In US popular national discourse, immigration tends to be associated with Latinx and Latin American people. Yet the Western European philosophical subfield of ethics of immigration has not adequately engaged the materiality of US-Mexico border histories and the lived experiences of immigrants entering the United States from Latin America. This is foremost in the historical lack of dialogue and uptake with Latin American philosophy. If one were to investigate early articles in the field of ethics of immigration, one would encounter abstract discussions of these matters that presuppose neutral notions of space, homogenized accounts of immigrants, and idealized concepts of states. Latin American Immigration Ethics is a non-ideal theory,Footnote 1 materialist intervention that is conscious of these conceptual traps and carves out a distinct Latin American immigration ethics.
The collection splits into four sections. The first focuses on providing methodological foundations for a Latin American ethics of immigration. Specifically, it argues that we should take a Latin American and decolonial approach to immigration issues. While both of these approaches are heterogeneous and thus do not link a priori, they are distinctly recognizable approaches that emerge from the three articles in the section.
The first chapter, co-authored by Amy Reed-Sandoval and Luis Rubén Díaz Cepeda and titled “Latin American Immigration Ethics: A Roadmap,” develops the nonessentialist roadmap thesis that Latin American immigration ethics has two methodological features. First, by paying attention to the histories of Latin American migrations, it is explicitly a historical method. This can be helpful when the authors situate migration within the history of Spanish colonization in 1492 and move through the period of Latin American independence because it encourages philosophers to research, for instance, the arguments in favor of blanqueamiento (i.e., white immigration policies). Second, this contextual approach to immigration draws on Latin American philosophy. This chapter expands our categorical horizons beyond merely Global South to Global North analyses to include South-South and North-South histories of migration. It also goes beyond discussions of the categories of migrant and refugee and introduces the concept of the exile as a unit of analysis.
The second chapter, written by José Jorge Mendoza, called “Decolonizing Immigration Justice,” critically evaluates three dominant view in the field of ethics of immigration: reactionary, market based, and liberal egalitarian. The first prioritizes enforcement as a way of managing threats to the national cultural order. The second is concerned with maintaining a situation in which global competition for labor is operative. The third tends to argue for open borders because of the moral claims that generate in these conditions. Indeed, a right to exit when the migrants in their original country are under threat generates duties for the destination countries to receive them.
Mendoza notes how these approaches are limited in that they often ignore the historical construction of the illegal and the anchor baby. Radical approaches offer a corrective and try to offer another vision of immigration justice. Some radical approaches challenge the assumption that states have a right to regulate immigration. Some also challenge the presupposition of methodological nationalism—a Westphalian image of homogenous societies bounded by impermeable national borders and often presuppose a notion of sovereignty as unified and at the state level; it casts borders as fixed and renders citizenship in exclusivist terms. While radical perspectives point to important limits of the conventional view, for Mendoza, they tend to be limited in that the accounts often are Eurocentric (i.e., tend to think through immigration issues only through the lens of Western European philosophy). As a corrective, Mendoza suggests an approach to the ethics of immigration that takes coloniality into account and puts Western European sources in conversation with thinkers such as Anzaldúa, Lugones, and Dussel.Footnote 2
In the third chapter, “Oaxacan Transborder Communities and the Political Philosophy of Immigration,” Reed-Sandoval extends Will Kymlicka’s distinction between national minorities and voluntary immigrants by introducing the concept of transborder communities. These nonterritorially concentrated groups exist simultaneously in more than one state. They form a critical mass in both states, and they possess and sustain their unique societal culture by their regular circular migration patterns. She specifically argues in support of the concrete immigration policy that Oaxacan transborder community members should be given a visa that allows them freely to enter the United States for a certain period. This is not to be confused with a guest worker program, which allows them to work in the United States for a limited time and without political rights. Her proposal challenges and moves beyond the normalized, unfair practice of offering tourist visas primarily to middle- and upper-class Mexican citizens.
The second section of the book focuses on philosophizing from South America about immigration issues. Chapter 4 argues for drawing on Latin American liberation ethics to make sense of the histories of migration in the context of Portugal’s colonization of Brazil and Brazil’s subsequent independence period. The following chapter attends to the philosophical significance that migration patterns from Colombia to Venezuela and back should have on immigration policies. Chapter 6 draws on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics to make sense of the racism and xenophobia directed toward those deemed foreigners, which tries to provide a justification for the death of certain immigrants in Chile.
The third section, which focuses on Central America and Mexico, leads with a chapter by Díaz Cepeda called “Ethics of Liberation: Listening to Central American Migrants’ Response to Forced Migration.” Here Díaz Cepeda critically evaluates three theories of poverty in Latin America: modernization, dependency theory, and Pablo Casanova González’s internal colonialism theory. He argues that the internal colonialism theory is the most adequate for explaining the causes of poverty in Latin America. This, in turn, helps to explain the causes of immigration flows from Central America to Mexico to the United States.
Chapter 8 offers an interesting discussion of the philosophical significance of three walls—the one at the US-Mexico border, the one Israel built to keep out Palestinians, and the one the Moroccan kingdom built to annex the Saharawi territories and assimilate the population under occupation. Carlos Pereda in chapter 9 adds to the heterogeneous snapshot of immigrants in the book. He shows the philosophical value of the songs that people constructed as illegal sing as they migrate. He reflects on the places they sing. He listens to the content of their music and attends to how the songs express the despair of their situation. From this he shows how we can learn something about migrants’ various self-other relations (i.e., their relations to their future bosses in the United States, to those in their home country that forced them to migrate, to their loved ones left behind, and to themselves).
The fourth section concludes the book with two generative contributions that open up more paths for future investigation. Chapter 10, a piece by Lori Gallegos titled “The Interpreter’s Dilemma: On the Moral Burden of Consensual Heteronomy,” makes visible what Gallegos identifies as the interpreter’s dilemma—a situation Latinx bilingual folks have to navigate when they translate for loved ones encountering English-only bureaucracies. The interpreter confronts the decision either to act in accordance with the desire of the translator or to acquiesce to the views of their loved ones that the interpreter-translator does not endorse. Gallegos argues that a racist and xenophobic context in which linguistic marginalization is operative forces the interpreter-translator to grapple with an unjust moral burden.
The final chapter, by Eduardo Mendieta, offers a powerful way of making us recast immigration discourses, and more generally, those of states that continually engage in wasteful wars abroad, increased police militarization, and ICE detention centers at home, all at taxpayers’ expense. In the face of this outrageous, catastrophic, obscene, wildly irresponsible, and utter disregard for the people, future generations, Mother Earth, and all life embedded in it, Mendieta makes us face a question that people often do not pose in national and academic discourses. What should people do when a state is continually committing treason? How can we hold the state accountable for its utter disregard for creating the conditions for promoting the well-being of the people, especially its most structurally vulnerable segments of the population?
After contextualizing Huntington’s fears of Hispanics and Muslims, Mendieta offers a genealogy of citizenship, and in the process shows the importance of the distinction between the rights of humans and the rights of citizenship. He argues that in order to continue the unfinished project of revolution we must do away with the notion of jus sanguinis—ancestral ties–based citizenship—and embrace jus solis—birthright citizenship. The latter is a notion that deracializes political membership and takes citizenship as a verb that involves political responsibility and engaging in civic duties, as opposed to being a given.
