Immigration and Social Equality: The Ethics of Skill-Selective Immigration Policy

Skill-selective immigration policies, through which states favor the admission of highly-skilled migrants over low-skilled migrants, are a familiar component of the immigration landscape. Wealthy Western states, such as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia have explicitly declared their desire to attract the "best and the brightest". On the other hand, attitudes towards low-skilled migrants could not be more different. They have consistently been portrayed as dangerous and undesirable, a drain on social welfare, and economically threatening to citizens. Immigration and Social Equality argues that we ought to re-think this stance. Beginning from the widely-shared principle of equal respect for all persons, it proposes that equal respect requires the recognition of each person's pro tanto right to social equality, regardless of their citizenship status. Even if states have the right to exclude non-citizens, they cannot do so in a way that is demeaning or subordinating to excluded persons. The right to social equality gives us a richer picture of why certain instances of immigrant selection, such as the US's recent ban on citizens from Muslim-majority countries, are unjust. However, it also has troubling implications for skill-selective immigration policies, as they are currently practiced: the book reveals that they ought to be regarded as a form of wrongful discrimination. Drawing on the framework of social equality, Désirée Lim goes on to consider the problem of colonial injustice and how it may be reproduced by skill-selective immigration policies, as well as migratorial disobedience.