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European Consortium for Political Research, Montreal, 2015

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Migration Enforcement and Bureaucratic Domination

Reflections on the Normative Implications of Enforcement Practices
Canada ordered the deportation of long term resident and Somali refugee Ibrahim Hassan after
he completed his four month sentence for assault. Hassan suffered from bipolar illness and
diabetes and though he was eligible, he had never applied for Canadian citizenship. His ordeal
under the Canadian Border Services Agencys (CBSA) custody ended when he became agitated,
was restrained, and on June 11, 2015 died from a lack of medical care. While awaiting
deportation, he had spent four years in custody at the Central East Correctional Centre, a prison
in Lindsay, Ontario (Keung 2015). Hassans death follows the suicide of Lucia Vega Jimenez in
a holding cell awaiting deportation from Vancouver. Before her death she had accessed mental
health services in custody and had presented clear indicators of severe distress and emotional
trauma (Gros and Van Groll 2015: 15-7). In both cases, the CBSA remained secretive and
resistant to public oversight, including from the media. The press only learned the details of
Hassans death because his family chose to share them (Keung 2015a). In the case of Vega
Jimenez, the CBSA chose to ignore the coroners inquests recommendations for an independent
ombudsperson and a civilian organization for investigating deaths (Black 2015).1
Canadas treatment of immigrants in custody is not exceptional. Deaths in custody are
part of a larger move toward increased detention of immigrants around the world (Nethery and
Silverman 2015).2 Moreover, avoidable deaths are just the most deplorable symptoms of the
unaccountability, secrecy, and lack of transparency of state immigration agencies. Their victims
include refugees in limbo in desolate camps or jail cells, workers recruited under temporary visas
See Silverman and Molnar 2015 for an overview of Canadas immigrant detention system.
In 2008, the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times had to invoke the Freedom of Information
Act to investigate to receive a list of the number of immigrants who had died in custody (Bernstein 2008, 2010).
This investigation was prompted after Boubacar Bah died four months after going into a coma after a surgery for a
skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages (Harris 2010).
1
2

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who find their human rights are abused with impunity, and family members torn apart by
bureaucratic obfuscation and inertia for years or even decades.
Normative investigations of migration have for the most part remained silent about these
banal injustices, preferring to analyze immigration at the level of general principle with little
attention to the ethical questions raised by administrative and enforcement practices and
procedures. Normative theorists have followed a division of labor in which they provide
clarification of principles and rights to guide legislators with little attention to the fact that
immigration enforcement and regulation do not emerge directly from legislation, let alone
philosophical principle. Rather, they are filtered through administrative decisions carried out by
organizations that interpret policies, set priorities, and exercise bureaucratic discretion.
Individuals employed in immigration systems have the power to deny entry, reject visa
applications, and detain people with little accountability, opportunity for redress, or even an
explanation to people harmed by their decisions.
As a result of this division of labor, normative theorists have insufficiently analyzed the
ethical significance of the practices that govern migration. This is a mistake. Many practices and
policies of immigration administration and enforcement that seem reasonably just in principle
invite grave injustices in practice. Family-based immigration policies that appear fair in principle
leave spouses vulnerable to abusive partners or separate families for years or even decades.
Temporary worker programs may guarantee workers rights but suffer from systematic abuses
due to limited independent oversight, the failure to inform workers of their rights, or the lack of
mechanisms for effectively expressing grievances. The practice of immigration detention, even if
warranted in some circumstances, can be widely used when it is not merited. Immigration
officers may implement prima facie racially neutral laws in ways that systematically discriminate

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against some groups. Not only is the examination of these practices morally important in its own
right, but a close examination of the nature of immigration decision-making and enforcement has
implications for arguments justifying state discretion on immigration admissions.
My goal is to begin to show why immigration decision-making and enforcement are
important for the ethics of migration. First, I establish that questions of enforcement have been
largely neglected in the normative literature on migration. Second, I raise a central problem with
the ethics of immigration administration, the problem of bureaucratic domination, and argue that
this problem is particularly vexing for immigration. Third, I consider a variety of strategies that
could be used to address bureaucratic domination and argue that they fail. When we examine
how immigration policy is actually implemented and how, under reasonable empirical
assumptions, it must be implemented, basic principles of democracy and equality suggest the
implausibility that a just restrictive immigration policy could be constructed.
The Neglect of Enforcement
In his seminal article Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders, Joseph Carens observed
that Borders have guards and guards have guns. (Carens 1987) Despite the cogency of this
observation, the guards and guns have mostly remained invisible: few normative theorists
writing on immigration have dwelt at length on the techniques and apparatus that determine the
decision to use and type of force used against immigrants. Instead, the debate has largely been
confined to questions of admission: do communities have a right to restrict admissions that is
sufficiently strong to override the rights and interests of would-be immigrants?3 Relatively little

The normative literature on immigration controls is large. For overviews of many of the major debates, see Carens
2013, Wellman and Cole 2011, and Wilcox 2009.

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has been written on which administrative procedures are needed to justly refuse admissions or
what enforcement measures can be justly employed.4
David Millers recent examination of the ethics of border regimes is an exception that
proves the rule. Miller investigates the obligations of states toward people claiming asylum even
if there is no human right to open borders. Miller believes that border regimes do not in
themselves violate human rights: as long as people have a reasonable range of alternatives for
residence that allow them to live minimally decent lives, states have no obligation to open their
borders. On his account, to justify the existence of a human rights requires showing that they are
an essential part of a set of rights which together provide the right holders with the opportunity
to lead a minimally decent life. (Miller 2013: 5) These rights which include substantial and
procedural rights and encompass basic and social needs, access to cultural identity and other
conditions necessary for a decent life.
Miller defines border regimes as the set of rules and procedures that apply to those who
are trying to enter the states territory. Border regimes encompass the criteria for admission, the
procedures for determining decisions about admission, and the treatment of people within the
country who are awaiting a decision about their admissions status or have been denied the right
to reside (Miller 2013:1-2). Miller assesses mechanisms that states might employ to avoid
accepting refugees to settle in their territory. He finds it morally acceptable to send them to other
countries where their rights are respected, but unacceptable to prevent them from claiming
asylum altogether.
My approach will not be to query Millers account of human rights and its implications,
but rather to explore how he frames the question of enforcement and what he omits.5 Miller

4
5

A notable recent exception is Mendoza 2015.

For a defense of a human right to immigrate, see Oberman 2015.

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acknowledges that his article does not examine the human rights issues raised by the physical
means by which borders are defended, or the techniques used to deport those who are judged to
have no entitlement to stay (Miller 1013:22). Though Miller mentions carrier sanctions that
prevent many refugees from lodging a claim to asylum and remarks on the practice of detaining
refugees, he does not explore how these practices are implemented or their role in encouraging
smuggling and often fatal journeys. He suggests that asylum seekers can only be justifiably
detained if there is a significant risk that they might disappear and that detention centers must
meet conditions sufficient for having a decent human life (Miller 2013: 21).6 There is no
discussion, though, of the specific procedures for determining whether someone poses a flight
risk or how detention centers are actually operated.7
These omissions neglect two questions. First, there is the question of the legitimacy of the
institutions that enforce immigration. Immigration policies are implemented by agencies that
exercise enormous discretion on how to interpret policies and directives. This raises questions
about the accountability and transparency of these agencies. An analysis of the migration
industry shows that immigration administration and enforcement is prone to bureaucratic
domination because of its failure to give the people affected the power to contest policies, its
transnational nature, and its extensive reliance on public-private partnerships.
Second, there is the question of harms to migrants and to citizens affected by
enforcement policies. Millers investigation of the refusal to admit immigrants and refugees in
terms of human rights violation instead of agency practices neglects the many harms foreseeably
inflicted on immigrants and on citizens. These include the use of violence against immigrants
6

One question is the extent to which people who are deprived of their liberty and held in limbo in detention centers
with an uncertain future can enjoy a decent life.
7
See Stephanie Silverman 2014 for an important analysis of how some of Millers concrete proposals for assessing
refugee claims by using processing zones become dubious when confronted with the reality of refugee camps which
are often de facto detention centers.

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and against citizens in the name of immigration enforcement, the predictable actions of third
parties reacting to state policies and the abuses this encourages (e.g., thousands of people
drowning in the Mediterranean or perishing in the desert) (Brian and Laczko 2014), vigilantes
protecting the border and assaulting lodgings for refugees, smugglers entering niches created
by border enforcement, racially profiled citizens and documented immigrants harassed and
detained by officials, and the effects of border enforcement on immigrants within the country
who suffer discrimination because of restrictive policies backed by enforcement.
Though the violence, deprivation of liberty, and hardship inflicted on immigrants by
restrictive immigration and enforcement policies cast doubt on their permissibility, my focus will
be on the legitimacy of institutions and on bureaucratic domination.8 My strategy will be first to
provide an account of why immigration bureaucracies are morally problematic from a
democratic perspective. Once I have provided criticisms of immigration bureaucracies, I present
a more controversial suggestion: their injustice isnt simply a matter of real world institutions
failing to meet standards of justice, but inherent in the very enterprise of immigration
enforcement. The most plausible suggestions for reforming immigration enforcement will not
make them just.
Bureaucratic Domination and the Migration Industry
Complex societies rely on bureaucracies with specialists who interpret legislation, carry out
tasks, and exercise their judgment and discretion. Since these bureaucracies wield considerable
power to coerce people under their jurisdiction and possess knowledge that is not easy to obtain
or even for ordinary citizens to understand, they pose a serious threat to justice and to
8

See Martnez Slack, and Heyman 2013 for documentation of systemic physical and verbal abuse of migrants in the
US removal system. 11% of migrants surveyed reported physical abuse (1095 respondents) and 23% reported verbal
abuse (1092 respondents). The authors conclude: One of the biggest challenges of studying migrant mistreatment
while in U.S. custody, especially with regard to people who express interest in filing complaints or pressing charges,
is that there is little to no effective action they can take. (Martnez Slack, and Heyman 2013: 8)

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democracy. As Henry S. Richardson observes, Given how much discretionary decision-making

power rests in executive agencies, it is everywhere a serious question whether we as citizens are
subject to the kind of domination that consists in being vulnerable to the arbitrary power of
others. (Richardson 2002: 3) Mechanisms are necessary to circumvent the danger of
bureaucratic domination.
For bureaucracies to be just, they need to be in some meaningful sense accountable to the
people under their power. Though theorists differ in how to mitigate bureaucracies exercise of
arbitrary power, the most prominent solutions to bureaucratic domination emphasize the need for
participation and control.9 People under bureaucracies power must have the power to participate
in defining the basic aims (Christiano 1996), contest decisions that threaten to dominate them
(Pettit 1997), or participate in agency reasoning (Richardson 2002). Policies that subject people
to coercion and deprive them of the ability to influence how they are developed and applied are
illegitimate.
The administration of immigration enforcement raises serious issues of transparency and
accountability. Besides the formidable obstacles to accountability that all large bureaucracies
face, immigration enforcement has additional challenges. First, the population that it most
directly affects are non-citizens who lack substantive rights and protections to shape and contest
policy. Second, immigration enforcement is carried out by multiple actors, many with little direct
accountability to government officials, let alone migrants or the citizens of sending, transit, or
receiving states. Migration enforcement is accomplished through what Ruben Andersson has
dubbed the migration industry that includes private security firms, NGOs, journalists,

This is true even if we adopt an instrumental view of democracy in which democracy is justified because of its
good effects, e.g., democracies tend to promote greater average or net utility. Institutions that are not sensitive to
feedback from the people they affect are unlikely to have the information or the incentive to promote utility and
other valuable ends.

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academics, and other actors (Andersson 2014). Third, enforcement is increasingly extraterritorial
and transnational, accomplished through foreign governments and businesses such as airlines,
often with the explicit goal of depriving immigrants and refugees of due process rights that they
would acquire if they reached receiving states territory.
Immigration agencies are governed by immigration law, a branch of administrative law
that gives states considerable discretion in its ability to exclude, deport, and detain non-citizens.10
Immigration agencies rely extensively on nonlegislative rules as opposed to notice-and-comment
regulations to set agency priorities, practices, and procedures (Family 2012). Often these rules
change abruptly. Jill E. Family notes that the practice of immigration law includes a dearth of
firm rules and that the American Immigration Lawyers Association has complained to the
USCIS about changing adjudication standards, confusion as to the binding effect of guidance
documents, and a lack of transparency accompanying the use of guidance. (Family 2012: 587)11
Moreover, frontline adjudicators have considerable discretion and people affected by their
decisions have limited (if any) opportunities to appeal. The power immigration agencies exercise
over peoples lives is exceptional. Since immigrant detention and deportation are not considered
a form of punishment, the judgment of a single bureaucrat is often sufficient to put people behind
bars indefinitely or sever them from their family and community.12
Though immigration agencies are notoriously reluctant to permit public scrutiny, other
branches of administration law raise similar problems of accountability. Unfortunately, proposals
10

For a similar observation on the arbitrariness of discretionary powers over immigration, see Honohan 2014: 40.
On detention in particular, Stephanie Silverman and Amy Nethery point out, As an administrative measure,
authorities do not need to seek warrants pending an initial decision to detain. There are no readings of ones rights,
no automatic rights to a lawyer or a phone call and, usually, no meetings to explain how to get out of detention. In
some jurisdictions, there are also no translators, no mandatory court reviews, no visitations, and no one to alert
family and friends to the situation. (Silverman and Nethery 2015: 2)
11
Though a criticism of US agency administration does not automatically generalize to other countries, similar
points can be made of the immigration system in other countries.
12
See Valenzuela and Tidwell Cullen 2015 for an examination of the systemic lack of accountability in US
immigration detention.

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such as involving citizens in shaping policy through public comment and appeal to elected
officials do not solve the problem of bureaucratic domination for immigrants. Immigrants form a
systemically vulnerable population that lacks political rights and is in perpetual risk of
deportation.13 Most solutions to bureaucratic domination involve the participation of people
affected, usually assumed to be citizens.

As non-citizens, migrants lack influence with

government officials who might interfere on their behalf. Moreover, the people against whom
they may have grievances possess the power to deport them.14 Furthermore, immigration policy
is enforced against people who are often traumatized. Refugee policy acts on vulnerable people,
people who have suffered torture, rape, and witnessed the murder of family members. Migrants
may have suffered abuse in the journey from police in transit countries and from smugglers.
They arrive in a new country often without speaking the language, knowing their rights,
understanding the culture norms or enjoying a support network. They are rarely equipped to
effectively navigate the immigration system.
Beyond the political and psychological vulnerability of migrants, there is an inherent
murkiness in the nature of borders and their enforcement. William Waters notes that many
people see migration policy as a set of laws, regulations, bureaucracies and procedures that
together regulates the cross-border movement of people, setting the terms under which they
enter, reside, work, settle, and perhaps integrate in other countries. (Walters 2015: 16) Most
normative theorists remain mired in the framework of methodological nationalism (Sager 2014b;
Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003) which takes the borders and their administration as static
13

I develop this theme in more detail in Sager 2014a.

For more on these dynamics, Ruben Anderssons chapter on the migrant strike in Ceuta in Illegality Inc. provides
an important analysis. Andersson reports: Amadou and the other good immigrants were sent on to reception
centers on the mainland after the strike. The indios returned to the camp after the director had promised to help
them. They were eventually sent to CIEs and set free. The Nigerians, not least the women, were in a worse
position than the good African and Indian immigrants. In early 2011, a shack in Melilla burned down, killing three
and triggering protests akin to those of Ceuta in 2010. Thankfully, my Nigerian friends were unharmed. They were
still there, waiting for divine or state intervention to take them to Europe. (Andersson 2014: 239)
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barriers

encompassing

national

territories.

This

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overlooks

the

multiplication

and

heterogenization of borders (Mezzadra 2015) and the ways that borders are produced and
sustained through transnational processes.
Migration control is dispersed between multiple actors that span multiple regions.15 One
problem with guaranteeing accountability is the existence of multiple, overlapping agents, some
representing states and others from the private and non-profit sectors (Gammeltoft-Hansen,
Thomas, and Ninna Nyberg Srensen 2013).16 In the case of the private contractors that patrol
borders, operate detention centers, and impose carrier sanctions, there is some accountability in
principle.17 States can revoke contracts or change policies. There is not even the pretense of
democratic control over third-party states such as Cambodia, recruited with development funds
to accept Australian refugees (Crothers et al. 2015), Mexico, encouraged and financially
supported by the United States to police its Southern border to prevent Central American
children from seeking asylum (Wilson and Valenzuela 2014), or Morocco, which acts in
coordination with the EU and Spain to drive back sub-Saharan Africans (Human Rights Watch
2014).
It is not just a problem of identifying actors that can be held accountable. Many theorists
have turned to Foucaults work on governmentality and to Giorgio Agambens state of exception
to understand the processes and technologies by which categories are produced to classify

15

See Boswell 2003, Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias, and Pickles 2015, and Guiraurdon 2003 on the externalization of
migration policy.
16
As Ruben Andersson summarizes it: the creation of a subcontracting chain makes accountability impossible
while enabling extensive feedback between seemingly self-contained sectors. Frontex can blame member states for
human rights violations in joint operations; the Spaniards can shrug at reports of violence committed by their
Moroccan colleagues or blame defense companies for lethal fence technology; the Moroccans can point a finger at
Algerian soldiers, smugglers, or European push-backs; meanwhile, aid workers and security companies can argue
that they simply provide specific services or products without responsibility for how these will be used (Andersson
2014: 276).
17
For an important normative analysis, see Tendayi Bloom and Verena Risse on the hidden coercion of carrier
sanctions enforced by non-state actors outside of state borders (Bloom and Risse 2014).

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immigrants (e.g., temporary, illegal, family, etc.) and by which immigrants are policed,
surveilled, confined, criminalized, racialized, and incorporated into economies (Agamben 2005,
De Genova 2010, Foucault 2009, Kretsedemas 2012). Much of what occurs in immigration
enforcement is explicitly not subject to the rule of law and the protections offered by sovereign
states. Didier Fassin invokes Agambens state of exception by pointing out: The government of
immigration is thus an exemplary case study for an anthropology in the margins of the state,
because it concerns public action regarding marginalized population usually conducted at the
margins of the territory and the law. (Fassin 2011: 217)
The production of migration policy and the social understanding of immigrants is not a
top-down process, but rather the result of the clash and collaboration of multiple actors,
including migrants and media. Walters proposes a Foucaultian view in which migration policy
could be likened to a form of dispersed police that is exercised over the worlds population,
ordering, dividing, distributing but also connecting populations and territories. (Walters 2015:
16, c.f. Walters 2011)18 Indeed, it is even a challenge to identify the border. Ruben Anderssons
report on the 2011 Citizens Caravan for Freedom of Movement and Equitable Development
from Bamako and Dakar illustrates this point well. The caravan of activists sought to protest the
E.U. border regime and Frontex (under which they grouped African states efforts to prevent
migration and deport immigrants in transit countries). The problem with the protest was that it
was not clear where to protest: The marchers difficulty in locating the border and its regime
pointed to a larger absence of responsibility for the tragedies of the borderlands. (Andersson
2014: 269)

Policing is understood in Foucaults sense of that set of historical knowledges and practices dedicated to ordering
society for the purposes of enhancing the forces of the state. (Walters 2015: 16, c.f. Foucault 2009)
18

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The result is that people caught in the clutches of immigration enforcement face often
insurmountable legal, political, psychological, social, epistemic, and, given the amorphous nature
of borders, metaphysical obstacles to contest and shape life-altering decisions. Subjected to
coercive regimes that curtail their movement, frustrate their needs, and expose them to violence
and deny the opportunity to respond, they become victims of bureaucratic domination.
Addressing Bureaucratic Domination
Bureaucratic domination threatens to illegitimate immigration enforcement. If
immigrants do not have meaningful opportunities to participate and contest the power of
agencies to interfere with their lives, then immigration enforcement is arbitrary and an example
of domination. Is it possible to salvage states legitimate use of force in implementing procedures
and concrete measures to prevent domination? If not, the implication would seem to be that we
are committed to open borders in practice, even if would-be immigrants have no right to
immigrate and if states have a moral claim to exclude potential new members.
One possibility is that migrants do not suffer domination. David Miller has argued against
Arash Abizadeh that the exclusion of foreigners is not in fact coercive and for this reason they
are not entitled to a democratic right to participate in deciding border control policy (Miller
2010). Miller distinguishes between coercion and prevention and between (actual) coercion and
hypothetical coercion to argue that immigration controls do not actually coerce outsiders.
Though it is possible to dispute Millers analysis (e.g., Abizadeh 2010), it does not apply to
enforcement practices. Miller himself admits that specific activities used to carry out border
control are coercive:
We see people being bundled on to aeroplanes to take them back to their country of
origin, or small boats, being turned around on the high seas and forced back to their point

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of departure. These actions are indeed coercive: putting somebody into handcuffs and
frog-marching them on to a plane bound for Tehran, say, is an act of coercion, as the
analysis I shall shortly present reveals (Miller 2010: 112).
Even if Miller is able to sustain this separation between border controls themselves the
act of preventing somebody from entering a specific territory without authorization (Miller
2010: 112) and the means by which this is decided and carried out, there needs to be some way
in which people subjected to these coercive practices can contest them.
A more promising response is that there are mechanisms available that ameliorate or at
least lessen the domination suffered by non-citizens. Iseult Honohan has argued from a
republican perspective that migration controls constitute domination of sufficient intensity and
extent to demand redress. She suggests measures to reduce domination that include:
Establishing the legal status of migrants, and recognizing their equality in respects other
than admission; applying the rule of law to migration controls by limiting arbitrary
powers and constraining discretionary procedures; making accountable the institutions
determining migration law and policies by the introduction of a higher regulatory
authority; and, finally, making migration laws and policies contestable in some ways by
those who are subjected to them (Honohan 2014: 42)
These are laudable reforms (though it is difficult to know what these measures might be at this
level of abstraction). Are they sufficient to mitigate the bureaucratic domination of immigration
enforcement? Limiting immigration agencies discretionary power and subjecting them to
increased oversight from the courts is a step in the right direction. For example, we could follow
Jos Jorge Mendoza in rejecting the plenary power doctrine and in contending that non-citizens
(including undocumented immigrants) should be entitled to Constitutional protections through

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judicial review. Against Agambens contention that non-citizens live in a state of exception,
Mendoza cites the 1958 Trop v. Dulles which prevented the US government from stripping
Albert Trop of his citizenship. He observes that the law can at times be the only thing that
protects the most vulnerable from the full wrath of sovereign powers. (Mendoza 2011: 192)
At the same time, judicial review cannot substitute for voice. It only enforces existing law
and does not give people subjected to laws the ability to shape them. The difficulty with making
migration laws and policies contestable is that immigration status itself, independent of the other
vulnerabilities migrants face, poses an obstacle to effective participation. Though there are
notable examples of immigrants and their supporters winning victories for their rights, much of
the banal injustice and everyday violence remains invisible to the political process.
A more formidable obstacle is the transnationalism of migration controls. If we could
clearly identify the parties exercising discretionary power of migrants, then it would be possible
to develop mechanisms to make them more legitimate. It is not hard to imagine reforms that
would have prevented the tragedies of Ibrahim Hassan and Lucia Vega Jimenez even if there is
reason for skepticism about the political will to implement these reforms.
The deeper problem is that immigration enforcement is to a large extent extraterritorial,
carried on by agents that are not in any meaningful sense accountable to citizens. Could states
refrain from privatizing immigration enforcement and refuse to enter into agreements with other
states to assist with enforcement? Though there are good reasons to reject the privatization of
immigration enforcement (a more complicated issue is the reliance on NGOs to provide services
and, indirectly manage, shape, and enforce migration patterns and policies), the attempt to
renationalize immigration controls face challenges. One concern is effectiveness: for example,
the repeal of carrier sanctions would significantly raise the number of people claiming asylum. A

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just immigration policy is likely to be one that is generous with admissions and tolerant of a
substantial unauthorized population. A more serious issue is that migration is by definition
transnational and it is difficult to imagine how a nationalist enforcement regime can address it.
For example, deportation requires agreements from other states that they will accept deportees.
Moreover, any legitimate decision to deport people requires guarantees that the human rights of
returned citizens will be protected. The reliance on third-parties is built into the act of
enforcement and these third parties will not in many cases be accountable in a meaningful sense.
If this is correct it is hard to see how immigration controls can be justly implemented.
Even a cursory glance atenforcement practice shows that border controls involve
disproportionate, discriminatory coercion that leads to serious harms against vulnerable
individuals. I would go a step further and suggest that they are the inevitable effects of
administering a system of exclusion. If there is no route to avoid bureaucratic domination, then
immigration enforcement itself is premised on the powerlessness of the populations it regulates.
What are the implications of this? One suggestion is that even if open borders arent
justified in principle, real world difficulties in justly administering border controls make them
unjust. Because of the nature of immigration administration and enforcement, we ought to be
committed to open borders even if there are good reasons for restricting immigration in an ideal
world. Though open borders are often dismissed as utopian even by their proponents (e.g.,
Carens 2013), it may be that the ideal of open borders isless utopian than the ideal of a just
system of border controls. Border controls are a modern invention, whereas open borders have
been the norms for much of human history and indeed for much of the history of the state
(Torpey 2000). We have no clear counterpart of a world where borders are justly enforced.

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Even if an examination of the logic and effects of border enforcement does not entail this
radical conclusion, normative work on migration benefits from more sustained engagement with
enforcement practice. Normative reflections that seem eminently reasonable at the level of
abstract principle often take on a different hue when confronted with the harsh reality of practice.

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