Indeed, in a book of this character, agreeing with all of it would be impossible. Both Wellman and Cole favor fairly blunt moral solutions: Wellman argues for a nearly absolute deontic right to close the borders, and Cole for the nearly absolute impermissibility of closed borders. Despite Cole's exhortation to avoid seeking a "compromise" solution , I believe some more complex set of permissions and rights is likely what is demanded. In what follows, I will first lay out Wellman's argument, then Cole's, and then discuss my worries about their views.
Wellman's argument begins with three simple premises: These three are developed into an argument for a deontic right to close the borders against even the most needy would-be immigrant: Wellman's argument begins, then, with the idea of self-determination. Legitimate states are, he asserts, entitled to their own authority over self-regarding affairs; a country that has a less-than-optimal system of criminal law is not, in virtue of that, subject to being taken over or otherwise controlled by some outside agency If the criminal law becomes bad enough, of course, the human rights of the individuals in question might be violated -- in which case, the state is no longer legitimate.
The country would be wronged if we were to annex it, even in the admittedly rare circumstance that we were doing so in the name of its inhabitants, could actually run the criminal law better than the current institutional agents were doing, and were actually committed to democratic governance within the new country created by our annexation.
This wrong, though, seems to involve the right of a country to be free from unwanted alteration in the membership of that country. We wrong the country by denying it self-determination, and our insistence on annexing it denies it self-determination by denying it the right to control who shall be a part of that country.
If this is right, though, the right of political self-determination includes the right to exclude unwanted changes in the membership of polity.
This, however, entails a right to keep out unwanted would-be immigrants: Wellman's argument thereby defends the right of a country to exclude non-members -- even if the needs of these non-members are exceptionally great. While wealthy countries have obligations to help the members of illegitimate regimes, and the inhabitants of poorer countries, these obligations do not rise to an obligation to admit these people to membership.
Instead, Wellman argues that the obligations of the wealthier countries of the world are disjunctive in form: The importance of self-determination entails the right of legitimate states to be free from unwanted members, even when those members would be benefitted enormously by membership in such a society. Wellman's contribution includes a response to several theorists defending more open borders, a brief discussion of exit rights and the obligations of countries admitting highly skilled immigrants from developing countries, and an analysis of the moral wrongness of guest worker programs.
Reward Yourself
Throughout, however, Wellman's contention is unchanged: Cole's contribution argues for the opposite conclusion. His negative argument seeks to establish that arguments in favor of the right to exclude Wellman's included are morally unpersuasive. Cole's positive conclusion seeks to establish that a moral right to international mobility is part of any defensible and coherent liberalism. Liberalism's refusal to endorse open borders, on Cole's account, is both a theoretical and a moral embarrassment to liberal theorists: There are three threads in Cole's argument, two of which can be dealt with more briefly.
The first is that arguments from analogy -- which tend to dominate within defenses of the legitimacy of closed borders -- are morally misleading. Wellman, for example, compares the right of exit to the right to be married; if I have the right to be married, it means only that I have the right to marry someone who also wants to marry me -- not that I have the right to marry whomever I happen to want Cole, in response, notes that analogies such as these tend to blithely assume that state membership is like marriage, or other voluntary statuses; it isn't, not least in that one can survive comfortably without any spouse, but one cannot exist in security without being protected by some state or other Arguments from analogy, says Cole, tend to ignore the fact that states are unique entities, whose unique features tend to be overlooked in such arguments.
On the Right of Exclusion: Law, Ethics and Immigration Policy
The second thread is the historical context within which these debates are formed. We often ignore, Cole asserts, that the borders that divide the wealthy and the poor were, in large part, created by the wealthy, who felt and feel entitled to roam the earth in pursuit of profit Against this backdrop, arguments against the right of the poor to cross borders seem not only unjust but unjustly ahistorical; we invoke these borders as if they were morally sacred, while ignoring the fact that they are the legacies left over from uncontroversially unjust patterns of exploitation and enslavement.
The third thread, which will require more attention, is the insistence that closed borders are morally impermissible, because these borders violate the egalitarianism that is at the heart of liberalism itself. There are, under this heading, several individual arguments Cole believes can demonstrate the incompatibility of closed borders and moral equality.
The first is that membership is, itself, a good we distribute; we distribute membership in states to persons, assigning some to wealthy democratic states and others to unrepresentative and unresponsive regimes with few protections for basic human rights. For Cole, the fact that we do this is itself an issue to be dealt with by our theories of justice; we cannot think that a "just" domestic political community is fully justified, if the good of membership in that community is distributed arbitrarily among the world's population, any more than we would praise a group of racists who marginalized those of other races, yet practiced fairness in their dealings with one another This argument entails that we have reason to condemn any distribution of membership that assigns greater life-chances to some people, giving them greater resources and protection -- and that then defends this distribution by giving states the unilateral right to control membership.
To insist that no arbitrary facts can determine the allocation of primary goods within a country -- but to then allow arbitrary facts to determine who shall be a member of that country -- is to run into self-contradiction. Cole similarly argues, in this thread, that the liberal insistence that states can close their borders to would-be immigrants -- but cannot close their borders to keep in their own members -- is incoherent.
If emigration is morally important enough to warrant the strong moral defense we give it, both in liberal theory and in international law, then so is immigration; the one is impossible without the other, since one cannot emigrate without there being some state in which one is entitled to be admitted If, in other words, the right of exit is to mean anything, it must include the right to enter someplace else; our refusal to see this, argues Cole, has made us hopelessly self-contradictory in our thinking about the right to exit.
In Defense of the Right to Exclude - Oxford Scholarship
Cole concludes his contribution by rejecting some more common consequentialist worries about the practicability of open borders, and by giving some initial thoughts about what a regime of open borders might look like. As I said above, I find myself attracted to the range between Wellman and Cole: Wellman's right to close the borders seems to overstate the strength of self-determination as a norm to be pressed against the neediest foreign citizens.
Cole's right to move across borders, in contrast, seems to rest upon arguments that liberalism has reason to resist. I believe, in sum, that some more complex set of rights is likely to be more defensible in the end. In this context, though, I will limit myself to some initial remarks on the arguments in this volume. Wellman argues that the right of a state to close its borders is deontic in character: Wellman does allow that the right is not absolute, but it is instructive that his example here is one of catastrophe: This right is, in other words, so strong that it can be overridden only by the sorts of hypotheticals that we might invoke to justify overriding the right to be free from torture.
Why, though, should we think that the freedom of association is sufficiently important to ground rights of this sort?
Account Options
Wellman's answer seems to be that those who are members of a group legitimately care about its future direction, and the admission of new members changes the nature of that group and the policies it is likely to make: But it seems hard to think that these considerations, however weighty, give rise to anything like the strong deontic rights discussed here. Imagine, for example, that the members of one demographic group begin to have children at a rate that alarms the members of a dominant majority.
Can a legislative majority, in the name of shaping its country's legislative future -- and preserving a particular form of life -- prevent the members of that community from having babies, through compulsory contraception? Can they simply cite the fact that they do not want these prospective members "entering" the community as a reason to impose this policy?
The answer, of course, is no, which Wellman would readily accept; it would be dramatically unjust for the government to coercively prevent the births. This, however, shows us that the right to control the membership of a country is not the deontic right imagined; it is, in contrast, a right that might sometimes be trumped.
Our democratic right to "exclude" the unwanted babies fails, immediately, because of the competing value of reproductive autonomy. My worry is, though, that once we admit that there can be such competing values, the right given by Wellman isn't anywhere near as strong as he believes it to be. Self-determination, on the view I hold, is justly limited by the considerations of liberal egalitarianism which include, but go beyond, reproductive autonomy.
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