Migrations and Illegality: an Ethical View

Abstract

This essay takes as its framework the ethics of alterity of Emmanuel Levinas from which it aims to explore the bad response which the receptive countries gave to the others, the illegalized migrants. The hypothesis at play points to a radical contradiction in the political ethics of these countries. On the one hand, they adopt the liberal ethics implicit in universal human rights but, on the other, they are identified with the ethics of the political realism and with the communitarian ethics which defend the interest of its members and legitimate the non recognition of the citizenship of illegal(ized) migrants. The essay, then, aims to frame this situation in a more large historical and philosophical context and arrives at the modern European colonization and the Hegelian justification of colonial slavery and its implicit racism. This racist and slave "ethics" is recovered in Europe with migrations in the form of new-racism. In front of that and its Hegelian justification rises the ethics of alterity by authors like Charles Taylor and Emmanuel Levinas who, at the same time, fall out from the abstract and possessive individualism of the liberal egalitarianism.