London Lectures

Amnesty For Immigrants

In this talk, Lea Ypi makes the case for general, unconditional amnesty and naturalisation of all irregular migrants.

Part of the London Lectures series, A Philosophers’ Manifesto.

 

 

Lea Ypi argues that if the supersession of historical injustice can be invoked to justify the rights of states to exclude, it can also be invoked to justify the claims of irregular migrants.

She explores some analogies and disanalogies between the cases, and suggests that we should hold states to the same stringent standards of compliance with just norms that they apply to the assessment of the moral conduct of individual migrants.

Ypi argues that those standards ought to orient migrants and citizens’ moral assessment of how their states handle questions of irregular migration and to inform political initiatives compatible with these moral assessments.

  • Speaker

    Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of Economics. She is the author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency and coauthor of The Meaning of Partisanship (both published by Oxford UniversityPress). Her latest book, Free, will come out with Allen Lane/Penguin Press next year.