Immigration Ethics: Sacred and Secular

Abstract

The U.S. and other nation-states regularly impose horrific harm on immigrants, would-be immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers: ‘migrants’, for short. Migrants are regularly separated from their spouses and children, detained for long periods under brutal and dehumanizing conditions, forced to live in squalid camps, threatened with state-sanctioned violence, deported to foreign lands in which they have little social connection or means of support, forcibly prevented from fleeing violence and poverty, and more. The vast majority of migrants subject to such treatment are non-criminal people looking for honest work, hoping to make a better life for themselves and their children. In this paper, we will argue that the plausibility of the usual justifications for such harms to migrants depends importantly on the metaphysical framework from which one approaches the ethics of immigration. We will argue that, from within a secular framework, in which God plays no role in matters moral, there is at least a surface-level plausibility to some of the standard justifications for harms to migrants in service of border control, but that given a theistic framework of the sort at the heart of Judaism and Christianity, the usual justifications for such harms fall flat: none are even remotely plausible. The upshot of this, we shall urge, is that denizens of those religious traditions should support a policy of nearly open borders.