Immigration
French national migrating to New Zealand faces minimal barriers; a Ghanaian seeking identical opportunities confronts substantial obstacles. Al Hashmi (2025) notes that skill-selective policies are ‘unfair as those from low- and lower-middle-income countries are less likely to have the skills required due to unequal educational access. Thus, proximity preferences operate in practice as racialized exclusion mechanisms. When selection processes are de facto proxies for national origin discrimination, states lack the right to implement proximity preferences as they perpetuate neo- colonial practices and structures. In accordance with Rawls’ notion of justice as fairness and difference principles (1999), states then do not have the right to limit the immigration of certain groups, given that it perpetuates historical injustices; 4 in fact, states have the duty to allow them to migrate into the country if immigrants wish under remedial justice (Wilcox, 2014). This strengthens the case laid out earlier where states have the duty to implement integration structures and reject states from limiting certain immigrants. Refugees We shall examine whether states have the obligation to take in refugees, even when states have reached the threshold outlined in the introduction. Refugees fleeing persecution have not chosen migration: they have been forced to do so by circumstances beyond their control, such that their realistic alternative is death or persecution. From Nozick’s libertarian framework to protect negative rights (1974), states are obligated to take in refugees. This is entrenched in the non-refoulement principle under the 1951 Refugee Convention (UNHCR); thus, this duty of states is largely agreed. Yet do states still remain obligated to admit refugees if they reach the threshold outlined in the introduction? Additional refugees would place a huge burden on the social fabric, undermine the functions of institutions of the country, and place the country under the potential of unrest. At this point, this essay would argue that unless no other safe country can receive any more refugees (which is highly unlikely), states on the threshold could then justify rejecting refugees and relocating them onto other safe countries. This is justified as it does not violate non-refoulement and refugees are still protected. Refugees are in a comparable position in another safe country as they are not facing any imminent persecution; they are also able to access comparable resources to the country they have arrived in. Therefore, it would benefit both the state and the refugee if refugees are relocated. We can look to the modern example of the Syrian conflict to see how states reach the threshold with an unexpected number of refugees. Both Jordan and Lebanon, neighbouring countries of Syria, registered unprecedented numbers of refugees, with Jordan’s refugee camp becoming the state’s fourth-largest city (Carnegie Endowment, 2013) and Lebanon registering more than a million (UN, 2014), a quarter of the country’s original population. By virtue of being situated next to a state in conflict, Jordan and Lebanon had a disproportionate burden compared to states further away. In such cases, this essay would argue that Jordan and Lebanon would have the right to refuse any extra refugees, as health and public services, infrastructure, and education can no longer cope. Building integration and refugee- accommodating structures require time; thus, it would be justified for those states to relocate refugees
4 Rawls’ justice as fairness primarily addresses a society’s basic structure, and in The Law of Peoples (1999) he permits immigration limits; however, Abizadeh 2014 argues that because border controls coercively bind outsiders, principles of justice must be justified to non-citizens as well.
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