José Jorge Mendoza

This book is an attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the relationship between philosophy and immigration policy. It does this by framing the current immigration debate as part of a much larger conflict over competing moral and political principles, as opposed to thinking of it merely as a problem of applied ethics. By framing the issue of immigration in this way it becomes clear why the current immigration policies of various states are stuck in a security dilemma, which is where a regime attempts to avoid falling into a state of nature (e.g., political instability) but in doing so engenders the sorts of conditions that give rise to states of exception (e.g., totalitarianism). In this regard, this book suggests that public policymakers would benefit from the work of moral and political philosophers. At the same time, moral and political philosophers have only been able to resolve the security dilemma in their theoretical work by giving priority to the liberty concern. This shift in priorities has itself given rise to a second difficulty which I have dubbed the liberty dilemma. This dilemma consists in trying to reconcile commitments to democratic self-determination, individual liberty, and universal equality without in turn sacrificing too much of either one in order to realize the other two. This has been especially problematic for moral and political philosophers who work on the ethics of immigration. This book offers a creative solution to these two dilemmas by suggesting that questions concerning immigration justice—both at the policy and theoretical level—ought to begin by examining what and how immigration policies can be enforced. In doing so, this book shows how commitments to democratic self-determination, individual liberty, and universal equality can be maintained while at the same time also addressing the concern for security. The trade off, however, is that states must allow for a certain amount of immigrant rights that often will take precedence over their ability or desire to exclude and remove non-citizens.

This essay argues that we should find Crimmigration, which is the collapsing of immigration law with criminal law, morally problematic for three reasons. First, it denies those who are facing criminal penalties important constitutional protections. Second, it doubly punishes those who have already served their criminal sentence with an added punishment that should be considered cruel and unusual (i.e., indefinite imprisonment or exile). Third, when the tactics aimed at protecting and serving local communities get usurped by the federal government for immigration enforcement purposes, they often undermine these original aims or get used in ways that conflict with the U.S. Constitution. These concerns should prompt us therefore either to reject the government’s plenary power over immigration or require the federal government to be more consistent about maintaining the separation between criminal law and immigration law.

Given the oncoming demographic changes—which are primarily driven by the growth in the Latinx community—the United States is predicted to become a minority-majority country by around 2050. This seems to suggest that electoral strategies that employ “dog-whistle” politics are destined for the dust-bin of history. Following the work of critical race theorists, such as Ian Haney-Lopez and Derrick Bell, I want to suggest that pronouncing the inevitable demise of dog-whistle politics is premature. This is because there are reasons to suspect that certain segments of the Latinx community—much like the Southern and Eastern Europeans in the early part of 20th Century—might be co-opted into American whiteness.



This essay explores the philosophical and policy implications of “Juan Crow" (i.e., the systematic undermining of the civil rights and equal protections of Latino/a citizens in the United States by internal immigration enforcement). This essay argues that resolving Juan Crow is especially difficult in today’s political climate given that the two dominant models of immigration reform—“enforcement-first” and “comprehensive immigration reform”—both agree that stricter immigration enforcement is necessary for any kind of immigration reform to move forward. This consensus on stricter immigration enforcement has relegated discussions of Juan Crow to debates over federalism (e.g., states’ rights) and centralism (e.g., executive action). In these debates, Juan Crow appears to expose a weakness in the federalist approach and thereby seems to speak in favor of a centralist approach to immigration justice. This essay argues that Juan Crow should instead be seen as a challenge to the consensus that has formed around stricter immigration enforcement and that it actually has little to do with the debate between federalism and centralism. This suggests that the most effective way to respond to Juan Crow is to have immigration enforcement comply with two standards, equality of burdens and universal protections, which would entail less draconian immigration policies and more open borders than we currently have or that are being proposed.

The social trust argument asserts that a political community cannot survive without social trust, and that social trust cannot be achieved or maintained without a political community having discretionary control over immigration. Various objections have already been raised against this argument, but because those objections all assume various liberal commitments they often leave the heart of the social trust argument untouched. This chapter argues that by looking at the socio-historical circumstances of Latino/as in the United States, an inherent weakness of the social trust argument gets exposed. Giving a political community discretionary control over immigration not only fails to deliver on the promise of social trust, but it actually seems to promote its opposite, social mistrust. This suggests that a far better way of promoting the goal of social trust, and at the same time abating social mistrust, is to actually circumvent a political community’s ability to control immigration by giving priority both to socio-historical circumstances and immigrant rights (at least in a minimalist sense) in determining immigration policy.

In debating the ethics of immigration, philosophers have focused much of their attention on determining whether a political community ought to have the discretionary right to control immigration. They have not, however, given the same amount of consideration to determining whether there are any ethical limits on how a political community enforces its immigration policy. This article, therefore, offers a different approach to immigration justice. It presents a case against legitimate states having discretionary control over immigration by showing both how ethical limits on enforcement circumscribe the options legitimate states have in determining their immigration policy and how all immigrants (including undocumented immigrants) are entitled to certain protections against a state’s enforcement apparatus.

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.