Immigration and Democracy

Sarah Song knows a thing or two about immigration. Born in South Korea, she immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was six years old. After having to repeat the first grade because she didn’t speak English, she went on to earn an M.Phil in politics from Oxford and a Ph.D in political science from Yale. She is now a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, where her work centers on issues of immigration, citizenship, and multiculturalism.

Song’s second book, Immigration and Democracy, is the product of years of careful thinking about immigration and its role in democratic societies. The arguments presented here are grounded in a deep understanding of political theory, providing a necessary corrective to the crude sloganeering that too often shapes our public discourse on immigration policy. As Song states in her preface, she has written the book in the hope “that we can move beyond an ‘us versus them’ mentality and engage in reasoned debate about immigration.”

The book is divided into three parts. In Part I, Song examines various justifications for the state’s power over immigration. These include the “plenary power” doctrine articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court—which Song characterizes as “more assertion than argument”—as well as the writings of a number of philosophers and political theorists. Building upon the theory of collective self-determination, Song argues that the “right to control immigration is part of the bundle of territorial rights necessary for peoples to be self-determining.” This right, however, is not absolute. It is qualified by other, competing rights, such as the rights of refugees fleeing violence or persecution.

In Part II, Song examines the arguments in favor of open borders. These are of two basic kinds: global distributive justice arguments and rights-based arguments. Global distributive justice arguments are generally concerned with alleviating global poverty. If all borders were open, the thinking goes, then people born in poor countries would be free to seek economic opportunities elsewhere. But as Song points out, “it is typically not the world’s poorest who migrate, and the departure of a country’s more-skilled members tends to deepen, not mitigate, global inequality.” While recognizing that wealthier nations have a certain moral obligation to help alleviate global poverty, Song argues that development assistance is a more effective solution than open borders.

She then goes on to consider rights-based arguments for open borders, which invoke widely recognized rights such as freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of contract. Song finds that all of these arguments fall short of justifying open borders. She notes that individual rights must be weighed against competing rights, including the right of a people to self-determination. Furthermore, rights-based arguments “are indifferent to the reasons people have for wanting to migrate…. [A] compelling normative theory of migration should be able to distinguish and prioritize among different reasons for migration.”

In Part III, Song considers the various circumstances under which people migrate, and attempts to lay out a framework for democratic societies to consider when formulating immigration policy. She does this by drawing a distinction between what she calls “obligatory admissions” and “discretionary admissions.” Obligatory admissions include refugees and certain types of family-based immigration claims. Discretionary admissions include those who migrate for purely voluntary reasons. “Many migrants fall somewhere in between, and there is reasonable disagreement about where to draw the line,” Song writes, “but I believe it is important to maintain some distinction between those who have fundamental interests that can only be met through migration and those who do not. Doing away with the distinction altogether would leave us without any way to prioritize truly necessitous migrants.” She then goes on to discuss the criteria states may use when considering discretionary admissions, whether for temporary-worker programs or for permanent residence, and concludes with a discussion of the rights of non-citizens in the territory. 

Immigration and Democracy is an illuminating and well-argued book that deserves the attention of anyone interested in a serious and nuanced approach to immigration policy. It is now available on the New Books shelf at the O’Quinn Law Library.