Book Review: Immigration Justice, by Peter W. Higgins

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591715580070
• Date: 01 June 2015
• Author: Michael Blake
• Published date: 01 June 2015
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2015, Vol. 43(3) 412 –423

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Immigration Justice, by Peter W. Higgins. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

2013.

Reviewed by: Michael Blake, Department of Philosophy, University of Washington,

Seattle, WA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591715580070

Recent debates in the political philosophy of immigration have tended to

focus on whether or not there is a human right to migration. The debate has

been dominated by two camps: one, often identified as cosmopolitan, defend-

ing the proposition that borders must be open to all who desire entry; and the

other, often identified as nationalist, defending some version of the contrary.

Peter Higgins’s Immigration Justice offers a way to transform this dialectic,

by shifting our attention towards a more contextual analysis of how distinct

forms of migration policy might affect the interests of different social groups.

On his analysis, which is both plausible and attractive, we are bound by lib-

eral precepts neither to a policy of open borders nor to a politics that permits

the exclusion of unwelcome foreigners simply because they are unwelcome;

we are, instead, commanded to discover and promote those forms of policy

likely to undermine global relationships that perpetuate social and political

marginalization.

Higgins’s analysis will, therefore, undermine both contemporary defenses

and critiques of the right to migration. Against nationalists (for whom the

nation ought to be preserved by means of migration controls) and defenders

of the moral right of states (for whom the state has the moral right to deter-

mine its own principles of migration), Higgins offers a powerful critique:

such theorists rely upon a grossly oversimplified account of what a state

really is, subsuming relevant differences within an empirically false account

of social cohesion. Against the cosmopolitan, similarly, Higgins offers a

powerful claim: those who demand a policy of open borders ignore the ways

in which such a program might harm the most marginal global citizens—

including, notably, those too impoverished or disadvantaged to migrate.

Higgins advocates, instead, for a more nuanced account of migration rights,

580070PTXXXX10.1177/0090591715580070Political TheoryBook Reviews

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