Human Rights and Border Exclusion: Do States Have the Right to Create and Enforce Their Border Policies Unilaterally?

Recent events have thrust migration, and more centrally borders and border policy, to the forefront of academic and popular discussion. It has become far too common to see reports of the deaths and the harms that migrants face, however, states claim a near unilateral right to control borders. At present, states are only obliged to grant entry to migrants in a very limited set of circumstances set out in, for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1951 Refugee Convention with its 1967 supplement, Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. These circumstances are limited to when the receiving state believes that a migrant has suffered political persecution and not the wider set of harms that cause displacement such as war, poverty and, increasingly, environmental collapse. This position has resulted in an overly weak international duty of rescue that is compounded by states operating immigration policies that not only fail to meet these minimal standards, let alone any reasonable moral standards, but are actively hostile towards migrants.
In response to this, liberal theorists have conducted a broad and in-depth normative enquiry examining under what circumstances (primarily western) states have either a moral obligation to 'open their borders', or are morally capable of excluding non-members, with the literature on border security can broadly divided into two camps. On one side are those who call for open borders in almost all cases, with borders viewed as morally arbitrary constructs requiring significant justification. On the other side are those theorists who justify strict border controls on the basis that states have competing obligations to maintain democratic legitimacy, cultural homogeneity, economic stability and social harmony at home.
In the course of these debates however, at least two mistakes are made. Firstly, these positions, whilst representing extremes, are problematic. The first position undervalues national membership, resulting in the legitimate concerns and interests that states have in controlling border access being overlooked. The second position fails to fully recognise international duties of rescue that states possess. In so doing making the opposite mistake of the first camp and so fail to adequately support an international migration regime that would protect and advance human rights. Secondly, and just as crucially, it is all too common for theorists examining migration to leave many key terms undefined and instead to rush to explore the normative underpinnings at play when discussing the movement of people across international borders. This is too quick as providing a simplified account of terms such as 'state', 'border admission', 'borders' and 'border controls' fails to adequately capture the realities of migration, thus creating a disconnect between theory and practice.
My research seeks to broaden the analytical lens used when conducting a normative enquiry in migration by highlighting the need for a more nuanced understanding of how migrants interact with 'the border', before seeking to establish a mid-point capable of recognising the complex relationship between noncitizens and receiving states, and balance the need for a morally principled approach to duties of rescue.