Justice, Migration, and Mercy

FAIN: FT-248890-16

Michael Blake
University of Washington (Seattle, WA 98195-1016)

A book-length study on the morality of migration, the rights of citizenship, and asylum law.

I hope to write, in the summer of 2016, the central chapters of a monograph on the morality of migration. My thesis will be that many commentators who have looked at this issue have missed the point; by focusing on justice, at the expense of other virtues, they have ignored the true moral complexity of migration. I want to demonstrate that justice has some role to play in how we understand migration—in particular, in the analysis of who ought to count as a refugee. Many more people, though, do not have a right in justice to move, nor a right to remain where they are if they have crossed borders without legal permission. My argument, however, is that we have good moral reasons to develop programs by which many of these people will be given the rights of citizenship. These moral reasons, though, have less to do with the rights of the migrant, and more to do with the creation of a domestic political society that demonstrates and practices the virtue of mercy.

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