Academic

Chang on Immigration and Distributive Justice

By Lawrence Solum

Howard F. Chang (University of Pennsylvania Law School) has posted The Immigration Paradox: Alien Workers and Distributive Justice on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The immigration of relatively unskilled workers poses a fundamental problem for liberals. While from the perspective of the economic welfare of natives, the optimal policy would be to admit these aliens as guest workers, this policy would violate liberal ideals. These ideals would treat these workers as equals, entitled to access to citizenship and to the full set of public benefits provided to citizens. If the welfare of incumbent residents determines admissions policies, however, and we anticipate the fiscal burden that the immigration of the poor would impose, then our welfare criterion would preclude the admission of relatively unskilled workers in the first place. Thus, our commitment to treat these workers as equals once admitted would cut against their admission and make them worse off than they would be if we agreed never to treat them as equals.

A liberal can avoid this "immigration paradox" by adopting a cosmopolitan perspective that extends equal concern to all individuals, including prospective immigrants and other aliens, which suggests liberal immigration policies for relatively unskilled workers. I argue that liberal ideals require a global view of distributive justice and that attempts to defend more limited conceptions of distributive justice that apply only within nations are ultimately question-begging. The problem with policy prescriptions based on global justice is the failure of most citizens to adopt such a cosmopolitan perspective. As long as citizens are reluctant to bear the fiscal burdens that cosmopolitan liberalism would impose, constraints of political feasibility may imply that guest-worker programs are the best policies that cosmopolitan liberals can obtain with respect to many aliens.

And from the text:

Charles Beitz and others have argued that the entire world is a ?society? in which all individuals would be parties to the original position.22 Beitz suggests that ?we should not view national boundaries as having fundamental moral significance? and that ?principles of justice? should ?therefore apply globally.?23

Others, however, dispute the claim that the world is a ?cooperative venture for mutual advantage? within the meaning of the theory of justice developed by Rawls.24 For critics of the cosmopolitan perspective, the obligations of distributive justice among residents of one nation are more extensive than those that apply across national borders. Thus, for those who stress cooperation as the basis for obligations of distributive justice, ?the salience of global justice is increasing in the density of interactions across borders.?25 Andrea Sangiovanni calls such a claim ?relational,? because it asserts that ?the content and scope of distributive equality? depends on ?the current extent and degree of interaction.?26

Any theory of justice that makes obligations of distributive justice contingent on the actual degree of cooperation between parties, however, creates a problem analogous to the immigration paradox. If voluntary acts of cooperation trigger obligations of distributive justice, then wealthy societies have a reason to avoid cooperating with poor societies. The wealthy would seek to avoid the burdens that such obligations impose by shunning interactions with the poor, to the detriment of the very individuals whose welfare we would seek to improve through those obligations. This ?cooperation paradox? is simply a more general version of the immigration paradox.

We can avoid the cooperation paradox only if we instead adopt a normative criterion that is independent of all of our policy choices.

Very interesting & highly recommended.

I have a question about the argument in the quoted passages.  It is not clear to me the precise nature of the claim made by Chang in the second to the last quoted paragraph: "wealthy socities have a reason to avoid cooperating with poor socities."  To what kind of reason is Chang referring?  If it is prudential reasons (in the broad sense that would include the political reasons of elected officials), then there appears to be a category mistake--the paradox would be a conflict between reasons of political morality and prudential reasons--which is no paradox at all for many plausible metaethics.  On the other hand, Chang might be referring to reasons of political morality, but in that case there is no paradox: wealthy societies would take into account both the benefits to the least advantaged (with the societies) of more cooperation and the disadvantages to the least advantaged of the additional obligations that would come with the cooperation.  There is nothing odd about this--we way the moral pluses and minuses of taking on additional obligations all the time.  That quibble aside, this was an excellent paper.

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Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on July 28, 2008 (boomark / email).