The Ethics of Refugee Protection

"Around 42.5 million refugees worldwide have been forced to flee their own states and are unable to return because of severe threats to their lives, human rights, or basic needs. Having fled these threats, the vast majority have by no means found protection. Instead, most refugees live either in squalid refugee camps or face destitution in urban areas in regions close to their own states in the Global South. A small minority risk their lives on journeys to reach asylum in the Global North; many thousands lose them."

"How should states in the Global North (the affluent liberal democracies including the U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia, and European states) respond to this situation? Some philosophers argue these states should open their borders to accept as many refugees as possible until the point of societal collapse. Other philosophers argue states need not admit a single refugee. Some states have responded with expansive welcome schemes accepting over one million. Other states have erected concrete walls and barbed wire fences."

"We sorely need an understanding of what an ethical response to refugees would be, and one that could be widely accepted as well as possible in the here and now. For this, we must understand the obligations that states owe to refugees. Many philosophical treatments of this question adopt a state-centred methodology, where the starting point is the state as the primary site of normative analysis. One adopts the perspective of a particular state and asks: What obligations would this state have if faced with the presence of refugees seeking protection?"

"This methodology naturally invites certain questions: What would refugee protection cost to the state, and are those costs acceptable to the state? How should responsibilities be distributed between states, such that no state is unfairly "overburdened"?"

About 42.5 million refugees have fled their own states and cannot return because of severe threats to life, human rights, or basic needs. Most refugees do not find protection and instead live in squalid camps or face destitution in urban areas near their home regions in the Global South. A small minority risk their lives traveling to seek asylum in the Global North, and many thousands die during these journeys. States in the Global North respond in sharply different ways, ranging from large welcome schemes to restrictive barriers and hostility. Ethical guidance is needed to clarify what obligations states owe to refugees and how those obligations should be understood and distributed.

Read at Apaonline