Over 11 million illegal immigrants reside in the United States, and a projected 1,400 new immigrants cross the border illegally or overstay their visas each year, making immigration a topic of a raging debate in the US. Debating Immigration is a volume of 18 original essays, written by activists, experts and scholars, and organized around five themes of religion and philosophy, law and policy, economics and demographics, race and ethnicity, and cosmopolitanism. Debating Immigration contributes to this debate by searching for the answers to a range of questions: Who should be admitted as an immigrant? What rights and benefits should host countries grant immigrants? What, if anything, do immigrants owe their host countries? How can the division between public attitudes about immigration and the policies produced by elected officials be explained? Why has the US failed to develop a well-articulated public philosophy of immigration? What does the Bible say about immigration policy? What are the moral and social obligations among fellow citizens? Do these obligations trump responsibilities to the world’s poor? How can the tendency to frame the immigration debate in the dichotomous terms of legal versus illegal and citizen versus non-citizen be explained, when the most critical troubles are the consequences of immigration itself and not its legality or lack thereof? How is the European experience different from the US one?
Debating Immigration is innovative as there are very few studies that address the issue of immigration from a philosophical perspective. James Edwards’ essay, A biblical perspective on immigration, is especially noteworthy. He argues that the Bible and Judeo-Christian ideology emphasize the authority of civil government to preserve the rule of law and defend nations against invasion. Thus emerges a debate between the “cosmopolitan” viewpoint that endorses shared citizenship and a universal obligation of distributive justice opposed to the “civic obligations” viewpoint that sup- ports the existence of special obligations among citizens. Stephen Macedo rejects the “cosmopolitan” viewpoint and claims that Americans have to prioritize the needs of the poorest Americans rather than the globally impoverished.
There are four problems with Debating Immigration: First, as seen in Macedo and Edwards’ essays, there is a general tendency among the authors toward a restrictive immigration policy for the US. This is also reflected in other essays like Steve Camarote’s, where he argues that there is a direct relationship between unemployment of native- born workers and increases in the immigrant population. Thus, overall, the volume seems as if it is mirroring and promoting the negative side of the American public attitude toward immigrants. This yields a second problem. Although the essays are multifaceted, as stated in the preface, they are comprehensive in their themes, but not perspectives. Almost all the essays look at the issue of migration specifically from the host country perspective, ignoring the other actors in the debate such as the governments, nations of origin and most importantly the immigrants themselves. This goes against the general trend in migration literature, which has recently begun to ad- dress the issue from different levels and actors’ perspectives (see, for example, Thomas Faist). In this sense, the essays in Debating Immigration are a setback in terms of methodology. Finally, although the book is promoted as if it is a comparative volume of European versus American migration policies, this is not really the case. The essays are not balanced in their geographical focus. There are far more essays addressing the American case than the European one, and the few essays on Europe are not actually comparative, but mostly descriptive.
All in all, Debating Immigration is an important volume with its different themes, especially the parts devoted to philosophy and religion. It is also an articulate projection of the negative side of the American public view on the issue of immigration. However, readers must be warned that there are many other actors in the immigration debate and it is not so easy to reject cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization. Although most of the essays promote obligations towards the nation, this reviewer is of the view that the Global North does have moral obligations towards the poor of the world.
