Immigration Ought To Be Recognized As A Human Right

This will be an LD style debate. First round is presenting case, and so on. My dad was born in 1968 in Saigon, Vietnam during the war. Grandpa was a soldier fighting for the South in the Vietnam War, and was taken to a camp that was owned by the communists and was kept as a prisoner of war. In 1993, when my dad was 24 years old, his whole family received airplane tickets to America to escape the communist takeover in Vietnam.They chose to settle in California because he heard the weather was nice and there was a lot of job opportunities in San Jose. Stories like Kelly"s represent the promise of immigration, which is why I affirm Resolved: Immigration ought to be recognized as a human right But before I begin, I will offer some definitions to add clarity to this round. Immigration is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as The action of coming to live permanently in a foreign country. Ought is defined by Merriam Webster"s Dictionary as moral obligation or duty And finally, Human Right is defined by the United Nations as rights inherent to all human beings, whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status. http://www.ohchr.org... Since the resolution is a question of moral obligation, The Value Will Be Justice, defined by Aristotle as giving each their due. Philosopher John Rawls further states that Justice is composed of two core principles. Liberty, the basic rights and freedoms guaranteed to all people, such as dignity or security and Fairness, which Rawls outlines Fair Equality Of Opportunity, which holds that all have equal access to positions within society. Since fairness allows rights to be distributed evenly, the value of justice must be held to the highest importance Although many ways exist in which one can consider justice, the most effective criterion must be The Veil of Ignorance, a test of morality in which, as Rawls states, No one knows their place in society; nor do they know their fortune in the distribution of natural assets" Justice demands that we be impartial for the reason that, as stated by Rawls "rational persons are concerned to advance their interests. If a [woman knew that s/he was wealthy, she might find it rational to advance the principle that taxes for welfare be counted unjust; if she knew that she were poor, he would propose the contrary principle. To represent desired restrictions, one imagines a situation in which everyone is deprived of this information." Since people are unsure of their social position, they will rationally select the option that would best provide justice regardless of their true state. This ensures that biases are neutralized, and that certain groups aren"t advantaged, ultimately upholding fairness, and liberty. Joseph H. Carens wrote that This is ideal for cases that look at transnational forms of justice. Cases like immigration and trade, where people interact across governmental boundaries, raise questions about whether the conditions of the interactions are fair. In thinking about these matters we don"t want to be biased by [outside]considerations, and we don"t want existing injustices (if any) to warp our reflections. Moreover, we can take it as a basic presupposition that we should treat all human beings, not just members of our society, as free and equal persons. Observation: As indicated by the term ought, the resolution is not pragmatic in nature, but instead poses an ethical question; whether it is morally desirable to label immigration as a right. Hence, if immigration can meet the ethical standards of Rawls" justice, it is moral and therefore permissible Contention 1: Immigration Upholds The Liberty Principle. More often than not, people immigrate to new nations to escape some sort of hardship, whether that be war or oppression. Take The Troubles in Northern Ireland, a violent thirty-year conflict framed by civil rights and legal status of Northern Ireland. The scale of the killings perpetrated by all sides - republican and loyalist paramilitaries and the security forces - eventually exceeded 3,600. As many as 50,000 people were maimed or injured, with countless others psychologically damaged by the conflict, which is exactly why Rawls does acknowledge a "duty to assist burdened societies, in his Law of Peoples.Ghoshray elaborates, writing the United States is responsible, in a significant way, for allowing these regimes to thrive and survive politically. Take an example of Latin American nations like Nicaragua where, between the 1950s and the 1980s, the United States has been largely responsible for promoting either civil war, or supporting the regime for fear of spreading communism, giving scant respect to humanity. Hence, the responsibility and obligation lie to allow reasonable immigration to countries. Immanuel Kant called this a "universal right of hospitality", meaning If conditions in a person"s native country endanger his life and well-being, his right to survival, from an ethical point of view, carries as much weight as the new country"s claim to control borders (Benhabib).Carens elaborates, writing that In considering freedom, one adopts the perspective of the one who would be most disadvantaged, in this case the alien who wants to immigrate. In the original position, one would insist that the right to migrate be included in the system of basic liberties for the same reasons one would insist the right to religious freedom be included: it might prove essential to one"s plan of life. Under current conditions, when so many millions of poor and oppressed people feel they have so much to gain from migration to the advanced industrial states, it seems hard to believe that a utilitarian calculus which took the interests of aliens seriously would justify significantly greater limits on immigration than the ones entailed by the public order restriction implied by the Rawlsian approach. What we can take from this is that when migrants are oppressed at home, the veil of ignorance justifies immigration, being as it secures the liberty of the migrant. Contention 2: Immigration Upholds Fair Equality of Opportunity. Just as it ensures liberty, immigration also ensures that all people have fair equality of opportunity. Carens explains, Within democratic states we all recognise that access to social positions should be determined by an individual's actual talents and effort, and not on the basis of birth-related characteristics such as class, race, or gender that are not relevant to the capacity to perform well in the position. This ideal of equal opportunity is intimately linked to the view that all human beings are of equal moral worth, that there are no natural hierarchies of birth that entitle people to advantageous social positions. But you have to be able to move to where the opportunities are in order to take advantage of them, making the right to immigrate a prerequisite to Rawlsian justice. Looking back to the value premise, fair equality of opportunity holds that citizens with the same talents have the same educational and economic opportunities regardless of whether they were born in Britain or Uganda. By excluding immigrants, we condemn to poverty, poor education, limited political freedom, and often disease and/or violence many who would come to flourish. Equality of opportunity demands immigration. Carens adds," Every reason why one might want to move within a state may also be a reason for moving between states. One might want a job; one might belong to a religion that has few adherents in one"s native state and many in another; one might wish to pursue opportunities that are only available in another land. So, the basic agreement among those in the original position would be to permit immigration as it upholds both aspects of Rawlsian justice, making it worthy of the title 'right'. "My Immigration Story." My Immigration Story. Web. 08 May 2016. Rawls, John. " A Theory Of Justice (Revised Edition)." The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press (1971), p. 98-99 . July 01, 1971. Web. May 05, 2015 http://www.univpgri-palembang.ac.id... Perpustakaan/American%20Phylosophy/John%20Rawls%20- %20A%20Theory%20of%20Justice~%20Revised%20Edition.pdf = Benhabib, Seyla. "The Morality of Migration." Opinionator. The New York Times, 29 July 2012. Web. 08 May 2016. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...; . "Day The Troubles Began." History. BBC News, 2015. Web. 8 May 2016. <http://www.bbc.co.uk...;.