Review of Michael Blake, Justice, Migration, and Mercy , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020, 266 pp, ISBN: 9780190879
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Review of Michael Blake, Justice, Migration, and Mercy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020, 266 pp, ISBN: 9780190879556 Jamie Draper1 Accepted: 24 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
The literature on migration in political philosophy is by now mature, and well-trodden argumentative paths map the contours of its central questions. This makes it all the more impressive that Michael Blake’s Justice, Migration, and Mercy manages to navigate those questions in a novel and genuinely distinctive way, as well as to chart out new routes for exploration in the terrain of debate. It will prove valuable to both students of migration in political philosophy, for the lucidity with which it approaches its central questions and relates them to contemporary migration politics (especially in the USA), and to partisans in the debates in which Blake engages, for the original perspective that it articulates and for Blake’s thoughtful engagement with his interlocuters. Justice, Migration, and Mercy has two central aims. The first aim is to lay out the best case for the liberal state’s right to exclude would-be immigrants. Blake’s best case for the state’s right to exclude, his ‘jurisdictional’ view, is fairly uncompromising. Aside from those whose human rights are under threat in their states of origin, few would-be immigrants have claims to admission at the bar of justice. It is tempered, however, by Blake’s claim that the bar of justice is not the only standard that matters. Blake’s second aim is to create space for concepts beyond justice, and in particular the concept of mercy, to illuminate moral discussions about migration. Though states that exercise their broad discretionary powers with respect to migrants in strict and self-interested ways may not be acting unjustly, they are certainly acting unmercifully. For Blake, the virtue of mercy is about what kind of people we want to be, rather than about the claims that others can make against us as a matter of right. These two concepts—jurisdiction and mercy—are at the centre of Blake’s project, and it is worth examining each a little more closely. Blake introduces his jurisdictional view after having surveyed and rejected a range of arguments in favour of open borders (Chap. 2) and alternative defences of the state’s right to exclude (Chap. 3). The common complaint that he raises against * Jamie Draper [email protected] 1
Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
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both defences of open borders and previous defences of the right to exclude is that they pay insufficient attention to ‘the fact of jurisdiction’: the idea that those within a state’s jurisdiction stand in a ‘political relationship, which involves the use of coercive legal rules imposed only within a particular territorial space’ (p. 33). The world is divided up into states, and each state is charged with the protection and fulfilment of the rights of those within its jurisdiction. Beyond their borders, states are only required not to interfere with th
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