Presumed guilty until proven credible: epistemic injustice toward Venezuelan immigrants in Colombia

Abstract

With few exceptions, philosophers working on immigration have not taken up the topic of epistemic injustice, primarily, I imagine, because immigration justice is often too narrowly conceived of as encompassing moral and political concerns rather than epistemic ones. But the more I think about cases like the ones just highlighted, along with other injustices immigrants endure on a daily basis, the more I take this to be a mistake; epistemic injustices must be seen as a central aspect of immigration injustice too. In what follows, I will demonstrate how this is the case. More specifically, after providing an overview about the nature of epistemic injustice, I will highlight some examples of it in the lives of displaced Venezuelan immigrants in Colombia. In doing so, I hope to show why discussions about immigration injustice must include identifying and confronting epistemic wrongs.