Sunday, August 06, 2017

Anomaly v Huemer on Immigration

People often assume that to allow immigration is an act of charity: a country generously sharing its land and institutions with outsiders who have no real claim to be there.  Michael Huemer's work forcefully upends this assumption, showing that immigration restrictions are in fact a form of harmful coercion (like blocking a starving man from accessing a public market where he could trade for food). This reconceptualisation shifts the argumentative "burden", insofar as we generally accept that it is much more difficult to justify coercively harming someone (a seeming rights-violation) than to merely refrain from assisting them.