Wage competition and the special-obligations challenge to more open borders

Arash Abizadeh, Manish Pandey and Sohrab Abizadeh
Additional contact information
Arash Abizadeh: McGill University, Canada

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2015, vol. 14, issue 3, 255-269

Abstract: According to the special-obligations challenge to the justice argument for more open borders, immigration restrictions to wealthier polities are justified because of special obligations owed to disadvantaged compatriots negatively impacted by the immigration of low-skilled foreign workers. We refute the special-obligations challenge by refuting its empirical premise and draw out the normative implications of the empirical evidence for border policies. We show that immigration to wealthier polities has negligible impact on domestic wages and that only previous cohorts of immigrants are adversely affected. The special-obligations challenge therefore succeeds only if special obligations owed to previous immigrants justify closing borders to further immigration; we argue that they do not.

Keywords: immigration; open borders; wage competition; special obligations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470594X14544286 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:pophec:v:14:y:2015:i:3:p:255-269

DOI: 10.1177/1470594X14544286

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics, Philosophy & Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().