Recently, many countries have enacted migration policies that raise new ethical questions. These policies range from keeping asylum seekers from reaching their borders to deporting people who had been living peacefully in the country for decades. Because they produce suffering for migrants and citizens alike, these policies demand ethical evaluation. Justice for People on the Move responds to this demand.

Current debates on migration ethics often pit the view that there should be open borders against the view that nation-states have an unqualified right to control them. Gillian Brock’s new book charts a middle path between these positions. It develops a normative framework for evaluating migration policies that holds that states have a unilateral right to control their borders because they are self-determining, but these policies ought to be constrained by the international state system and the international human rights regime.

According to Brock, justice requires that there be states with rights to control their own borders. She grounds this view in the importance of moral agency. To be an independent moral agent, a person needs to meet basic needs (including health, security, understanding, autonomy, and decent social relations). Meeting such needs, in turn, requires satisfying “derivative needs” such as basic economic conditions, a community, and political self-determination. Derivative needs tend to be anchored in particular places because people make located life-plans that presuppose the reasonably secure access to territory. Therefore, attaining the prerequisites for moral agency, justice, and just institutions requires limited jurisdictions with the right to control their own borders. People need settlements, and they need administrative structures to achieve the components of justice within them. So, in Brock’s view, we should support territorial institutional schemes, including their borders, when they have a good chance of securing justice. Brock concludes that the state and the modern state system are currently the best available institutions to do this.

Exclusionary borders can be justified then, but only to the extent that states and the state system are legitimate. For Brock, “settlers may be justified in continuing a way of life on a particular territory if their settlement arose without wrongdoing and they do not promote wrongdoing” (p. 25). However, most states lack such historical legitimacy. Their rights then come from a commitment to advancing their citizens’ interests and from guaranteeing that every person (no matter where they are) can also enjoy similar protections and opportunities. Hence states are entitled to their borders only insofar as they protect human rights, both within their borders and outside, and only if they also contribute to the justice of the state system as a whole. This ensures that every person has a country that secures basic needs, and when individual states do not uphold human rights, the international community has the duty to pick up the slack. (Brock substantiates these claims by drawing on Charles Beitz’s practice-based theory of human rights.)

Brock’s central argument for the framework of justice for people on the move runs as follows:

1. 1. States may enjoy a right to self-determination when legitimacy conditions are met…

2. 2. To exercise power legitimately, states must respect their own citizen’s human rights…

3. 3. Exercising power legitimately is also conditional on being part of a legitimate state system.

4. 4. The legitimacy of the state system requires states to participate in the cooperative project needed to sustain a justified state system. (p. 38)

Hence if a state fails to fulfill these conditions, it forfeits its right to self-determination (including its right to close its borders). A claim to self-determination cannot shield a state from demands to uphold human rights within and beyond its borders. In sum, Brock’s framework gives us a three-layered account of legitimacy that has an internal requirement, a system requirement, and a contribution requirement. If—but only if—every state fulfilled these requirements, people on the move could rest assured that their needs would be met, and every country could legitimately control their own borders.

Using this normative framework as a metric, the book analyzes several recent policies. On Muslim bans, Brock concludes that they fail the first and third requirements. On deportation of long-term migrants, she argues that these policies are unjust, at least when the state has created expectations about how the migrants’ lives would continue (and other cases). On refugees, she uses the example of camps in Uganda and Jordan and asserts that there should be international institutions coordinating a development approach to refugee aid. Regarding migrant worker programs, Brock favors them, as long as they give mutual advantage to workers and employers and provide human rights protections. On restrictions on migration as a precaution against terrorism, she examines the example of the United States, arguing that there is no evidence of a meaningful connection between those two concerns. Finally, the book wades into the controversy over whether (legitimate) states should always open their doors to migrants or are allowed to deny them entry. Brock relies on the 2018 Global Compact for Safe Orderly and Regular Migration to show that, by bolstering international systemic commitments, the compact reinforces individual states’ capacity to govern their borders, manage migration at the local level, and create inclusive communities. Her conclusion is “a human rights oriented middle ground between the positions of those who advocate for open borders and their critics” (p. 226).

Justice for People on the Move will be invaluable for those seeking clear ethical metrics for evaluating recent immigration policies. Brock deftly navigates between exploring current events and providing sound philosophical reasoning. Her capacious ethical framework draws from her prior work on global justice and solidly grounds arguments regarding policies that affect the human rights of migrants and refugees. The book also stands out by exploring South–South migration. This global approach reminds us that international movement agitates all states, whether poor or rich. Governing migration is therefore a shared responsibility of every individual state and of the system as a whole. Even those countries that think that they are off the hook because they are not an obvious destination for migrants are also responsible for the migrant’s fate; hence, they too are required to contribute to solving the migration crisis. Brock’s three-tiered framework reminds us that unless all rights are respected, no one is safe, and thus nobody may look the other way.

For all its welcome features and its clarity with respect to human rights, however, the book’s scope remains narrow. Like many other recent books on migration ethics, its main arguments remain constrained by the fairly abstract debate on the state’s right to exclude, “the classical open borders debate” (see Amy Reed Sandoval, “The New Open Borders Debate,” in The Ethics and Politics of Immigration: Core Issues and Emerging Trends, edited by Alex Sager, 2016). Although this has become the standard way of tackling migration ethics, the approach’s narrow scope depends on two questionable assumptions.

The first is that we have to accept that “we find ourselves in a world of states” (p. 33). In other words, states are the received institutional order that we must seek to justify. My concern with this assumption is that we also find ourselves in a world of forces that escape the state: most states’ attempts to contain flows of people are futile, as are their attempts to control unauthorized migrant populations. For example, even if all the governments in Central and North America committed to combating human rights abuses, migrants would still suffer at the hands of the drug cartels. So, if the ethical problems of migration transcend the institutions of the nation-state, perhaps migration ethics should also look beyond the institutional realm and focus on individuals or communities.

The second questionable assumption concerns normative standards. No state is fully legitimate because none fully respects human rights, as Brock acknowledges. Therefore, a state’s legitimacy depends on the promise that it will make good-faith efforts to do better in the future. But if everything hangs on a vague unfulfilled promise, why should we remain committed to the narrow approach of state legitimacy, rather than exploring other ideal frameworks of justice? If the nation-state and the state system are partially the cause of the current problems, why not concentrate on other promising normative frameworks that are not tethered to the nation-state? Many of migration’s human costs come from the unfulfilled (and arguably unfulfillable) ideal of having one self-determining people fully within each territory. Could we solve some of our current problems by changing our normative horizons? In the last two decades, scholars have proposed “states without nations,” “open borders,” “no borders,” and borders that detach jurisdictions from communal identity (as I propose in On Borders). Why not explore whether these alternative approaches could help us deliver justice for people on the move?

These considerations, however, do not affect the book’s core arguments. These are indeed challenging times for migrants. Gillian Brock’s book provides a clear and well-grounded framework for considering what it means to do them justice.