by J. Toby Reiner, Dickinson College, [This article first appeared in The Conversation, republished with permission]
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested roughly 50,000 immigrants in July and August 2026; almost 80% of those migrants did not have a criminal record. Until the end of the Biden administration, federal authorities did not expect migrants to leave the country while their visa renewal was pending. The Trump administration has changed that policy.
ICE has defended itself for the overall scale of detentions by saying that it is simply enforcing federal immigration law. However, immigrant rights advocates are skeptical about this claim and wary about the lack of oversight of ICE agents.
This scale of immigration enforcement raises fundamental philosophical questions: What ethical obligations do governments have to prospective migrants? And what claims to admission do migrants have?
As a scholar of migration ethics, I have studied the arguments philosophers make about migration. Many philosophers claim that immigration should be understood as a human right. From their perspective, governments have an important responsibility to tread carefully when denying entry to migrants and especially when deporting them.
Freedom of movement as a human right
To consider the moral foundations of criticisms of ICE, it is useful to first examine the arguments in favor of freedom of movement.
Several philosophers have argued for freedom of movement, often on the grounds that migration should be understood as a human right. For example, the philosopher Kieran Oberman argues that people have a basic interest in being able to move to any country in which they have core attachments, such as a job or close family members. This argument follows the claim, developed by philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, that individuals should be free to pursue their own life plans. They hold that this pursuit is essential to achieving self-realization.
The argument for freedom of movement often involves a comparison to movement within a nation-state. At least in liberal democracies, citizens are entitled to move anywhere they wish within state borders. Political philosopher Joseph Carens uses this claim when he argues that freedom of international movement is justified as an extension of internal freedom of movement.
Citizens may move where they wish within state borders because this protects freedom. This includes both the freedom to pursue important personal projects and goals, and to pursue joint projects such as business endeavors.
The freedom-based argument for migration maintains that the same considerations that apply within a country also do so internationally. For example, immigration restrictions can prevent people from marrying their preferred partner or from pursuing the job of their dreams.
If we value freedom, we have a reason to allow people to work, study and live wherever they wish because doing so may be integral to a fulfilling life.
If migration were a human right, then any state-imposed restriction on movement across borders would constitute an unjust violation of rights. According to this perspective, then, states do not have the right to control immigration.
Underlying this view is a conception of human rights in which rights take precedence over other values, such as social welfare, because they protect vital human interests.
Migration and cultural cohesion
Against this view, other philosophers hold that societies rely for their cohesion on some degree of cultural commonality. In this view – echoed by many political critics of mass migration – unless political communities have shared values, they will be unstable.
A related argument made by philosophers such as Sarah Song and Michael Walzer is that control over migration is integral to self-determination. Without it, states cannot be sovereign entities that decide for themselves what shape their society should take. They cannot produce “communities of character”: social groups that share a way of life that they wish to pass on to their descendants.
Migration and global equality
But some philosophers argue national sovereignty cannot override people’s equality of opportunity – a key goal of liberal democracies. Migration could serve a way to expand opportunities across borders.
In this view, restrictions on migration render citizenship a form of feudal privilege in an unequal world; they deny people from poorer countries the chance to access opportunities and resources in wealthier economies.
This argument holds, then, that restrictions on migration fix a global hierarchy in place, reduce social mobility and give people unearned advantages based on where they happened to be born. Moreover, they do this using all the tools of violence at the state’s disposal.
As with the freedom argument, this claim hopes to appeal to both the left and the right, for equality of opportunity is a bipartisan political value.
Migration restriction and its impact on opportunities
In addition, scholars such as the political geographer Reece Jones argue that migration restrictions reinforce global racial inequalities. As Jones notes, the migrants who are denied admission to the U.S., and to Western European countries, are predominantly from countries in the Global South that are majority nonwhite.
Advocates of the equality argument often hold that migration will not merely promote equality of opportunity but also reduce economic inequality. This is because opportunities to access social welfare, healthcare and other important social goods are often greater in wealthier economies.
For example, the philosopher Darrel Moellendorf argues that children should have the same opportunity to become a banker wherever in the world they are born. Moellendorf holds that, if there were global equality of opportunity, a child born in Mozambique would have the same chance of becoming an investment banker as would one born in Switzerland. Migration is thus a crucial means of enabling people born in the Global South to access lucrative jobs.
There are many objections to this proposal. For example, Song points out that different societies regard different opportunities as important. It therefore might not be possible to come up with a global list of opportunities that should be equal.
Yet the equality of opportunity argument gets to the core of the dispute about migration. Liberal democracies understand themselves to be committed to meritocracy. This requires that individuals rise and fall based on their own talents.
As migration restrictions deny people opportunities based on where they were born, they may be in tension with fundamental democratic principles.
J. Toby Reiner, Professor of Political Science, Dickinson College
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.