5.1 INTRODUCTION

Existing nationalist and cosmopolitan approaches to the regulation of immigration falter on a variety of grounds, but one flaw that most share is a failure to treat the fact that all national societies are constituted by institutions that create distinct groups of individuals, privileging some and disadvantaging others, as morally salient. By contrast, the moral principle for evaluating policy proposals for regulating immigration that I developed in the previous chapter, the Priority of Disadvantage Principle (PDP), foregrounds these social divisions, holding that immigration policies that avoidably harm social groups that are already unjustly disadvantaged are unjust.

The purpose of the present chapter is to defend the PDP against competing views on immigration justice. In the following section (section 5.2), I confront the most basic of challenges to my principle: that states ought to be regarded as having moral (as opposed to mere legal) sovereignty over immigration. This view, which I call the moral sovereignty of states view, holds that states are entitled to grant and to refuse admission to foreigners as they will, free of the constraints of alleged principles of justice. The moral sovereignty of states view does not uniquely challenge the PDP; it challenges all views on which the state's selection of immigration policies is subject to principles of political morality, whether cosmopolitan or nationalist.