Migration, Borders, and the Ethics of Exclusion

Joseph Carens's 1987 article "Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders," published in The Review of Politics, remains the founding text of the philosophical open-borders position, arguing from three distinct traditions — Nozickian libertarianism, Rawlsian egalitarian liberalism applied globally through an international "original position," and utilitarianism — that each, taken to its logical conclusion, condemns the restriction of freedom of international movement across state borders on grounds analogous to those that had earlier condemned feudal restrictions on freedom of movement within a single country. Carens famously described citizenship in an affluent liberal democracy as a modern analogue to feudal privilege — "birthright citizenship in Western liberal democracies is the modern equivalent of feudal class privilege — an inherited status that greatly enhances one's life chances" — arguing that a person's life prospects are overwhelmingly determined by the arbitrary accident of birthplace, a form of luck no different in its moral arbitrariness from the accidents of birth (class, caste, race) that liberal theory has long condemned as unjust grounds for differential treatment when they operate within a single society.