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Aside from the case of refugees under international law, are non-citizen outsiders morally justified in unlawfully entering another state? Recent answers to this question, based on a purported right of necessity or civil disobedience, exclude many cases of justified border-crossing and fail to account for its distinctive political character. I argue that in certain non-humanitarian cases, unlawful border-crossing involves the exercise of a remedial moral right to resist the illegitimate exercise of coercive power. The case accepts, for the sake of argument, two conventional assumptions among defenders of immigration restrictions: that states have a 'right to exclude' and that migrants have a prima facie duty to respect borders. Nonetheless, where immigration law is racist or otherwise discriminatory, it violates the egalitarian standards at the core of any authority it can plausibly claim over outsiders. In such cases, it may be resisted even where the law is facially non-discriminatory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A collection of recent works offer a route into rethinking the ethics of borders at a time when the rules and practices of global mobility have been called into question by the coronavirus pandemic. What counts as a legitimate justification for the closure of borders and who gets to decide? Who has responsibility for the protection of refugees? Just how practical is the ideal of 'open borders' and is there a trade-off between justice in immigration and the stability of a liberal political order? While some commentators have claimed that the coronavirus pandemic sounded the death knell for the ideal of open borders, its true import is to highlight our mutual vulnerability and the need for effective global co-ordination of migration and asylum. The four contributions I discuss provide vital moral arguments and conceptual distinctions relevant to thinking about the contours of a post-pandemic regime of global mobility. While they differ on the question of who the liberal state may justifiably exclude, and on the desirability and practicality of cosmopolitan reform, they converge in assigning states a far greater role in protecting the human rights of vulnerable non-citizens and in their condemnation of a cruel and repressive status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]