I thank Rebecca Hamlin for her generous and thorough review of my book. I am heartened that the book’s main purpose to, in Hamlin’s words, “point very clearly to colonialism as the root of the persistent racial bias we see in international migration today” shone through. I particularly enjoyed engaging with her insightful comments on its shortcomings, addressing which would have made the book stronger. My comments on her main points follow, and I hope that this conversation will encourage scholars of IR and migration to continue to center colonialism and racism in their examinations of contemporary politics.
In her review, Hamlin suggests several topics, authors, and literatures that she wished I had engaged with. They include, among others, exploring law and legality, connecting my argument to the literature on the “migration state,” and discussing how the West developed the concept of sovereignty to serve the colonial project. Each of these suggestions is spot on. Some absences reflect my attempt to avoid spreading the analysis too thin, such as my discussion of the role of unauthorized immigration. However, my argument is certainly compatible with the expanding literature on the migration state. In particular, Adamson and Tsourapas’ work on its postcolonial variant dovetails with my analysis of the performance of sovereignty in the Global South, and I regret not making this connection explicitly. Engaging with Achiume’s work on “migration as decolonization” and discrimination against refugees provides a possible way forward to integrate these themes into an expanded analysis of how state sovereignty allows color-blind racism to fester in international migration.
Hamlin also raises questions about the language I use to describe the baseline model. She notes that the analysis “reveals that there is much less legal immigration than there would be if push and pull factors acted unobstructed by law,” and wonders whether the model estimates migration in a world with open borders. I frame the model as I do for two reasons. First, the law’s obstructions are implicitly included in the model because variables like regime type and conflict are correlated with migration policies. Second, although my initial inclination was to explicitly model an open borders world, I settled on a more conservative strategy to guard against criticisms that the analysis was too far-fetched or idealistic. One benefit of this choice is that the results provide a best-case scenario estimate for the amount of racial bias in global migration.
Hamlin’s final point concerns the possibility of change. I show that Global North states continue to benefit from a denial of colonialism’s effects, which makes systemic change unlikely. Yet I speculate about whether certain exogenous shocks like COVID-19 or climate change will exacerbate or ameliorate racial bias. Living through the pandemic made me less sanguine about the possibility of the latter, and my recent work on the moral basis of public attitudes toward unauthorized immigrants reflects this pessimism (Rosenberg, “Agents, Structures, and the Moral Basis of Deportability,” Security Dialogue,1-18 [2022]). Indeed, one lesson of both Hamlin’s and my own book concerns not only the persistence of systemic inequalities, but also their intractability. Future work should dig further into the overlapping international and domestic mechanisms that entrench this system.
