The Right to Emigrate & The Duty to Stay

Despite the consensus that the right to emigrate is a fundamental right, it is sometimes argued that this right may be overridden by a countervailing duty to stay. Concerned with the impact of the so-called “brain drain”, many liberal political philosophers suggest that the emigration of large numbers of highly qualified people can severely harm their states of origin, and that, consequently, highly qualified professionals have, at least under certain conditions, a duty to stay.

In this talk, I argue against the duty to stay. I first present what I take to be the strongest argument in support of a duty to stay: the argument that potential migrants have a duty to stay as part of the general duty of individuals to create and support just institutions. Then, I argue that this argument raises a normative paradox. It seems that the worse the conditions in one’s country of origin are, the stronger one’s duty would be to stay and support the creation of just institutions. And yet, an exit route from bad conditions in one’s state of origin was precisely what was taken to justify the right to emigrate. It seems that the more reasons we would have to recognize someone’s right to migrate, the more reasons we would also have to argue that they have a duty to not migrate.

To resolve this paradox, I propose a reconceptualization of the duty to create and support just institutions. I suggest that the paradox arises because of the implicit adoption of a sedentarist and state-centric interpretation of the duty to create and support just institutions. I argue, firstly, that the duty to support just institutions can be considered to justify not only staying in one’s country, but also leaving that country. Secondly, I suggest that the duty to support just institutions is not necessarily limited to the support of state-level institutions. Last, I hold that the duty to create and support just institutions is sometimes compatible with breaking ties with one’s state of origin, and that each person is the best judge of whether this applies in their own case.

Anna Milioni
https://www.lecre.umontreal.ca/en/chercheur-e/anna-milioni/
Post-doctoral Fellow, Centre for Research in Ethics
Université de Montréal

About the Speaker:

Anna Milioni pursued her PhD at King’s College London, under the supervision of Dr Sarah Fine and Prof. Andrea Sangiovanni. During her PhD, she was also a visiting fellow at the University of Geneva (supervised by Prof. Matteo Gianni) and at Cornell University. Before her PhD, Anna completed a Research Master in Philosophy at the KU Leuven, as well as a Master in Philosophy of Law and a Bachelor in Law at the University of Athens. Her research is on the political philosophy of migration, with a focus on the intersections between mobility and migration. She is also interested in democratic theory, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of law. Her work has been published in Ergo, Philosophy, Moral Philosophy and Politics, Nations and Nationalism, Res Publica and Ricoeur Studies. Anna is also interested in public philosophy and is co-editor of the public philosophy magazine The Pamphlet.

Recently, Anna Milioni was awarded the Res Publica Postgraduate Essay Prize for her paper “Relating to each other as free and as equals: beyond the egalitarian justification of democracy”, published in Res Publica, as well as the UK Kant Society Essay Prize 2024 and the North American Kant Society Wilfrid Sellars Junior Scholar Prize for her paper “Nomads, territory, and the Kantian state”, published in Kantian Review.

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This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here [to be posted].

About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):

The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.

In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.

The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai