Abstract

CAMACHO BELTRAN, Enrique  and  VALENZUELA MORENO, Karla A.. Are migrants a public charge? Antimmigrant measures and deportability in the United States. Inter disciplina [online]. 2023, vol.11, n.29, pp.53-77.  Epub June 26, 2023. ISSN 2448-5705.  https://doi.org/10.22201/ceiich.24485705e.2023.29.84480.

In August 2019, the Trump administration added a new element to his Zero Tolerance policy: the Public Charge Rule. The rule poses a threat to the immigration status of those foreigners who use certain public services, causing them to be deportable. We argue that public charge by itself is not a valid reason to legitimize deportability. First, under certain egalitarian theories, it can be unfair to construct the persons as deportable based solely on their need to use social welfare programs, since those programs were created in order to compensate for the negative effects of bad luck, domination and exploitation. Second, it can be morally undesirable to construct them as deportable, due to the harmful effects that deportability generates, more so, if we consider that immigrants’ contributions to the American society are more significant than the benefits they obtain from public services. Hence, immigrants should not be considered as a public charge even from this point of view. Finally, we propose the concept of “fair public charge”, to accurately assess immigrants’ contribution to the host country.

Keywords : deportability; public charge; social welfare state; migration ethics; migration justice; border legitimacy.

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