FEATURE Climate Migration and the Right to Exclude Dan Boscov-Ellen American liberals may demand an end to excessive violence against Latinx migrants and refugees . . . but they rarely locate immigration and border policies within broader systemic forces. A long arc of dirty colonial coups, capitalist trade agreements extracting land and labor, climate change, and enforced oppression is the primary driver of dis- placement from Mexico and Central America. Migration is a predictable consequence of these displacements, yet today the US is fortifying its border against the very people impacted by its own policies. Analyzing the border as part of historic and contemporary imperial relations . . . forces a shift from notions of charity and humanitarianism to res- titution, reparations, and responsibility. —Harsha Walia Border and Rule  T hat sovereign nation-states have the right to exclude most nonmembers is largely assumed in both popular political discourse and mainstream political and legal theory; Joseph Carens has aptly dubbed this “the con- ventional moral view on immigration.”  The ubiquity of this view means that it is often treated as obvious rather than argued for,  but the political thinkers who do argue for it often stress its deep normative import, portraying a nation’s control over its borders as indispensable to collective self-determination and so as consti- tuting a core pillar of democratic political sovereignty. Accordingly, as E. Tendayi Achiume suggests, both “the governing law and the dominant ethics that underpin Dan Boscov-Ellen, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, United States (dboscove@pratt.edu) Ethics & International Affairs, , no.  (), pp. –. © The Author(s), . Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs doi:./S 369 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0892679424000248 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 74.73.59.182, on 23 Jan 2025 at 19:58:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at