The Legitimate Authority of Migration Control

Objective

In the European Union and beyond, states’ efforts to control migration and the legitimacy of these efforts are politically charged issues of intense public controversy. Political philosophers have long argued that at least some control efforts are morally permissible, but have neither fully clarified how we should assess the claims of states to authority in the migration control domain, nor seriously assessed the moral significance of specific, newly emerging migration control strategies. Combining theory and practice in a two-step process, LEGITCONTROL aims to correct these shortcomings. First, it theorizes the conditions of legitimate state authority over migrants and the conditions of the proper interstate bindingness of bilateral migration control agreements. Second, it analyzes whether increasingly prominent systems of digital and algorithmic migrant selection meet the first kind of legitimacy standard, and whether increasingly prominent bilateral migration control agreements between states in the Global North and states in the Global South meet the second kind of legitimacy standard. In so doing, LEGITCONTROL scrutinizes the legitimacy of migration control in liberal democracies by assessing some of its most salient contemporary manifestations, seeking to inform societal debate, civil society organizations, and migration policymakers alike. Geared towards multiple peer-reviewed publications in field-leading venues for migration studies and political theory, LEGITCONTROL is expected to position the researcher as an important voice in academic and public debates on migration and migration control.