Abstract
In this article, I unify the diverse but related ways that scholars, activists and people on the move have demanded migration as a form of reparations. I first compare (mostly U.S.-based) theoretical arguments for migration as a form of reparations for colonization, military occupation, and climate harm. I then turn to international legal traditions of reparations to highlight the ways that reparative migration might be actualized in response to human rights violations.
Looking at EU and international legal standards on remedies, I show how these arguments are not necessarily radical but, in fact, could be at least partially possible under the current European human rights legal regime.
Bringing together decolonial and racial justice frameworks with theories of remedy, I argue that the European Union (EU) has positive obligations to admit people on the move. I consider how, rather than emphasizing a person’s “right to enter” the EU, legal and advocacy strategies could challenge the EU’s “right to exclude.” To conclude, I reflect on how this framing works toward border abolition and a right to movement, as well as on its limitations. In so doing, I 1) synthesize previously disparate articulations of migration as reparations; 2) point to existing legal authority on reparations that might help achieve reparative migration; and 3) highlight ways European lawyers can engage with this theory both in messaging and in legal claims to resituate client work within this ongoing conversation about racial and mobility justice.
Included in
Human Rights Law Commons, Immigration Law Commons, International Law Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons