A Relational Ethics Of Immigration

Drawing on feminist and poststructuralist understandings of ethics and hospitality, this book offers a new approach to immigration ethics by exploring state and societal responses to immigration from the Global North and South.

To understand the ethics of immigration, we need to start from the way it is enacted and understood by everyday actors: through practices of hospitality and hostility. Drawing on feminist and poststructuralist understandings of ethics and hospitality, this book offers a new approach to immigration ethics by exploring state and societal responses to immigration from the Global North and South. Rather than treating ethics as a determinable code for how we ought to behave toward strangers, it explores hospitality as a relational ethics -- an ethics without moralism -- that aims to understand and possibly transform the way people already do embrace and deflect obligations and responsibilities to each other. Building from specific examples in Colombia, Turkey and Tanzania, as well as the EU, US and UK, hospitality is developed as a structural and emotional practice of drawing and redrawing boundaries of inside and outside, belonging and non-belonging. It thereby actively creates a society as a communal space with a particular ethos: from a welcoming home to a racialised hostile environment. Hospitality is therefore treated as a critical mode of reflecting on how we create a 'we' and relate to others through entangled histories of colonialism, displacement, friendship and exploitation. Only through such a reflective understanding can we seek to transform immigration practices to better reflect the real and aspirational ethos of a society. Instead of simple answers -- removing borders or creating global migration regimes -- the book argues for grounded negotiations that build from existing local capacities to respond to immigration.

In The Ethics of Migration: An Introduction, Adam Hosein systematically and comprehensively examines the ethical issues surrounding the concept of immigration. The book addresses important questions, such as: Can states claim a right to control their borders and, if so, to what extent? Is detention ever a justifiable means of border enforcement? Which criteria may states use to determine who should be admitted into their territory and how do these criteria interact with existing hierarchies of race and gender? Who should be considered a refugee? Which rights are migrants who are present in a territory entitled to? Is there an acceptable way to design a temporary worker program? When, if ever, are amnesties for unauthorized migrants appropriate? Featuring case studies throughout, this textbook provides a philosophical introduction to an incredibly topical issue studied by students within the fields of political philosophy, applied ethics, global studies, politics, law, sociology, and public policy.

Eminent political theorist Joseph Carens tests the limits of democratic theory in the realm of immigration, arguing that any acceptable immigration policy must be based on moral principles even if it conflicts with the will of the majority.

This volume provides an overview of the main themes and developments in the ethics of immigration.

Legal precarity, mobility, and the criminalization of migrants complicate the study of forced migration and exile. Traditional methodologies can obscure both the agency of displaced people and hierarchies of power between researchers and research participants. This project critically assesses the ways in which knowledge is co-created and reproduced through narratives in spaces of displacement, advancing a creative, collective, and interdisciplinary approach. Documenting Displacement explores the ethics and methods of research in diverse forced migration contexts and proposes new ways of thinking about and documenting displacement. Each chapter delves into specific ethical and methodological challenges, with particular attention to unequal power relations in the co-creation of knowledge, questions about representation and ownership, and the adaptation of methodological approaches to contexts of mobility. Contributors reflect honestly on what has worked and what has not, providing useful points of discussion for future research by both established and emerging researchers. Innovative in its use of arts-based methods, Documenting Displacement invites researchers to explore new avenues guided not only by the procedural ethics imposed by academic institutions, but also by a relational ethics that more fully considers the position of the researcher and the interests of those who have been displaced.

Explores the nature of the ideal of relational equality and how it relates to distributive ideals of justice.