There are currently 43.7 million refugees worldwide. These are people who have been forced to flee their home countries due to severe threats to their lives, human rights and basic needs. Yet, having fled in search of safety, they have not always found it. Instead, the vast majority live in squalid and dangerous camps or face destitution in urban areas in regions neighbouring their own states in the Global South. In these conditions, refugees continue to face severe human rights violations. A small minority undertake perilous journeys to find adequate safety in the Global North. Thousands lose their lives on the way, every year.

How should states in the Global North respond to this situation? This question polarises debate. Some philosophers, like Peter Singer, argue that states must admit refugees until the point of societal collapse; others argue that states are not necessarily obligated to admit a single refugee. Some politicians advocate for expansive resettlement, others seek to prevent refugees from seeking asylum at the border, or even deport them. Some citizens march the streets proclaiming ‘refugees welcome here’, others attempt to burn down a hotel with refugees inside. Some states have welcomed more than a million refugees, others build concrete walls and barbed wire fences.

In the face of such volatile disagreement, there is an urgent need for an understanding and agreement on what an ethical response to refugees would be.

To achieve this agreement, we must reach across divides in current debates to find common ground and base our approach on widely shared commitments. In this spirit, we can grant that states have a right to control their borders and immigration. The question of obligations to refugees is often tangled up with questions of whether states have a right to control borders. But these are distinct questions. You can believe that states have a right to control borders and immigration, yet still agree that states have obligations to protect refugees. So, we can move past the broader distracting and volatile debate on immigration, and focus on obligations to refugees specifically.

Refugees are migrants, but only insofar as they have fled their own countries. The majority migrate no further. Refugees are distinct, as recognised in international law, because they have been forced to flee their own states due to severe threats. Their own state is unwilling or unable to adequately protect them, so they are forced to seek safety elsewhere. This distinguishes refugees from migrants who may not be forcibly displaced and unable to return, but who migrate for other reasons. Refugees therefore have particularly urgent claims to protection and potential admission.

If an innocent person is in desperate need and you can help at little cost to yourself, it would be wrong to refuse

To reach agreement on obligations to such refugees, these obligations must themselves be based on widely shared core moral commitments (that is, basic commitments fundamental to common morality, as well as endorsed by all plausible normative ethical theories and the Abrahamic religions, to which the majority of the world adheres). The first commitment is the moral prohibition on harming or violating the rights of innocent people without substantial justification. For example, it is widely accepted that it would be wrong to physically abuse and then imprison an innocent person without trial for no adequate reason. This commitment grounds our negative moral obligations: obligations to not perform acts that would harm or violate the rights of innocent people. Such negative obligations are widely agreed to be particularly strong.

The second commitment is the principle (sometimes called the humanitarian or Samaritan principle) that if an innocent person is in desperate need of help and you can easily help them at little cost to yourself, it would be wrong to refuse to help and let them needlessly suffer. To take Singer’s famous example, if you saw a small child drowning in a shallow pond, and you could save them simply by pulling them to safety, it would be wrong to do nothing, stand by and let them drown. This commitment grounds our positive moral obligations: obligations to perform acts that would help or otherwise benefit others. These positive obligations are also widely accepted.

So what are the obligations specifically owed to refugees? To answer this question, it is essential to focus our attention on the situation and experiences of refugees themselves. This will reveal morally significant features that ought to be recognised and taken into account, thereby helping us understand our obligations towards them. Once understood, these obligations will form the components of what an ethical response towards refugees would be.

The first morally significant feature of refugees’ situation is that states in the Global North are by no means mere innocent bystanders simply overlooking the harms that refugees face. Rather, many states actively respond to refugees seeking safety with the following practices:

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