yong - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 2 (31):459-481.
The open borders debate, migration as settlement, and the right to travel.Ugur Altundal - forthcoming - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
Enforcing immigration law.Matthew Lister - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (3):e12653.
Clarifying our duties to resist.Chong-Ming Lim - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9):3527-3546.

View all 9 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

Killing in war.Jeff McMahan - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The Ethics of Immigration.Joseph H. Carens - 2013 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Immigration as a human right.Kieran Oberman - 2016 - In Sarah Fine & Lea Ypi (eds.), Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership. Oxford University Press UK. pp. 32-56.
Moral Principles and Political Obligations.A. John Simmons - 1980 - Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 87 (4):568-568.

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