Joseph Carens, Executive Action, and Human Rights

Professor Carens

The New York Times has an interview with Professor Joseph Carens of the University of Toronto: When Immigrants Lose Their Human Rights.

Carens is the author of The Ethics of Immigration and Immigrants and the Right to Stay, among numerous other publications. (I’m going to geek out here and just say that Carens’ work has been incredibly influential on my own.)

In the New York Times interview, Carens discusses the president’s recent immigration action.

He emphasizes that the beneficiaries of DACA and DAPA have “moral claims to legal status as residents and, eventually, to citizenship itself.” For, “[l]iving and working in a society makes immigrants members of that society over time, even if they arrived and settled without permission.”

-KitJ