Confucian ideal of relationality:
Webs of unique, dynamic relationships hold the possibility of global, inclusive, non-static harmony among people as well as in their relationships to the environment.
Analects 10.27
Analects 1.1
子曰：「學而時習之，不亦說乎？有朋自遠方來，不亦樂乎？人不知而不慍，不亦君子乎？」
色斯舉矣，翔而後集。曰：「山梁雌雉，時哉！時哉！」子路共之，三嗅而作。
This pheasant on the mountain bridge. What timing! How timely"
Is it not a joy to have friends visit you from far away?
The pheasant isn't just randomly there, and nor are Confucius and Zilu.
Is it not pretty rad that we can relate to each other across vast physical spaces?
We are all connected to one another and our environment by the processes that shape the world.
Forefronting the relationality and peculiarity of moral ties does not privilege formal recognition of state-citizen rights.
Our realm of moral concern functionally includes those in our space as well as those with whom we may form relationships.
Isn't this a better ethical foundation for thinking about migration?
unfortunately, it seems that...
"Whether we must concern ourselves with other people's good depends on whether, and with whom, and on what terms, we have agreed to do so."
Mass Migration, Nationalism, and the Potential for a New Cosmopolitanism
Sydney Morrow PhD
Nazarbayev University
UNF 2019
Bikini Atoll, 1946: First of over 7,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear detonations over 12 years
Are we (philosophers/ethicists/us) helping?
"There are only 90,000 of them out there," Henry Kissinger would later say about the relocation of Marshall Islands residents for missile testing. "Who gives a damn?"
The Problem?
The ethical issues at the root of migration crises do not cluster around whether to "let them in."
What brought them here?
What patterns and forces of mobility are at work?
Michael Sandel - Democracy's Discontent
The danger...
Contemporary (Anglo-analytic) political philosophy frames the problem of (im)migration along the same lines as pernicious nationalist rhetoric.
Even cosmopolitan ideals of justice presume that the migrant is an outsider, for whom special provisions must be made.
"Why are you here?"
"Why have you broken our laws to be here?"
"Why didn't you stay in your country?"
If we think of ourselves as "unencumbered" by the needs of others (or as citizens of a state that presumably cares), there will likely be no sustained civic response to the ethical problems of migration.
"[Border walls] intensify nationalist sentiments that in turn spur demands for greater exercises of state sovereignty, more effective walling and less flexibility in responding to globalization's vicissitudes and volatilities. In all of these ways, the new border fortifications tend to deepen the crises of sovereignty to which they also respond."
Wendy Brown - "Border barriers as sovereign swords..."
The conception of humans as autonomous, sovereign, self-directed individuals, who are then subjected to these vicissitudes, is the deep, intractable root of nationalism, intentional or otherwise.