Proportional Immigration Enforcement

This article considers how much harm is justified in reaching immigration goals. Political philosophers generally overlook this question, focusing on states’ rights to exclude immigrants in general, rather than which means of exclusion are justified. For example, even if excluding migrants during pandemics is justified, shooting at migrants is not. We argue that harm in immigration enforcement must be proportional. Whether harm is proportional depends on levels of harm migrants experience relative to harm immigration controls avert, whether migrants are forced to migrate, and whether harm is instigated by a state versus a nonstate actor. We further demonstrate that this claim is supported in a sample of UK and US citizens, including among those opposed to increasing migration. Drawing on an original experiment, novel in evaluating whether public opinions are consistent with the requirements of immigration justice, we demonstrate that opinions are consistent with the subprinciples of proportionality we present.