PHILOSOPHICAL STUDY OF

MIGRATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS

(Subtopic: Migration as a Meta-Human Right)

Vaibhav Bhatia
Roll number 17077
Group number 13
4th semester, RGNUL
PHILOSOPHICAL STUDY OF MIGRATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS

1. INTRODUCTION

Migration is a meta-human right: a right on which other human rights depend. Since
some governments are amoral or simply unable to protect human rights, a human rights
commitment requires a commitment to individuals ' freedom to move to countries
where they can live comfortable life. Refugees — homeless on the streets, futureless—
present an international moral emergency that overcomes the usual national statecraft
considerations, such as fiscal implications and political risk to governing parties.

A person belonging to a developed country, (e.g. Germany) he / she can travel to more
or less any country he / she wants without any migration issue suffered by people
belonging to a poor country. (for example; Bangladesh) This was all made possible for
him because he has the right type of passport from a rich, powerful country that is not
particularly oppressive. In other words, he has the freedom to migrate precisely because
how his life goes is not especially important.

By contrast, the country which is our friendly neighbour, Nepal or Bhutan, though not
particularly oppressive, is one of the very poorest in the world. The freedom (choice)
to migrate could make an enormous difference to how the lives of Nepalese go, and that
is essentially why it is denied to them.

I think it's obvious that this is exactly the wrong way around. If migration is a privilege,
it is a morally repugnant of heritable socio-economic status (following Joseph Carens)
that recreates feudal system in the modern world. Migration is properly understood as
a human right — the term we use in cases where power should be held accountable to
individuals rather than vice versa— and not just a universal right held by all human
beings, but one of particular importance that trumps the usual discretion of states.

Therefore, in this article I will make four claims:

1. That migration should be acknowledged as a meta-human right-that is, as a right that

performs a constructive role in other human rights being guaranteed.
2. Because meta-rights are very important, they are superseding the ordinary politics
an d/or business, such as popularity with voters, fiscal implications, and political risk
to governing parties. Their absence is a moral emergency that triumphs over the less
urgent rights of existing citizens.

3. That analyzing migration in terms of a meta-right — rather than, for example, a

power and privilege that may or may not be granted — places the burden of proof on
states to justify not granting access to legal rights that are given to residents. The
challenge can not be avoided by states, "Why not?"

4. It is logistical rather than foundational from a moral philosophical perspective, the

main problems posed by large flows of refugees as we now see in Europe (which are
by no means unique even in European history). Like other international emergencies,
such as climate change or disease outbreaks, they have to do with how best to coordinate
efforts by states to fulfill their moral responsibilities, not whether they have all these
obligations or not.

Although I will focus on forced migration — that is, refugees from conflicts and
marginalization— rather than other types of migration, much of my analysis would
extend to migration in general — that is, to Bangladeshis drawn by the hope for a better
life for themselves and their children as well as Syrians driven out of their dwellings.
Nevertheless, the distinction is not ontological but pragmatic: refugees are those who
really need positive help-for example, chartered planes to take them from Lebanon-
while other migrants can be required to buy their own flight tickets.

2. Migration as a meta-human right

As noted by Hannah Arendt (in her famous chapter "The Decline of the Nation-State
and the End of Human Rights" in The Origins of Totalitarianism), access to human
rights depends on the government of the state in which you live. So it depends on how
states choose to treat you whether or not you enjoy the rights that international law and
moral theory say you have merely because of your membership of the human race.

Therefore, the practical relevance of the right to have rights-that is, the right to be
recognized as a possessor of human rights by a competent state. Since some
governments, as in a war, are malevolent or simply unable to protect human rights, the
right to have rights requires people to be free to leave those states to others where their
unfettered access to human rights is acceptable. Migration is a meta-right to the extent
that it plays a key practical role in ensuring the right to have rights in the real world of
states and failure of the state.

This, of course, does not fix the root causes of forced migration, or in the first place
what made people refugees. This is also a moral obligation on states, as international
institutions such as the International Criminal Court and the International Coalition for
Responsibility to Protect are slowly realizing.

But where we can't address the causes of their sufferings successfully, accepting
refugees is the only way we've eventually found to save at least some people from the
effects of gross state failure. The world is chocked full of the consequences of failure
to do so. In what amount of internment camps on the borders of Israel, Somalia and so
on, there are millions of people still living. The original refugees may have great
grandchildren confined to the limbo of statelessness, unable to move forward or
backward. Unable, for instance, to pursue college studies, own a home, travel outside
or work in certain areas.

3. Meta-rights are trumps

Within the framework of domestic politics, contemporary debate on refugees remains

trapped, particularly in the analysis of social benefits and costs for each polity. But
millions of human beings ' homelessness and futurelessness can not be adequately
analyzed in the same way as a policy decision on whether to build an train station.

Helping any substantial number of migrants to recover their lives will be economically
expensive and troublesome to public institutions, civil society, and current citizens '
expectations and rights of second order. For example, the commandeering of housing
buildings, the influx of non-German speaking children into state schools before new
teachers can be fully trained and classrooms can be developed. And to balance against
these extra costs, there is no clear benefit to society. If this was an airport, no democratic
state should build it!

But technical errors drive this conclusion:

• What goes uncounted. Any cost-benefit analysis to help them will fail as long as the
benefits to refugees themselves are not counted. Because it will consist mainly of costs,
with on the other side only a very few unconvincing speculation about shortening the
social security system in countries like Germany by increasing the working-age
population.

• To apply cost-benefit analysis to a situation of emergency. In cases of national

emergencies, such as regional refugees fleeing a hurricane or nuclear meltdown,
Democratic rule of law states usually suspend the usual cost-benefit analysis
procedures. The main priority then is to save as many people as possible and
subsequently try and help them put their lives back together. This cost does not go
through the regular process of budgeting. While some attention is paid to controlling
costs by choosing more than somewhat less efficient means (i.e. for logistics; trucks not
helicopters), this does not apply to controlling the overall cost of dealing with the
emergency: governments simply pay what it costs and figure out how to budget it when
the emergency comes to an end. Clearly, international refugees are as much an
emergency as domestic refugees are.

This draws me to the question of whether or not nations can decide if refugees are their
problem.

4. Why not?

In terms of the fundamental right to ajustification, Rainer Forst has proposed a very
useful way of thinking about justice. In general, there is a right to proper justification
for those affected by the exercise of governmental power. The simple and convenient
idea being is that power shouldn't be arbitrary.

In the normal situation, claims for rights must be made to the state that recognizes you
as a citizen or legal resident. But refugees are obviously unable to do this-people
deprived of a legislation that will defend their most basic rights. Their claims to human
rights do not disappear, but become the responsibility of any state capable of assisting.
I believe that this principle is generally recognized, not only in the Convention and
Protocol on the Status of Refugees, but also here and in international humanitarian law
and practice, such as the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine, which justified the military
interventions in Cote d'Ivoire and Libya in 2011.

What this means is that refugees deserve an explanation, "Why not?" States can't avoid
justifying their refugee policies; they can't pretend they don't make a sensible choice. I
think one can see that even many states ostensibly disinterested in the current problem
of refugees— like the United Kingdom — implicitly support this idea. Why do they
want to do so much to prevent refugees from putting their foot on their ground and
rejecting their claim to a new home and a positive future in their faces? Is this
undermining the sovereignty of the nation? I can't see how.

A great deal of public debate on migration confuses the right of governments to limit
access to their territory and the legal status of citizenship (i.e., sovereignty) with the big
question of what the right thing governments should do (moral philosophy). But this is
just another way to say that states need to make moral choices, like individuals.

Of course, many governments don't do the right thing - that's why in the first place we
have so many international refugees. But the premise of sovereignty would become
ludicrous if it were to mean that whatever a government decides to do is the morally
correct thing to do.

We can and do constantly criticize national governments for their moral behavior - it
consists of much more democratic politics than voting - precisely because we assume
that moral arguments can influence government decision - making.

5. International coordination

Governments have a particular moral duty to their citizens. Indeed, helping citizens
fulfill our moral obligations towards each other, such as an effective social insurance
system that prevents misery, is an important justification for government. But this
particular obligation is not a armor that can protect governments or current citizens
from other international moral duties, such as playing their part in reducing carbon
emissions and global pandemics or securing a future for the homeless refugees.

What we are coping with here-as with many other global issues-is the "bystander
effect," in which each individual feels less moral responsibility to do so and steps back
precisely because numerous countries are in a position to help. If some country-like
Germany-steps up, other countries will certainly feel relieved of responsibility. In the
international arena, the problem is compounded mostly by the lack of a higher power
to transform general responsibility further into specific responsibilities for each state
representing a fair and effective division of labor.

But there are many millions of other destroyed or repressive countries, from
Afghanistan to Ethiopia to Nigeria to Palestine, in addition to the 5 million centrally
displaced Syrians. It's quite clear that no single country-not Germany; even not
America-can take in all the refugees who just want a new home. An international effort
is needed, as well as for the organized resettlement of the 200,000 Hungarians who tried
to flee the Soviet invasion in 1956 and were placed between the 32 countries (a part of
the political history of Hungary that was somehow forgotten by its current Prime
Minister).

Or the much later resettlement from the original asylum seekers crisis of the 1970s as
well as 80s of 2.5 million Indochinese refugees.

These instances give cause for hope to oppose major failures such as the Palestinians,
Somali and the European cases (1930s). We know that if given the means, states can
collaborate to address this scale and complexity of international moral and ethical
emergencies successfully.

6. CONCLUSION: Moral arguments need politics

Let me conclude by pointing out the limitations of this issue with respect to moral
philosophy. I claimed the moral picture is clear for the right to migrate. One obvious
reason for my confidence is that in addition to the one I outlined here (as noted by
Joseph Carens) one can reach my conclusion through a variety of routes through moral
philosophy. But not the other way around. The only moral argument that I know of
against the freedom to migrate comes from communityism and suffers from all of the
many weaknesses of that approach.

Refugees have no real moral philosophy problem. But politics does not obey the
dictates of moral theory automatically, not even when those theories were officially
integrated into state constitutions.
Most of the case I described here follows from Hannah Arendt's remarkable analysis of
the social phenomenon of mass statelessness in Europe in the 1930s and the failure to
resolve pernicious "tribal" forms of political nationalism by the mere moral concept of
human rights. It is disheartening to see how relevant Arendt's description is still to
Europe's politics today, particularly in the new EU members like Hungary (and much
more to the geopolitics of the South Asian Rohingya refugee crisis).

As we saw fairly recently in the revolution of gay rights, moral arguments require active
citizenship in order to succeed. Only through politics can we overcome the apathetic
inertia of our fellow citizens and even the politicians who care for them, by challenging
such fallacies as the conflagration of national sovereignty with moral justice, and thus
bringing our governments around the world to do the hard but right thing.