Introduction to symposium on international migration

Abstract

Between 2000 and 2020 the estimated number of individuals living in countries other than their birth country grew from 150 million to 272 million, or from 2.8% to 3.5% of world population. Partly because of this substantial growth, international migration is now an important area of enquiry for researchers in philosophy, politics, and economics. The Symposium brings together five leading and diverse thinkers from different disciplines to address some familiar and less familiar migration-related issues. They do so in a way that illuminates an issue of pressing public concern as well as some more general theoretical debates in political philosophy. Paul Bou-Habib’s subtly argued paper on ‘The Brain-Drain as Exploitation’ presents a distinctive of account of the wrongs involved in brain drain. Bou-Habib argues that migrants may be free to move, and he does not argue that migrants have duties of compensation to the home state. He argues, instead, that by free-riding on the human capital formation services of home states the states that currently receive skilled migrants from poor home states are making exploitative gains. As a result, receiving states have duties of compensation to migrants’ home states. In their lucid and thought-provoking paper, ‘Only Libertarianism Can Provide a Robust Justification for Open Borders’, Christopher Freiman and Javier Hidalgo turn to explore whether existing border regimes are deeply unjust because individuals possess a human right to engage in international migration. The authors argue that only a rights-based version of libertarianism provides a relatively robust justification for such a right. If so, those of us who are currently committed to the human right to