International migration is a defining problem of our time, and at the heart of this problem are the ethical intuitions that dominate thinking about migration and its governance. This article questions existing approaches to a particularly contentious form of international migration, as an important first step towards a novel and more ethical way of addressing the problems of the movement of people across national borders.

The prevailing doctrine of state sovereignty in international law today is that it entails the right to exclude non-nationals, with only limited exceptions. Whatever the scope of these exceptions, so-called economic migrants – those whose movement is motivated primarily by the desire for a better life – typically fall outside them. While international refugee law and international human rights law place restrictions on the right of states to exclude non-nationals whose lives are endangered by the risk of certain forms of persecution in their home countries, there are no similar protections for economic migrants. International legal theorists have not fundamentally questioned this formulation of state sovereignty, which justifies the assertion of a largely unrestricted right to exclude economic migrants.

This article examines the history and legacy of the European colonial project to challenge this status quo. It argues for a different theory of sovereignty that makes clear why, in fact, economic migrants of a certain kind have compelling claims to national admission and inclusion in countries that today insist, unethically, on a right to exclude them. European colonialism involved the emigration of tens of millions of Europeans and the flow of natural and human resources across the world, to the benefit of Europe and Europeans. This article details how global interconnectedness and political subordination, initiated throughout this history, generate a theory of sovereignty that compels former colonial powers to open their borders to former colonial subjects. To the extent that certain forms of international migration today respond to political subordination rooted in colonial and neocolonial structures, a different conceptualization of such migration is needed: one that treats economic migrants as political agents exercising equal rights when they engage in “decolonial” migration.

• Adjunct Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law. I would like to thank the following individuals for their valuable contributions to earlier drafts: Amna Akbar, José Alvarez, Asli Bâli, Laurie Benton, Gabriella Blum, Devon Carbado, Justin Desautels-Stein, Laurel Fletcher, Gabriel Greenberg, Oona Hathaway, Loren Landau, Itamar Mann, Emmanuel Mauleón, Jon Michaels, Saira Mohamed, Hiroshi Motomura, Sam Moyn, K-Sue Park, Matiangai Sirleaf, and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. Equally instrumental were the participants in the following workshops: the Bellagio Workshop of the American Society of International Law’s Immigration Law Interest Group (especially Jaya Ramji-Nogales and Peter Spiro for creating an intellectual environment conducive to a radical reimagining), the Berkeley International and Comparative Law Colloquium, the Duke-Stanford Culp Colloquium, the Southern California International Law Scholars Workshop, the UCLA Working Group on Political Sociology and the Global South, the UCLA School of Law Summer Colloquium, the UCLA Junior Law School Colloquium, the UCLA Spring 2018 Advanced Critical Race Theory Seminar, the Vanderbilt International Legal Studies Program’s Works in Progress Roundtable, the Women in International Law Workshop, and the Yale-Stanford-Harvard Junior Law School Forum. I am grateful to the following individuals for their excellent research assistance and fruitful intellectual provocation: Rebecca Fordon, Erin French, Zachary Heinselman, Marc Jacome, Kabita Parajuli, and the excellent team of reference librarians at the UCLA School of Law. And finally, I am grateful to the Hellman Fellows Fund at UCLA for their research support. All errors are my own.