Cosmopolitans’ Dilemma: (Open?) Borders and Migration

Public Reason, 2012

This study is devoted to the ways and means to justify a ‘more’ cosmopolitan realization of certain policy implications, in the case of immigration. The raison d’être of this study is the idea that the contemporary debate over open borders suffers from indeterminate discussions on whether liberal states are entitled to restrict immigration. On the other hand, most of the liberal cosmopolitan accounts neglect the detrimental consequences of their open borders argument – which take it as a means to compensate people in need –, such as brain drain and the effects of brain drain on the opportunity sets of members of sending countries. Therefore I offer a moral cosmopolitan account of immigration which takes the interests of would-be immigrants, the residents in receiving, along with the residents in sending countries in respect to their opportunity sets because of the way arbitrary border control represents the inequality of opportunity. I do not provide a well-formed immigration policy here, yet I believe the account provided here is more feasible in considering phenomena such as brain drain.

Philosophy and Public Issues, 2021

In this paper I propose a novel defence of political cosmopolitanism grounded in a familiar principle: universal moral equality. Critics of cosmopolitanism generally agree to universal moral equality, but disagree about what moral equality means politically. According to my argument, if we accept that all people are morally equal, then we ought to accept their equal moral standing. We should therefore prefer socio-political arrangements that reflect the equal moral standing of all people over those that reflect differentiated moral standing. A reasonable cosmopolitanism need not preclude partialist attachment to co-nationals, or undermine the significance of self-determination, so long as political arrangements do not produce differentiated moral standing. As the political application of an uncontroversial moral principle, I defend reasonable cosmopolitanism against nationalism and statism. Neither of these, I argue, are suitable foundations for global justice in migration because they each conceive of justice as a local concern for insiders.

The San Diego law review, 2008

Irish Journal of Sociology, 2012

Cosmopolitanism is one of the most resistant debates in the history of thought and civil society. However, little attention has been focused on the meaning that borders have in the definition of this normative construct over time. Namely, cosmopolitanism is always a matter of negotiation and overcoming of delineated borders in the crisis of given political entities. This article is structured as follows: (1) a reconstruction of some philosophical debates on cosmopolitanism in antiquity in order to show the changing meaning of this dialectic concept; (2) an exploration of the meaning of cosmopolitanism in relation to the birth of the nation-state and the rise of the human rights discourse, stressing the paradigm shift in sociological terms; (3) the concept of a cosmopolitan democracy in the crisis of the nation-state and in the new geo-political scenario; (4) a cross-border idea of human dignity in the form of ‘immanent universalism’ and counter-factual cosmopolitanism, intrinsic to the context of daily life; (5) challenges to the limits of cosmopolitanism, as shown by the condition of asylum seekers and refugees nowadays, where the tension between ‘borders’, i.e. universal principles, international norms and domestic legislations, becomes evident.

In this essay, I argue that even when they appear to help, restrictions on migration are usually only an impediment, not an aid, to cosmopolitan justice. Even though some egalitarian cosmopolitans are well intentioned in their support of migration restrictions, I argue that migration restrictions are (i) not truly cosmopolitan and (ii) will not have the kinds of consequences they expect. My argument in defense of this claim begins, in section 1, by outlining a defense of migration restrictions based on egalitarian cosmopolitan grounds. Then in sections two and three, I reply to the harms this position associates with open borders and provide some reasons as to why restrictions on migration are incompatible with cosmopolitan justice.

Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, 2012

The overall aim of the projected conference is to make a significant contribution to the development of migration theory. In order to achieve this, it will focus on three interlinked concepts: border(land), citizenship and cosmopolitanism. These are currently highly debated in transnational and transdisciplinary academic discourses-initiating a fruitful dialogue between them might lead to paradigmatic shifts in migration studies and beyond. In order to do so, the conference examines specific dimensions of the ongoing deep transformation of statehood, citizenship, sovereignty and identity formations in sending, transit, and receiving states (cf. Mezzadra).

Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge, 2018

This article analyzes the different challenges of citizenship and rights in front of the new forms of flow migrations, especially in the Mediterranean and the case of Venezuelan migrants. The new conception of globalization and Soveranity redefines the relations between the State and individuals, whether national or foreign, and must be the basis for rethinking the new issues of citizenship, of migrants and of dialogue between cultures, which must be addressed from the so-called "ethics" of hospitality "and based on the principles of interculturality, the good universality of human rights and substantive and cosmopolitan citizenship. In the expansion of the universal quantifier of human rights, at the time of the nomination of constitutional states of law, there are limitations on the universalist conception, whose archetypal point is based on the thesis of ontological monism. By virtue of this the correspondence between rights, guarantees and benefits were anchored...

2013

This first iteration of the BCS e-book explores the relationship of borders, sovereignty, and rights at individual, cultural, national and international levels, with a special focus on contemporary Europe. Several essays call into question the assumption of the fixed quality of national borders, through the study of migration across Mediterranean states or the complex history of redrawing national borders, particularly around Italy. Other essays explore the ethics of inter-cultural dialogue, through participant observation or personal interviews, among communities of young male footballers in Belfast or among women grappling with the meaning of feminism in Milan. Yet others theorize the reconstruction of sovereignty, at individual and national levels, after the rise of the United Nations, the European Union, and their many international legal covenants and instruments which seek to protect human rights both regionally and worldwide. We believe the inaugural BCS e-book offers a rich international sampling of contemporary scholarly thinking on global justice issues. Our primary objective in editing the volume has been to encourage the next generation of political theorists-no matter what formal discipline they happen to occupy-to be daring and original in their work, and to risk the critical engagement of their ideas via the global electronic public sphere. For as the paradigmatic bordercrosser John Stuart Mill reminds us in On Liberty, it is only through such public trespass, intellectual travel, and creative redrawing of relationships that we can begin to move toward the truth which all thinkers seek in the first place: "only through diversity of opinion is there, in the existing state of human intellect, a chance of fair play to all sides of the truth." (Mill, 1863: 93

2010

What kind of role, if any, can immigration policies play in moving us towards global jus-tice? On one view, the removal (or reduction) of restrictions on immigration might seem to constitute great progress in realizing the desired goal. After all, people want to emigrate ...

2012

Can Kantian cosmopolitanism contribute to normative approaches to immigration? Kant developed the universal right to hospitality in the context of late eighteenth-century colonialism. He claimed that non-European countries had a sovereign right over their territory and the conditions of foreigners' visits. This sovereign prerogative limited visitors' right to hospitality. The interconnected and complementary system of right he devised is influential today, but this article argues that maintaining the complementarity of the three realms involves reconsidering its application to contemporary immigration. It situates Kant's Perpetual Peace within the context of debates about conquest and colonialism and argues that Kant's strict conception of sovereignty is justified by his concern in maintaining a realm of sovereignty that is complementary with cosmopolitanism and his prioritization of mutual agreements in each of the realms, particularly in a context of international power asymmetry. In Kant's time, European powers appropriated cosmopolitan discourses to defend their right to visit other countries and it was necessary to strengthen non-Europeans' sovereign claims. The strength and hostility of the visitors made limited hospitality and strong sovereignty act in tandem to keep away conquerors, expanding cosmopolitanism. Today, individuals from poor countries migrate to wealthier ones where they are subject to a sovereign authority that excludes them. Sovereignty and cosmopolitanism no longer work complementarily, but rather strengthen powerful state actors vis-à-vis non-citizens subject to unilateral rule. Maintaining the pre-eminence of the right to freedom, the article suggests that only through the creation of ‘cosmopolitan spaces’ of politics can we reproduce today the complementarity that Kant envisioned.