Social freedom and migration in a non-ideal world

ABSTRACT In this paper, I identify two key contributions that David Ingram makes to the migration ethics literature, one methodological and one substantive. Ingram’s methodological contribution is to model how non-ideal theorizing can be done without abstracting away the complexities surrounding migration, including how the motivation to migrate is tied to existing institutional structures. He does this by beginning with the powerlessness and coercion experienced by certain classes of migrants, which he analyses using a rich conception of agency as social freedom. From here, Ingram develops his substantive contribution. Ingram argues that cosmopolitan and communitarian analyses cannot fully capture the dilemma surrounding forced migration: migrate to improve welfare or remain for the sake of identity and community. Ingram identifies the injustice of borders as occurring within the context of an interconnected international order operating without discursive accountability to most of those affected by its policies. Ingram argues that until international institutions are suitably reformed, asylum is owed to economic refugees because of the coercive circumstances existing in their countries of origin. This allows him to show, too, why specific states have obligations to asylum seekers: because they participate in the institutions that have contributed to these circumstances. Although I agree with Ingram’s overall approach, I will question whether he downplays the demands of his conception of social freedom and consider the feasibility of institutionalizing his discourse theoretic framework.


Introduction
In World Crisis and Underdevelopment, David Ingram offers a nuanced analysis and critique of the way global political and economic structures impact our lives, including the decision to migrate. 1 Central to Ingram's analysis is social freedom, a Hegelian conception of freedom whereby individual freedom is a function of objective social conditions. Mention of Hegel is likely to bring to mind communitarian arguments against migratione.g., Michael Walzer or David Millerbut Ingram is not a communitarian; he is a discourse theorist, a position that, he argues, 'draw[s] quasicosmopolitan considerations from communitarian premises' (Ingram 2018, 159). In CONTACT Drew Thompson drewjthompson@gmail.com Department of Philosophy, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, USA 1 I would like to thank David Ingram for clarifying aspects of his argument and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft.
Ingram's formulation, discourse theory utilizes a conception of agency that emphasizes the individual's recognitional dependence on and discursive accountability to others. Ingram's argument may be described as 'open border,' but this is not because of any endorsement of fundamental principles governing movement; it is because mostthough possibly not allreasons in favour of closed borders will not survive discursive examination.
In what follows I identify two key contributions Ingram makes to the migration ethics literature, one methodological and one substantive. Ingram's methodological contribution is to model how non-ideal theorizing can be done without abstracting away the complexities surrounding migration, including how the motivation to migrate is conditioned by existing institutional structures. He does this by beginning with the powerlessness and coercion experienced by certain classes of migrants, which he analyses using a conception of agency as social freedom. From here, Ingram develops his substantive contribution. Ingram argues that cosmopolitan and communitarian analyses cannot fully capture the dilemma surrounding forced migration: migrate to improve welfare or remain for the sake of identity and community. Ingram identifies the injustice of borders as occurring within the context of an interconnected international order operating without discursive accountability to most of those affected by its policies. Ingram argues that until international institutions are suitably reformed, asylum is owed to economic refugees because of the coercive circumstances existing in their countries of origin. This allows him to show, too, why specific states have obligations to asylum seekers: because they participate in the institutions that have contributed to these circumstances. Although I agree with Ingram's overall approach, I will question whether he downplays the demands of his conception of social freedom, and I will consider the feasibility of institutionalizing his discourse theoretic framework.
Section I: Methodology: ideal versus non-ideal approaches to migration Methodologically, a foundational question for migration ethics is whether to theorize the ethics or morality of migration within ideal theory or non-ideal theory. Wherein exactly this distinction lies is disputed, but one way to distinguish ideal from non-ideal theory is to determine whether the focus is on identifying what justice is (ideal theory) or on responding to injustice (non-ideal theory). In ideal theory, a key assumption is that all duties of justice will be fulfilled, what Rawls called 'strict compliance.' Non-ideal theory, then, assumes partial compliance and is concerned with rectifying injustices. 2 For Rawls, non-ideal theory presupposes ideal theory: '[ideal theory] provides, I believe, the only basis for the systematic grasp of these more pressing problems' (Rawls 2009, 8). This epistemological claim justifies focusing first on ideal theory and only later attending to non-ideal theory (Simmons 2010).
Yet critics like Charles Mills argue that attending to ideal theory distracts from the injustices that exist before our eyes. Mills argues that Rawls et al. spend so much time on ideal theory that they never get to non-ideal theory (Stemplowska and Swift 2012). Worse still, Mills argues that ideal theory may inadvertently justify the status quo.
Consider that Rawls devoted very little attention to problems of racial injustice, despite writing A Theory of Justice in the United States during the 1960s. Further, Mills has argued that within the liberal tradition, the use of hypothetical contracts may inadvertently justify existing injustices since the normative framework established by hypothetical contract is often assumed without understanding the way existing residents are incorporated involuntarily into political communities (Mills 2008).
Other problems of ideality emerge in Rawls' work specific to migration. In Law of Peoples, Rawls argued that the 'problem of migration' would not exist in ideal theory since most reasons why one would want to migrate would be absent in a just world, given the removal of 'push factors' such as severe human rights violations or the existence of absolute poverty (Rawls 1999, 9). 3 Other theorists, notably Christopher Heath Wellman, treat migration as a matter of voluntary choice, focusing on the moral right of political communities to choose whether to associate with new migrants without considering the complexity of reasons underlying migration (Wellman 2008).
These ideal accounts can be contrasted to non-ideal theories of migration which begin by focusing on existing injustices and identifying the implications of these injustices on principles or ideals (though how one defines injustice requires some ideal theory). 4 As an example, José Jorge Mendoza has shown how the practice of border enforcement is tied up with racial profiling and discrimination. American residents with a 'Mexican Appearance' are stopped much more frequently by border officials, which calls into doubt the ability of border controls to comply with a principle of non-discrimination (Mendoza 2014). Border controls that may 'in principle' be justified are cast into doubt by seeing how these controls are implemented 'in practice. ' Ingram, as a critical theorist, is a non-ideal theorist. Marx defined critical theory as 'the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age' (Ingram 2018, 29), an approach Ingram adopts by beginning with '[h]ow the disadvantaged experience deprivation and powerlessness as a modality of structural coercion' (xi-xii). Ingram draws from several disciplines, including sociology, political science, law and economicsin addition to favouring qualitative approaches to poverty knowledgeto theorize how structural coercion is experienced. This positions Ingram to theorize migration nonideally because he begins with the experience of coerced migrantsrefugees, economic 'migrants' (more on this term later), and those trafficked or smuggled: experiences of coercion and extreme poverty which ought to be absent from an ideal theory.
Believing oneself to be deprived or powerless is not sufficient; there must be a conceptual framework by which these claims can be clarified and assessed. For this, Ingram defends a conception of agency informed by both discourse ethics (Habermas) and recognition theory (Hegel via Honneth). On a minimalist view of agency, agency is a property of an agent who can choose and act on her life plans. An agent is be free to the extent she can formulate her own life plans (positive freedom) and pursue them without interference (negative freedom). The problem with this minimalist account is that it neglects the social and cultural institutions that recognize agents as persons capable of giving reasons. According to discourse ethics' intersubjective conception of rationality, reason is discursive (i.e., communicative rationality). So, agency requires justifying one's actions and beliefs with reasons that others can accept (what Ingram calls rational or discursive accountability) (53). Yet discursive accountability is only part of what agency consists in; agential development requires that one live in environments that permit recognition as someone capable of giving reasons, as well as someone who can make social contributions. Axel Honneth has done the most to show how individuals are dependent upon intimate, economic and democratic spheres of relations (Honneth 2014). Without these institutions, individuals may fail to experience what Ingram, following Honneth, calls social freedom.
Social freedom is achieved when individuals 'self-consciously recognize the freedom of the other as a precondition for, rather than as a limit to, their own freedom' (Ingram 2018, 67). Social freedom goes beyond negative and positive accounts of freedom insofar as it requires institutions in the 'objective world' for the satisfaction of one's freedom. Of course, social freedom relies upon freedom as non-interference (provided by the law) and self-determination (provided by morality and political rights), and Ingram does much to stress the ways in which agency is enabled (or limited) by both legal and moral norms. Yet, without a background set of institutions in which individuals are affirmed as individuals, freedom is, at best, unsatisfying, and at worst, empty (67).
Violations of agency define what an injustice is, a claim Ingram defends by drawing on Nancy Fraser's principle of participatory parity: injustices occur when individuals are denied the opportunity to discursively shape the institutions to which they are subject (77). For example, one aspect of the injustice of severe poverty is that poverty is caused by economic institutions to which the global poor have little, if no, discursive access. After the signing of NAFTA in 1994, millions of small farmers in Mexico, campesinos, were forced off their land, in part, because they could not compete with their subsidized American competitors. Despite the significant dependence of the Mexican economy on the United States' post-NAFTA, American legislators debating federal subsidies did not seek out any input from affected campesinos (Carlsen 2013). Because injustices are violations of the principle of participatory parity, Ingram argues for an institutionalization of discursive procedures so that those affected can contribute to the relevant debates. Through these discursive institutions, individuals achieve greater agency since discourses take place within cooperative discursive institutions, in which individuals are able to critique the terms of association (Ingram 2018, 83-86). In practice, this would mean giving greater input, if not formal participatory rights, to non-Americans, given the effects of US policy on non-Americans' interests.
In sum, agency reflects a form of social freedom in which individuals are affirmed as moral, legal and social equals, and that protections are afforded to the contexts in which agential development occurs. This description does not exhaust Ingram's discussion of agency. Ingram also discusses several dilemmas in the context of poverty (and then migration) in which pursuit of one form of agency, such as welfare agency or feminist agency, requires sacrificing social freedom for the sake of achieving welfare or being empowered at the cost of social exclusion (79-81, 156-162).
Section II: Migration, coercion and social freedom Using this richer form of agency as social freedom, Ingram's substantive contribution to the migration literature can be seen: both borders and coerced migration limit the agency of migrants, and are unjust, to the extent they take place under institutions operating without participatory parity. This nuanced analysis allows him to criticize as incomplete cosmopolitanspecifically libertarian and welfaristand communitarian accounts of migration.
Consider how a cosmopolitan theorizes the experience of the millions of irregular Mexican migrants who arrived in the United States post-NAFTA. The injustice faced by these migrants is captured by the existence of border restrictions: justice requires the elimination of borders in order to respect equal moral autonomy. A cosmopolitan commitment to freedom and equality condemns the unjust 'feudal privilege' of citizenship, as well as the attendant restrictions on labour mobility (Carens 1987). Addressing this injustice requires removing border restrictions so those who face economic, political, or social hardships in their country can escape them by migrating.
Ingram argues that this analysis leaves out the impact of migration on migrants' social freedom. Economically desperate migrants surrender 'freedom, social recognition, and well-being' by migrating away from communities of recognition (Ingram 2018, 153). Emigrants leave behind the recognitive relationships in which their identities are affirmedfamilies, friends and community. Migrants lose political rights, even if they are 'legal,' since there is a delay between admissions and being granted voting rights. Cosmopolitans emphasize migration as a means to satisfy welfare agency, at the expense of identity agency and discursive accountability, because they 'tend to dismiss the importance of communal attachments for fostering social recognition and intact identity' (153).
One could object that open borders could mitigate at least some of these losses. Open borders would permit migrants to take families and friends with them and recreate some of the conditions necessary for social freedom (e.g., by immediately granting political rights). However, this solution only seeks to recreate what migrants may have wanted from the beginning: satisfied welfare agency within one's country of origin and opportunities to participate in decisions affecting them. One could hypothesize that many individuals would not migrate if comparative economic opportunities existed at home. The sociologist Claude Fischer has shown that within the United States, greater economic security leads to less domestic migration (Fisher 2016). Since domestic migration requires fewer legal, political and social sacrifices, international migration could fall even more substantially if conditions were improved in sending states.
Ingram's analysis ultimately demonstrates the inadequacy of the cosmopolitan's prioritization of negative over positive political freedom. The open border solution does not entirely remedy the powerlessness migrants experience by being coerced to migrate as a result of political and economic forces over which they have no control. In fact, without a discursive institutional framework to tame the global economy, global migration may be de facto controlled by unaccountable transnational corporations that can relocate factories to new jurisdictions with more favourable regulations.
Ingram argues that some of the cosmopolitan's shortcomings are addressed by communitarians, given the latter's commitment to communities of recognition. However, Ingram rejects the way many communitarians 'wrongly postulat[e] the ontological priority of community over individual, welfare over autonomy … [and] often exaggerate the importance of stability, harmony, and homogeneity requisite for maintaining intact relationships based on solidarity' (Ingram 2018, 156). Communitarians would prioritize would-be migrants remaining to fulfil obligations to one's family and community rather than moving abroad to improve one and one's family's prospects. Applied consistently, communitarian policies may even justify paternalistic restrictions on emigration.
Taken together, both communitarian and cosmopolitan approaches fail to address the need to reform global economic and political institutions consistent with the demands of social freedom. Ingram argues that a better framework is provided by discourse theory, which addresses both communitarian and cosmopolitan concerns. Discourse theory requires that institutions and norms be justified through an inclusive deliberative process. As Ingram notes, '[d]iscourse ethics draws quasi-cosmopolitan implications from communitarian premises' (159). Because discourse theory requires face-to-face deliberation, it cannot abstract away from the identities of the agents deliberating in the way that Rawls, for example, veiled his contractors with ignorance via a thin theory of the good. Nonetheless, there is a component of idealization inherent to discourse theory: it allows individuals to question any institution or the framework for justifying the institution (159).
Ingram argues that discourse theory can inform migration debates in three ways. First, discourse theory informs the metapolitical framework in which migration policies are discussed (159-160). Discourse theory rejects any a priori constraints on what is relevant to immigration debates, and discursive justification applies equally to how we discuss these discussions. One consequence is the removal of the deference given to the status quo: receiving communities must offer reasons why admission cannot be granted to non-members. Yet, these reasons must withstand intersubjective questioning: what is a 'good' reason is a reason that others find reasonable or acceptable.
Secondly, discourse theory can inform deliberation about policy by 'expanding the community of deliberation to include migrants' (163). To assess a given policy, Ingram proposes a Discourse-Theoretic Principle of Immigration (DPI): An admission policy is just only if both current members and applicants could not reasonably reject it after fully and impartially discussing the moral rights and interests at stake for all affected parties (164).

Ingram then shows the implications of what DPI would reject:
Using my principle, it becomes immediately apparent that policies that restrict entry of economic and political refugees whose basic human rights are at stake are unjust. Also unjust, it seems, are policies that deny guest workers full civil rights and, if their immigration status is more permanent than temporary, a pathway to citizenship. Importantly, immigration policies that exclude candidates because their cultural beliefs and practices are different from those of the host country are unjust as well (165).
The reason these policies are unreasonable, and unjust, is that such policies would not survive discursive examination: after discussing impartially, the policies would be rejected by reference to the rights and interests of those affected (accounting for the different stakes each person would have in each decision). One of the benefits of discourse theory over cosmopolitan accounts is that it opens the possibility that groups could in principle defend restrictions on immigration (166). Ingram notes 'that small polities possessing strong religious identities -Israel and some aboriginal communities come to mindmight reasonably restrict immigration to preserve those identities and offer sanctuary to their historically oppressed adherents' (167). Here it would have been helpful if Ingram had offered examples and case studies for how these discourses might proceed, as well as discussed how this claim could be squared with his earlier rejection of Israeli treatment of Palestinians (161, 167). Ingram also could have provided more guidance how to understand 'reasonably reject', such that we can reject outright reasons stemming from racist considerations (e.g., White Australia) or Islamophobic conspiracy theories (e.g., Eurabia), reasons which Ingram would clearly see as unreasonable.
Another omission is that Ingram does not discuss what obligations migrants might have towards immigration law absent satisfaction of DPI. 5 Ingram clearly thinks it is permissible for economic migrants and political refugees to enter states unlawfully, but he says little else about other irregular migrants (Ingram 2018, 138). For instance, would it be wrong for a migrant not facing economic desperation at home to falsify paperwork in order to obtain a better paying job abroad? Although all existing migration policies violate the principle of participatory parity, the effect of violations by privileged groups could reinforce fears that greater migration opportunities may simply benefit the well-off.
The third application of discourse theory is to restructure immigration court proceedings. Ingram draws on his past work showing how immigration courts could be restructured to exemplify the discourse theoretic commitment to empathetic understanding of the migrant's situation, instead of as an adversarial proceeding (Ingram 2010). 6 As he says, Discourse ethics prescribes a judicial procedure requiring that all relevant perspectives bearing on the most comprehensive description of a case be considered and that all relevant principles (and statutory rules) be weighed in determining which rules and principles are most applicable. (Ingram 2018, 167) Drawing on the case of Alba Cruz, an asylum seeker, Ingram shows how Cruz's proceedings in a US immigration court reflected the judge's attempt to understand Cruz's situation. Ingram's account is one of the few that attempts to systematize norm justification and application in the context of migration.

Section III: Economic refugees
Ingram is neither the first discourse theorist to focus on immigration nor the first to criticize borders as lacking democratic legitimacy. Ingram's account stands apart by systematically discussing the background conditionsspecifically economicunder which decisions to migrate take place. To hone in on one argument, Ingram argues that economic migrants ought to be treated as refugees not just because they are deprived of welfare agency within their country of origin, but also because of the coercive environment in which the decision to migrate is made. The latter provides the basis of the obligation possessed by wealthy states to admit economic migrants as refugees: because these states participate in institutions that created the coercive circumstances compelling migration.
That economic migrants, as well as those fleeing domestic or generalized violence, ought to qualify as refugees follows from Ingram's understanding of the logic underlying refugee law and practice. Although the aforementioned groups are not covered by the definition of refugees given by the 1951 Refugee Convention (and subsequent 1967 Protocol), Ingram shows that refugee law has expanded in practice beyond its narrow construction through the UNHCR's adoption of the extended definition, as well as the US practice of granting parole to those fleeing endangerment (137-138). According to the extended definition, someone is a refugee if they are outside his or her country of origin facing 'serious and indiscriminate threats to life, physical integrity or freedom resulting from generalized violence or events seriously disturbing public order' and other 'man-made disasters.' Poverty that is 'life-threatening' satisfies the extended definition (138).
While there need not be a particular relationship between political refugees or asylum seekers and those countries obliged to admit them, Ingram argues that developed states, such as the United States, do possess special obligations towards economic refugees. This is because the wealthy developed states have contributed to the economically coercive environments from which those suffering from life-threatening poverty are compelled to emigrate. Here, Ingram analogizes the economic situation of migrants in sending states with that facing workers in hostile work environments. In hostile work environments, the hostility experienced by women or minorities may not be captured by any specific action by managers or co-workers or any specific action taken by the company. Yet under civil law, hostile workplace environments are 'illegally coercive insofar as they leave women and minorities with no choice but to suffer unbearable hostility or resign' (108). By analogy, governments and other agents should be held responsible for creating an environment in which individuals face the choice between remaining in poverty or migrating.
How the United States contributes to these conditions, for example, is by acting as an 'imperial empire' that 'not only exercises asymmetrical power in its dealings with other sovereign nations, but … also projects more power than any nation in influencing international institutions that shape economic development throughout the world' (174). These international institutions are responsible for global poverty through unfair trade agreements and burdensome loan conditions. Among the many examples Ingram cites is how the World Bank, over which the US government exerts significant influence, required state borrowers to remove protective tariffs on imports. Once these barriers were down, US products would be imported that were artificially cheaper (through subsidies and advanced technology) than domestic products (179). Farmers, finding no work domestically, would face the unconscionable choice to remain or to emigrate. By analogy, "governments that legally support a global economic order that forces a poor person to make an unconscionable choiceculminating in a decision to embark on a course of illegal transitare analogous to business owners who permit a workplace environment that forces an employee to leave her job, with its attendant risks and insecurities, or stay and face demeaning misrecognition" (148). Absent trade agreements that reflect the principle of participatory parity, or at least a minimization of 'domination and coercion,' countries like the United States bear special responsibilities towards affected individuals. These individuals ought to be recognized as refugees as a second-best solution until the global economic and political order is reformed.
Ingram does not address is the limits of these obligationsgiven 75 years of United States imperial power, many, if not most, refugees could make specific claims against the United States. Is there a point at which the United States could stop accepting refugees? Closely related, Ingram does not discuss in detail how refugee obligations are to be distributed. Should these distributions be based on how much states, institutions, and specific policies have contributed to coercive circumstances, assuming these analyses could even be done? Ingram suggests that refugee sharing agreements could be developed in a suitably restructured United Nations General Assembly; given his commitment to discursive resolution, this is perhaps all Ingram can say (265). Ingram also does not discuss how the agency of economic refugees, or refugees more generally, is to be respected in this process. Based on his conception of agency, refugees ought to be given the opportunity to voice their preferences for resettlement, since they should have a say in decisions about where they will spend, at a minimum, the next few years, and at most, the rest of their lives.

Section IV: Assessing ingram and what must we do for effective inclusion?
Ingram's vision requires understanding the various ways in which social freedom can be promoted in our world. As Ingram shows, one key reform is a global cosmopolitan arrangement in which individuals have a forum (or fora) to question and raise concerns about policies affecting them, consistent with the principle of participatory parity. This would allow formal migration policies and other push-and-pull factors to be subject to discursive examination. Another area for reform is the global economy. In the long term, it must be radically restructured, specifically by eliminating global capitalism. As an alternative, Ingram refers to David Schweickart's account of economic democracy, which places control of economic enterprises and investment in the hands of the community. Economic democracy removes many of the existing imperatives of global capitalism, such as the focus on expanding GDP through accessing new markets (Schweickart 2011). 7 Without these imperatives, there would be incentives to transfer intellectual property and aid to developing economies, policies that would alter the coercive economic situations that compel emigration. Economic democracy would also create more discursive opportunities for agents to control the institutions that shape their lives. This is one of the great benefits of Ingram's account: he identifies and addresses the role the global economy plays in migration, an area which has been neglected by other democratic theorists, such as in Bertram's Do States Have the Right to Exclude? or Benhabib's Rights of Others.
Although economic democracy and cosmopolitan institutional reform is a normatively desirable arrangement, the focus for now must be on the ways that social freedom can be furthered within current economic and political arrangements. One 7 See Chapter 4 of Ingram (2018). concern I have with Ingram's account is that Ingram undersells just how demanding such inclusion is. Consider the case of a Mexican campesino immigrant to the United States. Assuming that the campesino is not undocumented, improving his or her agency requires several steps (if he or she is, then regularization is a first step). The principle of participatory parity requires granting him or her input into the democratic politics of the United States. Yet a formal right to participate is insufficient: migrants displaced into new political and cultural environments may lack the self-esteem to publicly voice their concerns. To help in this respect, the campesino will need family members to accompany him or her for the sake of supporting the intimate sphere in which social freedom is achieved. 8 In addition, steps will need to be taken to remove the cultural impediments that prevent the campesino from being recognized as a social equal and to create conditions in which the campesino's interests can be affirmed by co-residents. This requires creative ways of minimizing the social discrimination experienced by economic refugees. Further, the campesino will need the basic tools necessary to participate effectively in politics, such as English competency and training in civics. Depending on where in the United States the campesino wants to move, there may be conflict between existing residents and migrants over access to scarce public benefits, such as subsidized or rent-controlled housing. In this case, new institutions are needed that allow input from existing residents or citizens who feel negatively affected by migration. Even if their concerns are not ultimately accepted, the legitimacy of integrative policies would be improved if they could be publicly contested and justified (Pettit 1997, 198-199). In sum, a theory of social and political integration is a necessary component of a social theory of migration, and it is one that Ingram has not provided, even if there are plenty of tools available in his account to develop one.
Ingram defends an ambitious vision of social freedom, and it is to his credit that his account provides tools and concepts that can be used to improve policy both in the short and long term. It is also a credit to Ingram that migration ethics is portrayed in all its complexity. The justice of borders depends upon individual, social, cultural, economic and political contexts, and solutions ultimately must emerge from discourses inclusive of those affected by migration. For now, Ingram's account directs those engaged in migration politics to focus their attention on maintaining those policies that protect important human interests, such as family reunification, asylum and refugeehood. Almost as importantly, engaged citizens must find creative ways to amplify the voices of those who are denied formal access to deliberate on the economic and political policies that shape their lives.

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