Mich: Can liberal states treat political and economic refugees alike?

Fumio Iida (Kobe University, FAI fellow)

Liberal states have long endorsed a double standard regarding the treatment of refugees, which requires them to permit maximum number of political refugees to stay while leaving the number of acceptable economic refugees totally at the discretion of the recipient countries. This allowed liberal states to accept only minimum number of refugees, so long as political refugees are far smaller in number compared with economic ones. However, a growing number of theorists supporting the ideal of open border or freedom of movement are beginning to suggest that the most ideal policy would be to grant formal citizenship status to both political and economic refugees alike almost automatically. This paper challenges these recent arguments by proposing an alternative admission policy, which requires liberal states to grant only renewable working permissions to both political and economic refugees in order to accept maximum number of refugees as a whole.