The forthcoming article “States, cities, and border control: Do sub-state collectives have a right to protect vulnerable people on the move?” by Kim Angell is summarized by the author below.
“A standard argument in favor of a state’s right to control its borders appeals to the value of collective self-determination. The idea, roughly, is that a state’s members have a morally significant interest in freely determining the values, goals, and practices that apply within their territory. Outsiders may bring unwanted changes, either by taxing the state’s resources or by introducing different values, goals, and practices. Collective self-determination, therefore, typically requires rights of border control. However, the state’s right to control its borders is not absolute. Outsiders have a significant interest in the protection of basic human rights, and each state must do its share in extending such protection to vulnerable people on the move. But as long as the state has fulfilled its ‘fair share’ (whatever that may be), it may exercise discretionary border control beyond that. Or so the standard argument from self-determination goes.
This paper challenges the self-determination argument on its own terms. The key idea is that what is valuable for state collectives might also be valuable for substate collectives. If we are to consistently value collective self-determination, we must look beyond the state level and consider whether substate collectives—such as cities—may also have relevant interests in immigration policy.
In many cases, cities have expressed strong solidarity with vulnerable people on the move, declaring their willingness to protect additional vulnerable immigrants—above and beyond those protected by the state. The paper discusses various examples of this, both from Europe (e.g., the Solidarity Cities network) and North America (e.g., the sanctuary city movement). If cities have such relevant goals and are capable of self-determination, they have a valid claim to protect additional vulnerable people on the move. This holds regardless of whether those people are UN Convention refugees, asylum seekers, unauthorized immigrants, or individuals with various liminal legal statuses.
A city’s claim to protect additional vulnerable people on the move must, of course, be balanced against the state’s claim to close its borders. After all, if self-determination matters, it must matter on both sides. Yet, as the paper demonstrates, this balancing process will inevitably result in a moral right for the city to protect an additional quota of vulnerable people on the move. While the exact size of this quota will vary from case to case, it will never be empty.
This result is quite surprising, given that the value of self-determination has traditionally been used to defend strong rights of border control for states. A key message of this paper, then, is that one of the most central arguments in the debate on immigration and border control must be reassessed.”
About the Author: Kim Angell is a Research Programme Manager at The Norwegian Nobel Institute. Their research “States, cities, and border control: Do sub-state collectives have a right to protect vulnerable people on the move?” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.