Discrimination and Immigration Control

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the ethics of the institutional apparatus that goes along with immigration control. It takes seriously the fact that immigration control sometimes lead to human rights violations, and that liberal states sometimes engage in problematic forms of discrimination when they engage in the business of policing their internal borders. It argues that liberal states must endorse a number of key strategies to ensure that unauthorized immigrants are neither placed in a position where their human rights are violated or left unprotected nor discriminated against on the basis of arbitrary criteria. The discussion therefore aims to minimize the vulnerability of those immigrants who have not received authorization to reside in the territory of the liberal states.