Countries with colonial pasts cannot turn immigrants away

The argument

This argument holds that countries with colonial pasts have a special obligation to accept immigrants — particularly from the lands they once colonised — because their present wealth and the present hardship of those lands are causally linked, and a nation cannot fairly shut out people whose countries it helped impoverish. The reasoning is one of historical responsibility. The former colonial powers built much of their prosperity on the resources, labour and exploitation of their empires — extracting wealth, drawing borders, distorting economies, and leaving many former colonies poorer, less stable and more conflict-prone than they found them. Much migration today flows precisely from those countries toward the former metropoles, driven by poverty, instability and the enduring economic patterns colonialism established. The argument contends it is incoherent and unjust for a country to have grown rich by reaching into other nations and then to slam its doors against the people now leaving those same nations, especially when the conditions they flee are in part a legacy of that very intrusion. The principle invoked is that those who cause or benefit from a harm owe something to those harmed. Having taken from these countries, the former colonial powers cannot consistently treat the resulting migration as an unprovoked imposition by strangers; the relationship is not one of charity but of debt. Accepting immigrants from this perspective is partial restitution — acknowledging that the wealth drawing migrants in and the deprivation pushing them out share a single colonial root. From this standpoint, a colonial history converts immigration from an optional generosity into an obligation. Because countries with colonial pasts ruined other countries and grew rich doing so, this argument holds, they cannot turn away the immigrants who come from them, and should accept immigrants.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Even granting that colonial extraction built wealth and left lasting damage, the remedy the argument reaches is poorly matched to the wrong it identifies. If the debt is owed to the populations of formerly colonised countries, immigration discharges it only for those who leave — a small and self-selected minority, disproportionately those with the resources to move — while doing nothing for the majority who remain, and the emigration of skilled workers can worsen conditions in the very countries said to be owed. Development transfers, debt cancellation, trade access and reparations reach the population identified as wronged; admission reaches whoever arrives. The mapping between colonisers and migrants is also loose. Much contemporary migration does not run from a country's former colonies to it, a great deal runs between countries with no colonial relationship at all, and states that held no empires — or were themselves colonised — receive substantial migration. As a principle of policy this would bind some states and exempt others on grounds unrelated to the migrants in front of them. The moral framework is contested at its base as well, since inherited collective liability is disputed, particularly where the present population includes many descendants of the colonised and many with no connection to the empire. And the argument makes admission a matter of debt owed rather than of the migrants' own claims — asylum, family, work, the right to seek a better life — which are the grounds most defences of immigration rest on, and which require nobody to accept the colonial premise first.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Granting that colonial extraction built wealth and left lasting damage, immigration benefits the minority who leave rather than the populations said to be owed, while development transfers, debt cancellation, trade access or reparations reach them directly. [Rejecting P2] The mapping is loose: much migration does not run from former colonies to their metropoles, states with no colonial empires receive substantial migration, and the principle would bind some states while exempting others on grounds unrelated to the migrants concerned. [Rejecting P3] Inherited collective liability is contested, especially where the present population includes descendants of the colonised — and the argument grounds admission in debt rather than in migrants' own claims to asylum, family reunion or work, on which most defences of immigration rest.

Further reading

Finish this argument using this source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/opinion/immigration-reparations.html