A liberal state must allow freedom of movement

The argument

It is a mark of the liberal state that it grants certain rights to its citizens, including the right to go wherever they please. States award this right of freedom of movement to its citizens by virtue of their humanity. Every human being should enjoy certain freedoms, such as the freedom to worship whichever god they desire or the freedom to go wherever they want. The grounds on which the right is held are what the whole argument depends on. A right granted because of citizenship is a benefit of membership and may be confined to members; a right granted because of humanity cannot be, because the quality it rests on is not something citizenship confers. The state should respect and protect these rights. This is a central tenet of political liberalism. The obligation is presented as definitional rather than optional, so a state declining it is not simply adopting a different policy but departing from the tradition it claims to belong to. Those who are not currently citizens of a particular liberal state are still humans. Thus they should enjoy the same rights as those who are already citizens. The inference is straightforward once the premise about grounds has been granted: if the qualifying characteristic is humanity, and non-citizens possess that characteristic, then they possess whatever it qualifies a person for. It would be inconsistent for the liberal state to deny this. If a liberal state disallows a non-citizen entry into its territory, then it will have denied his or her right to freedom of movement and fallen into inconsistency. The charge is one of incoherence rather than of cruelty, which is what gives it its force against a state that accepts liberal premises in the first place. Such a state cannot both hold that certain freedoms are owed to people as human beings and administer those freedoms as though they were owed only to the people it has already admitted.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the argument proves too much: if freedom of movement is an absolute right owed to every human by virtue of humanity, no state could ever set any immigration limit — a conclusion even most liberals reject. Liberal theory standardly distinguishes internal freedom of movement (a right against one's own state) from a right to enter any state one chooses; the former does not entail the latter. States also owe special associative duties to their own members, and democratic self-determination over membership is itself a liberal value — so a liberal state can consistently welcome immigrants as a matter of justice or generosity without conceding an unlimited right of entry that would dissolve the very idea of a bounded political community.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Freedom of movement as a liberal right is a right to move within one's own polity and against arbitrary detention, not a right to enter any state at will; the argument equivocates between the two. [Rejecting P2] That non-citizens are equally human grants them human rights, but the right to cross a particular border is not obviously among them — a liberal state can owe special duties to its members without denying anyone's humanity. [Rejecting C] The inconsistency charge dissolves once the two senses of freedom of movement are separated: a liberal state can limit entry while fully honouring the internal freedom it grants citizens, so "must allow freedom of movement" does not follow.

Further reading

Finish this argument and its counter(s) using this source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/immigration/#Lib Another source: http://www.jesp.org/PDF/Liberalism%20or%20Immigration%20Restrictions_final.pdf