The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events

Friday, 14 October 2016, 11:30
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, »goßer Salon« in the Villa Reimers

Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of Goethe University
Paper Presentation

Caleb Yong (Oxford University)
»Immigration Rights«

Caleb Yong received his DPhil in Politics at Oxford University with a dissertation entitled: »Justice, Legitimacy, and Movement across Borders«. From 2014−2015 he was granted a Postdoctoral Fellowship at McGill University and furthermore from 2015−2016 he was a Fellow in Residence at Harvard University. At present he is, on the invitation of the research centre »Justitia Amplificata. Rethinking Justice − Applied and Global« a Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften.

Abstract:
The philosophical debate on immigration often pits would-be migrants’ rights to immigrate against potential receiving states’ rights to regulate immigration. I argue that this binary framing of the debate obscures three important distinctions: between rights to free immigration and rights to immigrate for specific reasons, between strong and weak rights to immigrate, and between states’ legitimacy-rights and justification-rights to regulate immigration. With this conceptual framework in hand, I argue that although all would-be migrants have a weak right against immigration restrictions that lack a sufficient justification, and some would-be migrants have a strong right to immigrate for specific reasons, there is no strong right to free immigration in general. I further argue that, since there are potential immigration restrictions for which there is a sufficient justification, states can have a justification-right to restrict immigration.

Closed event
Contact: Beate Sutterlüty (b.sutterluety@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de, phone.: 06172-13977-15)