For many in the West, the primary moral question about refugees has to do with whether we have a moral obligation to admit them into our states. In this talk, Parekh argues that we should reject the long-term encampment of refugees as the de facto solution to the global refugee crisis. Many of the harms of current migration governance must be understood as structural injustices, in which Western states can be held remedially responsible. Structural injustices are not necessarily the result of deliberate wrongdoing, but are the unintentional outcome of the actions of different agents each working for their own morally acceptable ends.

Serena Parekh is an associate professor of philosophy at Northeastern University in Boston, where she is the director of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program and editor of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy.