Publication details

"Global Equality of Opportunity and Self-determination in the Context of Immigration." Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy

Article

Author(s): Kollár, Eszter
Year of publication: 2016

Abstract: David Miller’s political philosophy of immigration employs two complementary argumentative strategies to challenge open border theories. The first strategy is to defeat the principled case for open borders, such as the global equality of opportunity argument for more lax immigration control. The second strategy is to establish the democratic community’s prima facie right to determine the shape of its future, including membership and the right to exclude. First, I argue that Miller’s conception of global equality of opportunity is overly narrow and that his objections to the principle, to the metric and to what counts as feasible political action misfire against other, more plausible, accounts. Second, I argue that his democratic interpretation of collective self-determination does not solve the pressing question concerning the morally justified scope and content of self-determination and the moral limits of the right to exclude. I conclude by questioning Miller’s general strategy: whether theories of immigration should be engaged in an exercise of shifting the burden of proof between open and closed borders. By contrast, I argue that a more desirable task for the political philosophy of immigration is to find ways in which the joint requirement of global equality of opportunity and collective self-determination can be coherently upheld.

Keywords: Right to Self-Determination, Global Equality of opportunity, Political Identity, and Right to Exclude

Research area: Research Area 1: The Normativity of Normative Orders: Origins, Vanishing Points, Performativitiy
Research project: Sustainable Development, Global Governance, and Justice
Subject(s): political science, philosophy

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698230.2016.1231753?journalCode=fcri20