At some stage no social scientist interested in immigration can avoid dipping their toes into liberal political theory. They will find Joseph Carens’ enriching and thought-provoking new book invaluable. The Ethics of Immigration uses the treatment of non-citizens to hold a mirror up to liberal states and invites their citizens to look long and hard at themselves. The physical coercion of detention and deportation, the tying of workers to employers, the enforced destitution of asylum seekers, and the panoply of violence at the borders of liberal democracies appear on the surface to be extremely difficult to reconcile with the liberal values of equality and freedom, or with respect for human rights. The book explores the tensions that immigration policies pose and expose for liberal states, principally with respect to the United States, but also drawing in European examples. It is structured in two parts. The first part assumes that states have a right to control immigration and asks “Who Belongs?” It explores the rights of those non-citizens who are currently residing in liberal democracies and finds that they should be far more extensive than is the case in practice. The section develops a theory of social membership that emphasises the importance of the relationship between time and belonging. The second part asks “Who Should Get In?” It deals with the issues raised when non-citizens seeking “ordinary admission” and refugees request entry to a liberal state. This discussion leads to an argument for open borders on the basis of global equality and human freedom. The last substantive chapter considers the claims of community and what challenges these raise for Carens’ open borders argument, and the book concludes with a reflection on methodology.

I should state from the outset that I am not writing this as a political theorist. I do though fall into one of the groups the book is aimed at, being a person who studies immigration but is not “deeply familiar with the existing philosophical literature on the topic” (p. 4). In that sense this piece is less a review than an engagement with some of Carens’ arguments by a person with a more empirical approach and background. From this position his methodology, “political theory from the ground up” (p. 9), is an attractive one. He examines real life problems and seeks to identify “an overlapping consensus among different political theorists and among ordinary people from different democratic societies about the moral principles that I appeal to in my arguments” (p. 9). I cannot comment on the consensus among political theorists, but for a social scientist, the idea of “ordinary people” cannot pass unremarked. In the UK the alleged concerns of “ordinary people” loom large in immigration debates. These are characterised by an ordinary person who is presented as part of a nation. They are not any ordinary person, but a British (or often English, Scots, Irish, Welsh) ordinary person. There is often a thinly veiled racialization here, meaning that the ordinary person is white. They feel ignored by a state (and a European Union) comprised of cosmopolitan embracing elites. This is all discursive of course, but in this context the distinction between state and nation, even if unremarked, has considerable purchase, and consequently immigration has a strong symbolic power. Crucial to their ordinariness is that ordinary people—unlike business elites, policy makers, and ivory towered academics—do not like immigration. The strength of this feeling has been such that it seems the general public is prepared to forfeit what Carens would characterise as “democratic principles” precisely in order to contain immigration. The so-called “Foreign National Prisoner” crisis of 2006 for instance, was sparked by concerns that too many criminals were not being deported after serving their sentences because they were protected by the pesky UK Human Rights Act as refugees or family members. This marked the beginning of a relentless campaign for the repeal of this law that continues to flourish. It is surprising what democratic principles it is possible to forego in the name of stopping immigration. This does not undermine Carens’ methodology, but rather suggests that in the UK at least, it will convince hovering liberals and social scientists that are highly suspicious to the conventionally depicted “ordinary person.”

One reason the populist position has such resonance is that migrants and citizens are typically presented as competitors for the privileges of membership arguably intrinsic to the logic of borders. Carens does not really dispute this, and perhaps thereby denies himself some useful tools not just for his ideal, but also for his pragmatic arguments. Even in a closed border world, not all citizens are fully included, and not all migrants (even the undocumented) are totally excluded. Is it not conceding important ground to assume the interests of migrants and would-be migrants necessarily conflict with, or are independent of, the interests of citizens? For example, in a highly punitive United States, the deportation of longstanding resident non-citizens is possible in a context where twenty four states have “three-strikes laws,” thirty two have the death penalty (with the majority of foreign nationals on death row having been deprived of consular rights), and incarceration can mean the loss of rights to Medicaid, to food aid, and to vote for life (Alexander Reference Alexander2010). The deportation of Victor Castillo (p. 101) may not be consistent with democratic principles, but it is totally consistent within this socio-political context. This is not to applaud deportation of “criminals” for consistency, but rather to suggest the importance of understanding its acceptance within a broader suite of attitudes and policies that are not directly concerned with immigration, but shape the environment in which certain policies seem reasonable.

Carens acknowledges that the status of citizen, far from being the gold standard, in practice hides multiple exclusions. However, it is not the status of citizenship in the abstract that offers protections and rights, but rather certain types of citizenship. For some nationalities the rights that citizenship offers are minimal and can be reduced in practice to the requirement of your state to admit you if you are deported. It is not for nothing that some people flush away their passports before attempting to enter a state and claim asylum. For some their citizenship can be a liability, really only meaning that they can be moved across the world against their will at the convenience of states, both liberal and non-liberal alike. Arguing for a limited right to citizenship by descent on the basis of connection to a community, Carens explained that he wanted his children to have dual Canadian/U.S. nationality as “the children would have had a right to move to the United States to live with relatives there if both of us had died while they were young” (p. 28). Had Carens been a Somali passport holder he might well have avoided dual nationality fearing that his children would be removed to Somalia if their parents died. His point is that this is about choice, but it suggests that some arguments about “community” may be more closely related to citizenship’s instrumental value than it appears at first sight.

This, of course, is related to global inequality and inequality between states. I could not agree more about the important role of borders in sustaining global inequality. But although Carens is concerned with inequality, he does not engage at all with the fact that contemporary liberal states, while they vary in their institutions and their regulatory regimes, are capitalist states. This shapes a massive transfer of funds from the global South to what The Economist calls “the rich world.” Capitalist relations mean that the wealth and desirability of richer states are inextricably connected to the poverty of the poorer. They also have important effects on immigration policies: “Different varieties of capitalism found across liberal states are highly consequential for the kinds of immigration regimes they adopt” (Hampshire Reference Hampshire2013, 11). This surely has some moral implications, however complex and uneven the relations between states, capital, and individuals. Furthermore, it invites questions about the relation between property and citizenship, exposed in the growing practice of selling formal citizenship status or fast tracks to citizenship.

One important contribution of this volume is that it puts the temporal at the heart of social membership. Too often migration is seen as being about space, and time is overlooked. In practice, submitting to state control of time is a key aspect of being subject to immigration controls: You can only work x numbers of hours a week, you must be married for Z period before you can claim independent residence, etc. It is through restrictions on length of stay that immigration controls can do much of the “dirty work” of restricting access to citizenship. Time foregrounds questions about generation and political community, which Carens examines as part of an exploration of what he calls the state responsibility thesis. He critiques David Miller’s argument that significant inequalities between states can be a legitimate outcome of collective self-determination, on the grounds that it “misses the on-going importance of the connection between equal starting points and responsibility” (p. 263). Equal starting points are crucial but, Carens contends, later generations do not have an equal starting point. This is a really important argument. However, while time matters, so too does history. Carens refuses to engage with the empirical and historical questions about the origins of state inequalities. Surely the histories of imperialism and conquest, like capitalist relations, are of considerable moral consequence for contemporary immigration and asylum regimes? The colonial classification of natives by empires-in-crisis cloaked the political fragmenting of colonized populations with the mantle of tradition (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2012). It is this “tradition” that is called upon in many arguments about the preservation of national communities in liberal states, and in that sense they are infused with a fantastic (literally) sense of history. Refusing historical engagement allows this highly partial perspective to go unchallenged. The nation state is not a natural form, and it was often violently imposed with significant and lasting consequences for both “minority” and “majority” populations including longstanding conflict within and between states.

I am a social scientist and also writing from a “no borders” rather than an “open borders” position. As such, I am among a minority of Carens’ readers who want to push him further. That said, I suspect The Ethics of Immigration is already making an impact. Its structure is mirrored in the Charter of Lampedusa, launched in February 2014. This is a call for no borders by a number of European associations. It is divided in two: “This division aims to highlight the tension between our desires and convictions on the one hand, and the reality of the world we live in on the other” (Preamble Charter of Lampedusa). The beauty of Carens’ book is that he is writing to convince the unconvinced rather than preach to the converted, but he is crafting tools for political engagement along the way.