A REPLY TO MElLAENDER

Reconsidering Open Borders

Joseph H. Carens
University ofTOronto

I am very grateful to Peter Meilaender for his fair-minded, comprehensive,

and perceptive reading of my work. He has rightly identified some key con-
tinuities and tensions in my writing about immigration, and I welcome the
opportunity to develop my reflections further in response to his analysis. I
want to begin by saying a few things about how I first came to articulate the
open borders argument and how my thinking about the issue has evolved. I'll
explain how the open borders argument should be qualified and contextual-
ized and why, in my view, the core of the argument remains valid. Along the
way, I'll respond at various points to Meilaender's concerns, and at the end I'll
address directly the two challenges that he has posed.
When I started thinking about the ethics of immigration many years ago,
I was motivated by my puzzlement about the first Haitian refugee crisis in the
late 1970s (and by my need to write a paper for a faculty seminar on citizen-
ship). I had no particular preconceptions about what Americans (or anyone
else) should do about the Haitians, but I felt torn between the sense that there
was something wrong in excluding people in such obvious need and the feel-
ing that admitting everyone with comparable claims would be overwhelming
and would be especially harmful to those already most disadvantaged in
America. I turned for guidance to contemporary liberal theories and reached
the conclusion, somewhat to my surprise, that various versions of liberal the-
ory all pointed in the direction of open borders. That was the argument I laid
out in my 1987 article. Nevertheless, I felt somewhat ambivalent about the
argument, uncertain whether it revealed a deep moral problem with the
exclusionary practices of liberal states (which was the view I emphasized in
the article) or the limitations of abstract liberal theory (which was a concern
I pursued in subsequent work). At this point I think that both are true to
some extent.
One significant limitation of the Rawlsian and Nozickian versions of lib-
eralism that I used in my original article is their anti-perfectionism. As I see
it now, the view that the political community should be neutral between
competing conceptions of the good leaves too little moral space for the pur-
suit of a range of collective goals and gives too little moral weight to culture,

© 1999 by the Center for Migration Studies of New York. All rights reserved.
0197-9184/99/3304.0128

1082 IMR Volume 33 Number 4 (Wimer 1999): 1082-1097

 RECONSIDERING OPEN BORDERS 1083

community and history. The communitarian critics of liberalism were right

to insist on these points. On the other hand, what this requires is not a rejec-
tion of liberalism but a reformulation of ir.! What is needed, I believe, is a
version ofliberalism that takes rights seriously without making them absolute
and that retains the fundamental liberal commitment to human freedom and
equality, but is more pluralistic and open-ended in its understanding of the
human good, and more sensitive to context and history. Contemporary lib-
eral theorists like Kymlicka and Raz are pursuing this sort of approach, and
while I do not accept either of their versions in its entirety, I think they are
moving in the right direction. (Kymlicka 1995; Raz 1994) I do not claim to
have worked out a fully developed theory of my own that meets these require-
ments, but I have tried to provide a partial account that shows why such an
approach to liberalism can be fruitful. (Carens 2000a)
.fu part of this enterprise, I have written a number of articles in which I
explore how such a version of liberalism might qualify the open borders argu-
ment. Meilaender discusses several of these in the text or in footnotes.s .fu he
rightly says, I see these various articles as a departure from the anti-perfec-
tionism of Rawls but not as a fundamental challenge to the substance of the
open borders argument. Taken together the articles suggest that some limita-
tions on immigration might be justifiable in some circumstances, but that
even a more pluralistic and contextually sensitive approach to liberalism
would treat free movement as an important human right and would support
the basic principle that borders should normally be open. Why? Because even
that sort ofliberalism has to take seriously the moral claims of people who are
outside a political community and want to get in. Exclusion has to be justi-
fied. At the most fundamental level, it is never a sufficient justification of a

lit is significant that, with the notable exception of Michael Walzer, few of the communitari-
an critics of liberalism have been prepared to spell out their alternatives or to say concretely
how their positions differ from the broad liberal tradition. Walzer is concrete, but also deeply
tied to the liberal tradition for reasons spelled out in my original article and more fully in
chapter 2 of Carens 2000a.
-The only clarification I would offer in response to Meilaender's reading of these texts is that
I did not mean to say in my 1988 article that it would be justifiable to restrict immigration
for the sake of the welfare state. I intended to argue only that it would be permissible, under
some circumstances to require people to be residents for a modest period before gaining access
to (some) welfare state programs. Meilaender correctly sees my essay on Fiji as relevant to my
project even though I say nothing explicit about its implications for the open borders issue. I
took up the Fiji case in the first place because I wanted an example where communitarian
claims seemed intuitively very powerful to me and I argued that the moral importance of pro-
tecting traditional Fijian culture justified some restrictions on conventional liberal rights. Nev-
ertheless, I did not see this article as fundamentally challenging my open borders argument.
1084 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

policy to say "this is good for us." We also have to show why we are entitled
to pursue this good by the means of or at the cost of excluding others. And
given the various arguments I have offered as to why the ability to move from
one place to another and to cross state borders is an important human good,
I remain convinced that it is hard to find plausible justifications (at a deep
level) for extensive restrictions on migration (though I'd now acknowledge a
wider range of special circumstances justifYing restrictions than I did in the
original article).
The most significant way in which I want to qualify the open borders
argument is something that I would describe as a methodological rather than
a substantive point. As Meilaender notes, I have been concerned for a long
time with the relationship between theory and practice, and specifically with
the way in which the radical character of the open borders argument limits its
usefulness as a guide to public policy. My views on this have evolved some-
what over the years, and I now think that I have a somewhat clearer way of
presenting these issues. I will layout this new version and indicate how I
think it helps to meet some of Meilaender's concerns.3
With regard to every issue, including immigration, our arguments and
conclusions can be shaped in crucial ways by what we presuppose about the
context of our inquiry. All inquiries have presuppositions. In order to inves-
tigate some issues we must take other things as given: the meanings of words,
moral norms, facts about the world, and so on. I do not mean to suggest that
anything is entirely beyond investigation. We may start with some presuppo-
sition that we choose to challenge in another context or even later in the
course of the same inquiry. Nevertheless, we cannot challenge everything at
once. In any particular inquiry, we have to start with presuppositions.
Let me mark out two points on a continuum of possible presuppositions
framing an inquiry into the justice of immigration policies. First, we might
want to ask what justice requires in some sort of absolute sense. Here we situ-
ate our inquiry in a context where we set to one side obstacles to justice that
might be posed by the existing order of things: particular histories, established
institutions, the distribution of power, conventional (but problematic) moral
norms, the unwillingness of agents to act justly, and so on. Of course, this kind
of inquiry cannot be entirely detached from reality. It is still constrained by the
principle that ought implies can. But it treats the constraints of "can", of what
is possible, in a minimalist light. What justice requires must be humanly possi-
ble, under ideal circumstances. It need not be immediately feasible. This is a
3What follows in the next few pages is adapted from Carens 2000b.
 RECONSIDERING OPEN BORDERS 1085

familiar sort of presupposition for philosophers. It is rather like the sort of

inquiry Rawls seems to undertake in A Theory ofJustice when he talks about
ideal theory, or Aristotle in the Politics when he talks about the best regime, a
regime without presuppositions under circumstances that one would pray to
the gods for. But both Rawls and Aristotle take a single regime as their focus,
presupposing in these works a division of the world into regimes and saying lit-
tle about what justice entails for the claims of outsiders (individual or collective)
on those within the regime.! By contrast, an exploration of immigration at this
level should take the whole world order into account.
In thinking about immigration (or international distribution or other
issues of this sort), we may want to ask what justice requires in a world (not
just a society) where everyone is acting justly, all institutions are just, we don't
have to worry about overcoming past injustices, and so on. Presupposing this
sort of context for our inquiry enables us to focus more sharply on fundamen-
tal principles and opens up the possibility of our gaining a critical perspective
on unjust arrangements that are deeply entrenched and not easily subject to
change. For example, this presupposition would give us space to criticize the
modern state system as unjust, even if we conceded that it was here to stay for
the foreseeable future. I am not arguing here that the state system is unjust but
rather that it is sometimes important to have the space to reflect on that issue.
Similarly, this sort of presupposition opens up space for challenging liberal
assumptions about justice in the name ofalternative conceptions like, let us say,
Plato's. Let's call the sort of context I have described the just world presuppo-
sition.
Note that the just world presupposition is something that does constrain
inquiry and that we might want to move beyond it in another context. For
example, Nietzsche rejects the language of justice and morality itself, and so
a Nietzschean would not readily accept the just world presupposition as an
appropriate framework for inquiry. Depending on how the presupposition
was interpreted, those whose normative views are not derived from Western
philosophical and religious traditions might also want to challenge the pre-
supposition as one that excludes considerations or perspectives that they
regard as relevant. A5 I will explain below, this is highly relevant to Meilaen-
der's concern that the open borders argument does not address itself to those
who do not share the liberal tradition.

4 In my view, both Rawls and Aristotle adopt a number of other presuppositions as well (dif-
ferent ones, of course), some of which are explicit and some of which are implicit and all of
which are contestable. But examining those presuppositions is a task for another day.
1086 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

At the other end of the continuum, we might want to ask what justice
requires of us in the here and now, all things considered. This situates our
inquiry in a context where we must take into account all of the factors that
we excluded with the just world presupposition, because we want to know
how we should act in the world as it is. For that reason the idea that ought
implies can acts as a much more serious constraint on our inquiry. We have
to assess the feasibility of various courses of action. We want to be realistic.
So we have to take much of the world as given because it is not subject to our
control or easily changed. For example, we have to take as part of this pre-
supposition the division of the world into states with vastly different amounts
of power and wealth because whatever one thinks of this fact from an ideal
perspective (under a just world presupposition), it is a feature of our world
that is not likely to change in the immediate future. We have to take into
account not only the likelihood that we can persuade others in our own com-
munity to adopt a given policy (assuming that we are talking about some sort
of collective action), but also how we think other relevant actors will behave,
given their own interests, beliefs and circumstances. This way of thinking
abour normative issues is also familiar, though more frequently the kind of
approach adopted by policymakers than philosophers. For example, it is the
sort of presupposition we assume when we ask (from a moral perspective)
what our policy ought to be with regard to Kosovo. In thinking about that
sort of question, we cannot simply assume the willingness of others to act
justly. If we did so, Milosevic and the question would disappear from our
view. Similarly, we cannot simply assume that domestic support will be avail-
able for whatever course of action we would want to pursue. That, too, is one
of the constraints we must take into account. Let's call this the real world pre-
supposition, the assumption that we want to consider what we should do
about immigration in the context of the world as we find it. Let me add that
the real world presupposition does not preclude criticism, even sharp criti-
cism, of the status quo.
In contrasting the just world and real world presuppositions, I do not
mean to imply that the meaning of either is self-evident or uncontested. On
the contrary, people disagree deeply about both. Indeed, if what we care
about in the real world (for these purposes) is the set of feasible options for
various issues (and the relative feasibility of those options), it is probably fair
to say that people sometimes disagree about what the real world is as much as
(if not more than) they disagree about what a just world would look like.
Nevertheless, I hope that it is already intuitively clear that adopting one pre-
 RECONSIDERING OPEN BORDERS 1087

supposition rather than the other can have a considerable effect on the kinds
of questions we ask, the evidence we consider, and the arguments we advance.
How great that effect is depends on how wide we think the gap is between
the real world and a just world. The wider the gap, the greater the effect of
adopting one presupposition rather than another. And this may vary from
one issue area to another.
As I said at the outset, the just world presupposition and the real world
presupposition mark out two points on a continuum. There are many other
points along the way. We may often want to abstract from some of the con-
straints of the real world but not others for purposes of a particular moral
inquiry. It may be useful, for example, to ask what we think justice requires
of us with regard to Kosovo without paying attention (right away) to the
question ofwhether it is feasible. Even so, that sort of inquiry will presuppose
(implicitly or explicitly) many features of the real world. Or we might want
to ask what a just refugee regime would look like. That question requires even
more abstraction from the real world than the question of what we should do
about Kosovo, but it does not go all the way to the just world presupposition.
After all, in a world in which everyone was acting justly there would be no
refugees. This illustrates, by the way, why we should not assume that the just
world presupposition always offers a superior perspective on moral questions.
Some of the most urgent moral questions simply disappear from view in a just
world. So, moral reflection requires more than simply constructing a just
ideal and then seeing how closely we can approximate it in the real world.
What presuppositions should we adopt in thinking about immigration?
I do not think there is a single right answer to this question. It depends in
part on the purposes of our inquiry in a particular context. There are advan-
tages and disadvantages to any given presupposition. It is often helpful to
move from one set of presuppositions to another to see how that affects the
arguments we have constructed. The most important point is that we be as
conscious of and as explicit about our presuppositions as possible, so that we
do not talk past one another, and that we be willing to consider how a line of
argument would be affected by different presuppositions.
The conventional moral view is that justice permits the political com-
munity to pursue its own interests in these matters within broad limits. This
view is so deeply entrenched that it seems to me useful to adopt it as a pre-
supposition in order to explore the nature and extent of the limits justice
imposes on immigration policies within a realistic framework. In such an
inquiry, it is not a question of starting with an open borders ideal and trying
1088 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

to see how closely one can approximate this ideal within the constraints of
current political realities. Rather the task is to try to identify widely shared
moral views (whether explicit in public debates or implicit in practice) and
then to use these to think through the morality of current policies, within the
constraints of the basic presupposition about the general right of states to
control their borders. On this sort of approach, the open borders argument is
excluded a priori. Nevertheless, this sort of inquiry can lead to radical criti-
cisms of current policies in more limited ways (as well as defenses of them in
others). For example, I have argued that even on this presupposition, states
are not entitled to adopt racist admissions criteria or to deport long-term res-
idents. (Carens 1988, 2000c) As Meilaender notes, I have tried to pursue this
line of inquiry in a number of my post 1987 articles. However, I regard this
approach as much more than a tactical concession to the power of the forces
opposing open borders. Adopting as presuppositions moral views that one
knows to be widely shared by others is one way of participating in the process
of democratic deliberation, even if one wishes to challenge those presupposi-
tions at another moment of the process. Moreover, this approach makes it
possible to observe the contours of moral landscapes that are obscured from
sight by more radical perspectives.
It can also be important to challenge the conventional moral views in a
more fundamental way. To do so, we have to move further away from the real
world assumption. One way to do that would be to take as a presupposition the
principle - widely accepted among liberals - that we are obliged to regard indi-
viduals as being of equal moral worth and to ask what taking that commitment
seriously would entail for the right ofstates to admit or exclude whomever they
want. Note that this way of posing the question still leaves much of the exist-
ing background in place: the division of the world into states with vast differ-
ences of power and wealth between them, the absence of adequate human
rights protections in some states, and so on. But it deliberately abstracts from
any questions about the feasibility of the conclusions in order to focus on moral
principles, and it opens up the question of how the conventional principle
affirming the state's right to control its borders is connected to more funda-
mental liberal commitments.
Of course, this way of framing the issue leads directly to my open borders argu-
ment. If I were restating the argument today, I would detach it more sharply
from an anti-perfectionist account, and I would acknowledge more clearly that
there can be justifiable reasons for restricting free movement that would be
compatible with a commitment to equal moral worth. After all, people have a
 RECONSIDERlNG OPEN BORDERS 1089

variety of fundamental interests and sometimes they conflict with one another.
The right to move freely across state borders is an important human freedom,
but that does not make it absolute. Nevertheless, I still think that if we took the
principle of equal moral worth seriously, it would dramatically constrain the
sorts of considerations that now drive immigration policy and would make bor-
ders much more open.
One might object that there is something odd about adopting a presuppo-
sition that abstracts so sharply from feasibility but does not go all the way to
the just world presupposition. Isn't this an incoherent halfway house? After all,
many of the factors impelling people to migrate (the denial of basic human
rights, the absence of opportunities at home) are themselves manifestations of
deep injustices in their home country and/or in the international order. Open-
ing the borders won't do much to address these deeper injustices and won't help
most people (since most wouldn't or couldn't move even if the borders were
more open). Moreover, these deeper injustices are what make the right of free
movement seem such an urgent and important freedom, so if they were actual-
lyaddressed (i.e., if we did live in a just world), perhaps the right of free move-
ment would not seem so fundamental after all.
This is an important challenge. I will return to the question of immigra-
tion in a just world in a moment. First I want to say why I think this halfway
house presupposition is useful and illuminating.
One of the common ways of defending the conventional view that states
may (largely) choose whom to admit and whom to exclude among non-citizens
is to say that control over immigration is inherent in the idea of political sover-
eignty or that it is inextricably tied up with the very idea of a self-determining
political community. By adopting the halfway house presupposition, we can
critically examine this sort of claim. The idea that states must be unitary and
sovereign and must have control over their borders is a myth that does not cor-
respond to actual political arrangements in the real world.> Federal systems
often have complex separate and shared sovereignty arrangements (that may
also extend even to issues like immigration). It is sheer dogma to insist that the
sovereignty of the component parts of a federal system is not real sovereignty.
Like property, sovereignty is a bundle of rights that can be divided up in many
different ways. Yet this sovereignty co-exists with open borders among the var-
ious units. Of course, it is true that such openness has dynamic effects and that
the various units may have to take migration incentives into effect in planning
public policies, but in an interdependent world, political units have to take into

5Por more on this point see Carens 2000a, chapter 7.

1090 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

account many different factors that are outside the jurisdiction they control.
The policy of free movement within the European Union reveals even
more starkly the ideological character of the claim that control over immigra-
tion is inherent in sovereignty or essential for a political community to retain
its collective character. No one can seriously doubt that the European states are
still real states today with most of the trappings of state sovereignty and that
each of the European states has more effective power of collective self-determi-
nation than many states elsewhere in the world. Nevertheless, they do not have
the power to control immigration from other EU states. And it is a purely for-
mal point to say that they could reacquire that power by withdrawing from the
ED.
Someone may point out that the EU did not adopt its (internal) open bor-
ders policy out of a commitment to justice or human rights but out of a con-
cern for economic efficiency, and that it waited to implement the policy until
the economies of the poorer states, like Spain, Portugal, and Italy, had improved
sufficiently that the abolition of immigration restrictions within the EU would
not lead to massive population movements from the poorer countries to the
more affluent ones. I accept these claims entirely. From my perspective, they
simply confirm the most fundamental point, namely that control over borders
is most often essential to protect a community when that community is so eco-
nomically privileged relative to others, that many people would consider mov-
ing there. Restrictions on migration usually serve as a protection for economic
and political privilege. That's what becomes sharply visible from my halfway
house presupposition. I freely acknowledge that pointing this out will not
change it. I do not imagine that moral criticism moves the world, at least not
often. But one function this sort of criticism can perform is to unmask (for a
moment) the pretensions to moral legitimacy that are supplied by the conven-
tional view that every state has an inherent right to control its own borders.
A second advantage of this presupposition is that it provides a space with-
in which it is possible to challenge the common view that open borders requires
a degree of altruism that it is unreasonable to expect of human beings, individ-
ually and collectively. The argument for open borders that I have advanced does
not require individuals or communities to ignore their attachments. It is not a
matter of caring for everyone to the same degree but of respecting basic indi-
vidual rights. No one imagines that Tony Blair is or should be as concerned
with the well-being of the Germans in Germany as he is (or should be) with the
people who live in the UK, even though Germans have the right to bring them-
selves within his circle of concern by moving to the UK. If Massachusetts sets
 RECONSIDERING OPEN BORDERS 1091

up some social program, it does not have to provide the benefits of that pro-
gram to everyone in Georgia. It simply cannot prevent people from moving to
Massachusetts from Georgia whether or not their motive for moving is to par-
ticipate in the program (though studies suggest such motivations are rarely what
drives international immigration). Not using force to prevent people from exer-
cising a basic human freedom is not what we normally classifyas altruism.
Finally, I want to say a few words about how the immigration issue is trans-
formed as we move further towards the just world presupposition. Would a just
world include a right to move freely into any political community or would
some restrictions on mobility be morally legitimate? I use the word "political
community" but one of the questions we would have to ask about a just world
is whether it would have more than one political community and, if so, whether
it should be divided into relatively autonomous political communities like
modern states, and, if so, what the basis for the dividing lines of these commu-
nities should be and what sorts of powers these communities should have. It
would be hard to address the migration issue without taking such considera-
tions into account, and this reveals both the advantages and the disadvantages
of moving in the direction of the just world presupposition.
On the one hand, this sort of presupposition provides a context which is
open to the most independent and critical perspective on the status quo. That
is highly desirable because even if we do not have a realistic chance of bringing
about a fundamental transformation of our social arrangements (or of our-
selves), we should still assess current reality in the light of our highest ideals. If
we are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils, it is essential not to
delude ourselves into thinking that the lesser evil is really a good. Approaching
moral questions with something like the just world presupposition avoids legit-
imating policies and practices that are morally wrong and givesthe fullest scope
to our critical capacities.Thus this approach avoids some ofthe problems inher-
ent in the real world presupposition.
On the other hand, the just world presupposition detaches us from so
many familiar landmarks that it is easy to lose our bearings and easier still to
lose sight of the issue of immigration. There are many considerations that
would have to come into play in any fundamental exploration of what a just
world order would require, all of them highly contestable. Questions about a
just world order must be related to and derived from a wider set of moral con-
siderations, like out understanding of the human good, the moral standing of
humans (and other beings), the relevance of different forms of political com-
munity to the achievement of this good, and so on. The most basic questions
1092 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVlEW

of philosophy are implicated. Even in a more restricted focus, the challenge is

daunting. For example, suppose we asked what differences in language, culture,
and identity we would find in a just world and how these differences would
matter in social and political institutions. We know that some versions of these
differences make justice (as many of us understand it) impossible to achieve,
and others make it difficult. But would we assume them away altogether in a
just world? Or should we treat such differences as givens in a just world, as if
they were natural facts like climates and soils (which are themselves no longer
simply natural facts in the real world). What sort of history is required by a just
world? It will be immediately apparent that these sorts of questions only scratch
the surface of the questions one might ask about a just world, and that many of
these contestable features would be relevant to the question of migration in a
just world. In an inquiry into the nature of a just world, questions about migra-
tion are bound to playa subordinate role. One has to worry whether one would
ever reach them at all. In ordering dinner, it seems wiser to start with a menu
than with the Cartesian cogito.
Still, I don't want to overstate the difficulties (or forget the earlier point
about why it is crucial to adopt this sort of presupposition as a way of getting a
critical perspective on the status quo). It is important to remember that every
inquiry has presuppositions and that the just world presupposition is only one
point along a continuum. To simplify the inquiry into migration while retain-
ing a relatively radical perspective on the status quo, one might simply presup-
pose a commitment to liberal principles, thus setting to one side (for these pur-
poses) the various issues raised by non-liberal views. In other words, one might
ask what a just world would look like from a liberal perspective. And to sim-
plifY that inquiry, again in order to keep the focus on migration, one could
assume that a just world would be composed of different political communities
with roughly the same level of economic development and with basic freedoms
protected in each. That is a plausible, though of course contestable, picture of
a just world from a liberal perspective. Then one could consider the question of
how fundamental the right to migrate would seem in that context. I think that
it would still be an important right under these sorts of conditions, and also a
less threatening right for reasons indicated in my discussion of the ED, but I
won't try to develop that argument here.»

61 am also setting to one side the complex question of what relevance such an ideal has for
moral action in the here and now. Even if one had some tentative answets to the question of
what a just world order would look like, including just arrangements regarding migration, that
would still leave open the question of how to get there from here. It is not necessarily the case
 RECONSIDERING OPEN BORDERS 1093

Let me summarize the implications of all this for Meilaender's two chal-
lenges, the first concerning the relevance of the open borders argument to peo-
ple who do not share its liberal presuppositions, the second concerning the ade-
quacy of my conception ofliberalism given the evident lack of unanimity about
its validity among other liberals.
I have two responses to Meilaender's first challenge. First, as I have con-
structed it, the open borders argument does indeed presuppose a commitment
to liberal principles. So, as Meilaender suggests, I have not offered any reasons
why those who are not liberals should accept it. Nevertheless, I think the open
borders argument has more potential to open space for a fruitful exchange of
views with people who do not share liberal presuppositions than some familiar
forms of engagement across this divide.
Contemporary debates about human rights often find liberals (in Europe
and North America) taking the ostensibly high ground in promoting and
defending human rights over against people (usually in Asia and Africa) whose
practices and values allegedly conflict with these rights. I say 'ostensibly' and
'allegedly' as a caution that we should not always accept such claims at face
value, but I don't mean to deny that the charges of human rights violations are
often warranted or that we have a moral responsibility to pursue them. Never-
theless, these sorts of arguments always have a whiff of neo-colonialism and
nco-imperialism about them, as those of us who live in the affluent West stand
in judgment upon the morally inferior behavior and values of those from other
societies and cultures." One advantage of the open borders argument as I have
constructed it is that its critical thrust is directed more at those who live in the
affluent societies of the West than at those who live in the Third World. If the
that the best way to move in the direction of the overall ideal is to try to reform some subor-
dinate policy or practice to make it more closely approximate what it would be in an ideal
world. Rawls himself observes that the relation between the ideal and the non-ideal has to take
account of the theory of the second best, which entails a recognition that departures from an
ideal in one direction may sometimes require compensating departures in another. For exam-
ple, suppose that a just world would include free movement of people as one element in its
arrangements. It does not necessarily follow that we should push to open borders as much as
possible now. There are too many other factors and intervening variables. Even if the best
arrangement is one of open borders, the second best may be one involving considerable clo-
sure so that other features of what a just world requires may be developed within a protected
space. I do not mean to endorse this argument, but merely to show that the path from an
understanding of what is required with respect to migration in a just world to an under-
standing of how we ought to act in the world today is not straight and smooth. The best
approach is to adopt a series of different presuppositions, using the analysis developed within
each to shed critical light on the conclusions reached within the others.
70f course, some human rights advocates are much better at avoiding or minimizing this
stance than others.
1094 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

right to move freely across state borders is regarded as a human right, it is the
affiuent states of the West who are the worst offenders in preventing people
from exercising this right (though, of course, all states violate it as they try to
control their borders). So, it is possible to present the open borders argument
to those who do not start from liberal premises without it coming across as a
challenge from accuser to accused. In any event, there is no reason to assume
that a state's policies necessarily reflect the most principled account of its peo-
ple's moral commitments (liberal or other).
Because the open borders argument makes sense only if one is willing to
abstract from considerations of immediate feasibility, it is not, in the first
instance, a demand to "other kinds of polities" to "render themselves vulnera-
ble to ... fundamental transformation." Instead, it should be seen as a way of
starting a conversation. Certainly that is what I intend in relation to whatever
readers I have who do not share my liberal commitments. It's a way for me to
say to people of different backgrounds, "Here is what I think liberal principles
entail with regard to migration, though I recognize that this does not corre-
spond to the practices ofliberal states and is not remotely likely to become their
general policy in the near future. What do you think your most fundamental
moral commitments require with regard to migration and why?" I have no
views about where such a conversation will lead. Some people may say that their
traditions lead to similar conclusions by a different route, others that theirs lead
to different conclusions. Some may reject this mode of inquiry altogether. Of
course, there will probably be internal disagreements within other traditions as
there are within liberalism. I have no doubt that I would learn something from
such an exchange if I entered it in the proper spirit.
The general approach to moral inquiry that I have espoused here is to
recognize that all moral arguments must begin from presuppositions but that
we adopt different presuppositions for different purposes and that it may be
appropriate to adopt something as a presupposition in one context that we
want to subject to critical examination in another. I readily acknowledge that
my open borders argument starts from liberal presuppositions, but I would
be delighted to remove those presuppositions in order to engage with people
who do not share them in a discussion about what a just world requires, espe-
cially with regard to migration. For such a conversation to get off the ground
we would have to search for some other shared presuppositions, including
some moral presuppositions, but what form those would take, how we might
proceed, and where we would end up is something that could be determined
only in the course of an exchange.
 RECONSIDERING OPEN BORDERS 1095

Having said this, I have to acknowledge that the primary audience I had
in mind in developing the open borders argument was one that shared my
liberal commitments, broadly speaking. (This includes communitarians like
Walzer because, as I have argued, they cannot reject liberalism without reject-
ing the tradition of their own community, though, of course, they can reject
particular formulations ofliberalism, including my own, as inadequate). This
leads to my second response to Meilaender's first challenge. It is not the case,
as Meilaender seems to suggest toward the end of his article, that an argument
that rests upon liberal presuppositions can only lead to conclusions about the
moral obligations of liberals.
One of the interesting puzzles within the liberal tradition is how to rec-
oncile various liberal values like pluralism and equality or individual autono-
my and collective self-determination with one another. All liberals, no matter
how universalistic, have to leave some room for differences, even inequalities,
between people because not to do so would require us to suppress freedom
altogether. And all liberals, no matter how communitarian and relativistic,
have to set some limits to acceptable variations in individual and collective
behavior, because not to do so is to undermine the basis upon which we say
that the traditions, values and choices of individuals and communities should
be respected. Different liberals will mark off these boundaries in different
ways, but almost all of them will say that some practices are morally unac-
ceptable, whether or not the people who engage in these practices accept lib-
eral moral norms. For example, even a communitarian relativist like Michael
Walzer is prepared to say that it is wrong for a state to expel long-term resi-
dents simply on the basis of their nationality or ethnic origin, and to support
that assertion with an appeal not to the beliefs of the state in question but to
the political theory of Hobbes. This is not an isolated misstatement but some-
thing with deep roots in Walzer's own political philosophy."
In a similar vein, to advance a claim in the name of human rights is to say
that people are morally entitled to be treated (or not treated) in a certain way,
regardless of the cultural commitments of the society where they live or the
moral views of the political authorities. So, when I say that free migration
should be regarded as a human right, I am claiming that all states are morally
obliged to open their borders whether the populations or authorities of those

8Por a fuller account of the liberal universalistic streak in Walzer, see chapter two of Carens
ZOOOa. I have explored the wider issues raised by this paragraph at a number of places in this
book.
1096 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

states accept the premises from which my arguments are derived or not.? The
reach of the claim is universal even if the source of the argument is particu-
laristic (in the sense that it is rooted only in the liberal tradition).
I also have two responses to Meilaender's second challenge. Meilaender says
that I should spell out more fully my own account of liberalism and explain
why it should be preferred to the accounts of those who do not think that lib-
eralism entails open borders. First of all, I agree, and I am trying to meet this
challenge in various ways. I have sketched briefly here and articulated at greater
length in my forthcoming book a version of liberalism that is not unduly wed-
ded to an ideal of cultural neutrality and a corresponding non-absolutist con-
ception of rights ( though I readily concede that these writings don't amount to
a full theoretical account). Moreover, in the methodological argument that I
have presented here about the inevitability of presuppositions and the desir-
ability of shifting presuppositions in accordance with the nature of the prob-
lem, the purposes of the inquiry, and so on, I hope to have found a way of sit-
uating liberal arguments so that we can see more easilywhen people are talking
past one another because they are implicitly or explicitly adopting different pre-
suppositions, and when they are genuinely disagreeing. Of course, one can also
disagree about the appropriateness of a given set of presuppositions, but that is
different than disagreeing about the implications of liberal principles in a con-
text of shared presuppositions.
This leads to my second response. At the risk of hubris, I will say that I
think the open borders argument poses an important challenge to liberal theo-
ry that still has not been met. Let me hasten to add that I am not claiming that
the argument in its original version (or even in later ones) was without flaws.
On the contrary, I have learned a great deal from the many criticisms I have
received of the open borders argument, including, notably, Meilaender's article
in this journal. Although I now feel able to present the argument more clearly
and to acknowledge its limitations more fully, I think the core of the argument
remains intact. Most of the versions of liberalism that reject the idea of open
borders do so almost as an aside (as in the case of Rawlswhom Meilaender men-
tions) and do so because they adopt, explicitly or implicitly, presuppositions
that evade the problem that the open borders argument is designed to confront.
That is not grounds for rejecting these theories. The presuppositions they adopt

9 This is not to deny points made earlier in this article about how rights may sometimes con-
flict and have more or less urgency under different circumstances so that some violations of
the right to move freely may be worse than others and restrictions on the right may even be
justified under some circumstances.
 RECONSIDERING OPEN BORDERS 1097

may be perfectly reasonable ones for the inquiries the authors want to conduct,
and the inquiries may be important and worthwhile. But apart from the early
discussion of Walzer which I criticized in the original article, I know of no
attempt to layout in a systematic way a fundamental moral justification for the
right of states to exclude migrants in the world as it is, nor any to justify a gen-
eral right of exclusion on the world as it ought to be. Liberals aspire to justifY
their institutions and practices by offering reasons for them that no one can rea-
sonably reject. What reasons justify closure? How much do these reasons rest
upon unexamined and highly contestable presuppositions about the entitle-
ments of existing communities to preserve what they have regardless of what
others do not have? What sorts of reasons can be offered to those who are
excluded that it would be unreasonable for them to reject as a justification of
their exclusion?These questions may not be inescapable for any particular (par-
tial) account ofliberalism, but they are inescapable for liberalism as a whole. My
own view is that there are no satisfactory answers to these questions once one
removes the constraints of presuppositions about what is feasible and considers
the question from the perspective of what liberal justice requires in a (relative-
ly) just world. The challenge of open borders continues.

REFERENCES
Carens, J. H.
2000a Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A ContextualExploration ofJustice as Evenhan
edness. Oxford: Oxford Universiry Press, forthcoming.

2000b "Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Immigration: False Dichotomies and Shifting

Presuppositions." In CanadianPolitical Philosophy at the Turn ofthe Century: Exemplary
Essays. Ed. R. Beiner and W. Norman. Toronto: Oxford Universiry Press, forthcoming.

2000c "The Rights of Residents." In Reinventing Citizenship: Dual Citizenship, SocialRights

and Federal Citizenship in Europe and the Us. Ed. R. Hanson and P. Wei!. Oxford:
Berghahn Books, forthcoming.

1988 "Nationalism and the Exclusion of Immigrants: Lessons from Australian Immigration
Policy." In Open Borders? Closed Societies? Ed. M. Gibney. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press. Pp. 41-60.
Kymlicka, W.
1995 Multicultural Citizenship: A LiberalTheory ofMinority Rights. Oxford: Oxford Universi-
ry Press.
Raz, Joseph.
1994 Ethics in the PublicDomain. Oxford: Clarendon Press