Vulnerability and Mobility 527 1. Introduction This paper aims to apply the paradigm of human security to issues of migratory justice. It stems from a feeling of dissatisfaction with current moral and political theories regarding migration, a feeling which has been well addressed by Joseph Carens, one of the leading advocates of the idea that national borders are arbitrary from a normative point of view. Carens indicated that his work on borders was motivated by a moral discomfort. Considering a speciic episode of Haitian illegal immigration towards the United States, Carens stated: «I had no particular preconceptions about what Americans (or anyone else) should do about the Haitians, but I felt torn between the sense that there was something wrong in excluding people in such obvious need and the feeling that admitting everyone with comparable claims would be overwhelming and would be especially harmful to those already most disadvantaged in America» 1 . I think that this way of framing the question is largely shared in «developed countries» 2 : we feel torn between conlicting duties – duties of charity towards others and duties of justice towards our fellow citizens – and the sense of conlict rests on the fact that we insist on distinguishing two categories of people: the migrants, and ourselves. The aim of this paper is to show that this intuitive distinction is misleading if we want to imagine a justice in migratory and mobility issues and that these normative questions therefore need reframing. This paper will thus not propose answers, but alternative frameworks for analyzing transnational mobility. 1 J. Carens, Reconsidering Open Borders, in «International Migration Review», 33 (1999), pp. 1082-1109, here p. 1082. 2 I put the phrase between inverted commas because I think the dificulty we have of inding a proper theoretical framework for dealing with international migration comes largely from misrepresentations about the relative situation of countries as «developed» or «in development», «rich» or «poor», etc. In particular, public debate in European countries is often misled by the idea that Europe is universally seen as a heaven to be reached at any cost, completely neglecting other paths of transnational mobility, such as the important lows between Asia and the Middle East, for instance. Vulnerability and Mobility Does the Paradigm of «Human Security» Provide an Answer to the Ethical Dilemmas Raised by International Migration? Solange Chavel «Iride», a. XXVI, n. 70, settembre-dicembre 2013 / «Iride», v. 26, issue 70, September-December 2013