Toward a Political Philosophy of Mobility

Abstract

The final chapter proposes that abandoning methodological nationalism means that an ethics of immigration is untenable. Rather, what is needed is an ethics of migration or an ethics of mobility that sees movement across state borders, movement within states, and movement to and from cities as raising the same normative issues. In particular, an investigation of the causes of mobility shows that it is often a response to social, economic, and political forces that expel vulnerable people from their homes. The chapter ends with a plea that people recognize the complex ways in which people are connected within and across borders and the dangers of uncritically using words that encourage seeing the world in terms of “us” and “them.”

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