PART II: Ethics, Environment, and Migration: Immigration and the Ethics of Choice

Abstract

This paper begins by developing a language for ethical discourse on immigration and then examining the extent to which choices may be made at the micro-level and at the macro-level. States and individuals are examined as actors who are variously described as making choices or being choiceless. The concepts of cultural distance, reciprocity, the role of the individual and of the state and their interrelationships are evaluated in the perspective of choice. Whether an ethics of immigration can be successfully developed hinges on the degree of choice that individuals and states have or perceive themselves to have. How sad and fraught with trouble is the state of those who yearly emigrate in bodies to America for the means of living…. It is, indeed, piteous that so many unhappy sons of Italy, driven by want to seek another land, should encounter ills greater than those from which they would fly…. When they reach the lands for which they are destined, ignorant as they are of the language and the place, and hired out for daily labor, they fall into the hands of the dishonest, and even into the snares of those powerful men to whom they enslave themselves. (Pope Leo XIII, 1888) You shall not oppress an alien. You well know how it feels to be an alien since you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt. (Ex 23:9)