State Duties and Migrant Obligations: Who Owes What?

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Migration generates a host of transnational relationships from the personal to the interstate level. Among others, immigration places sending and receiving states, citizens and immigrants, and refugees, aid workers, bureaucrats and border patrol officers all in relation with one another. This intricate web of relationships complicates the already difficult question of what we owe to each other. Moreover, many of these relationships entail fundamental uncertainty and instability as migrants navigate opaque bureaucracies, fight for legal status, and process the trauma of migration. One role for political science is to clarify what it means for migrants and others in this web of relationships to encounter each other as political agents. How should we think about the duties, rights, and obligations of these actors in their relationships with each other?

The papers on this panel ask interrelated questions about the duties and obligations generated by migration, border enforcement, and displacement. Do migrants have an obligation to obey unjust immigration law? When do states have an obligation to extend rights of political participation to migrants? Who within society has a specific obligation to help refugees? And, for each of these questions, what principles ought to guide us in assessing who owes what to whom?

Sub Unit

• Division 3: Normative Theory

Individual Presentations

• Contextualizing Migrant Political Rights: Reconsidering State Duties - Joseph Cloward, Stanford University

• Tacit Dissent to Immigration Law: The Case of Short-Term Migration - Ugur Altundal, Dartmouth College

• Enhancing Outcome Responsibility in Assessing Moral Duties toward Refugees - Muhammet Ali Asil, Augustana University

Chair

• Hannah Marie Alarian University of Florida

Discussant

• Yuna Blajer de la Garza Loyola University, Chicago