Bridget Anderson’s review of my book confirms my sense that our approaches to migration are largely complementary rather than conflicting. The only disagreement that I have with her is that she seems to think that we disagree about some issues where I think we agree.

For example, I agree with her point that critics of immigration often contrast the views of “ordinary people” with the views of elites in an attempt to discredit the latter, but, as Anderson herself notes, this does not really challenge my claim to rely upon moral principles that are widely accepted, at least nominally, in states in Europe and North America. I disagree, however, with Anderson’s suggestion that I do not dispute the widespread view that migrants and citizens are “competitors for the privileges of membership.” On the contrary, the whole point of the first part of my book is to insist that justice requires that migrants be seen as members of society. I’m trying to criticize attempts to construct migrants and citizens as opposing categories of identity or as groups in competition with each other. Migrants’ claims to the rights of membership—and I prefer the term “rights” to “privileges”—are based upon the fact that they do belong, and I argue that it is both morally required and mutually beneficial for that belonging to be recognized by those in the receiving society.

Anderson also objects that I do not engage with the “empirical and historical questions about the origins of state inequalities.” I certainly agree that these are important questions. Consider, for example, the recent debates about how the United States should respond to child migrants fleeing from Central America. Those favoring a generous and welcoming response often made the point, rightly in my view, that the United States was in large part responsible for the creation of the violent circumstances that the children were fleeing because of its past actions in the region. In an earlier book I did emphasize the moral relevance of these sorts of historical and contextual factors in thinking about justice (Carens Reference Carens2000). In this book, however, I wanted to offer a theoretical account that would apply to all rich democratic states in Europe and North America, and that necessarily entails an abstraction from particularistic features of history even when they are morally relevant. In the case of the Central American children, for example, the responsibilities of all liberal states with respect to child refugees would be sufficient to make the United States obliged to extend protection to these children for reasons laid out in my book, even in the absence of this specific history. That is the sort of broader, more general argument that was the focus of my book. My sense is that the contextually specific arguments that are relevant to immigration complement and reinforce the general arguments that I offer in my book, and almost never conflict with them. A parallel point applies to Anderson’s objection to my lack of any discussion of the responsibility of capitalism for the global inequalities that I criticize. I think that it would be a mistake to tie a principled argument like mine too closely to a particular empirical explanation of the causes of existing inequality. For my purposes it is sufficient to establish that this global inequality is unjust and that this inequality is deeply linked to control over borders. That is the more fundamental point.