4.1 INTRODUCTION

The central goal of this book is to show that an immigrant admissions policy is unjust if it avoidably harms a social group that is already unjustly disadvantaged. I defend this principle, the Priority of Disadvantage Principle (PDP), as a universally applicable necessary condition of the justice of nation-states' immigration policies. The PDP is not the claim that states must prioritize the admission of members of unjustly disadvantaged social groups, though it may sometimes have this implication; instead, the PDP enjoins states to regard the effects their immigrant admissions policies have on social groups that are already unjustly disadvantaged as especially morally salient. The PDP applies to policies that stipulate the criteria of first admission to a sovereign state for permanent residents. Thus, I do not endorse this principle as a way to apprehend the justice of policies for admitting other kinds of foreigners, including refugees and asylum-seekers, temporary workers or other non-immigrants. I also do not propose this principle as a standard for measuring the justice of the criteria that a state may adopt to determine which legal residents may become citizens. Finally, this principle is not meant as a condition of the justice of policies regarding the treatment and legal benefits and rights of legal residents, permanent or temporary.

In this chapter I offer a detailed theoretical explication of the PDP, which I defend in Chapter 5 and apply in Chapter 6.