It seems to have become a tendency to focus on the negative consequences of higher migration flows. More open borders would supposedly undermine the sovereignty of states and lead to an unfavorable...Show moreIt seems to have become a tendency to focus on the negative consequences of higher migration flows. More open borders would supposedly undermine the sovereignty of states and lead to an unfavorable lack of control over who enters the country and who does not. Yet I believe there are many good reasons to defend looser border controls and actually far fewer reasons to support strict immigration policies. The conviction with which almost every country in the world defends the right to leave a country, while they simultaneously resist to acknowledge a subsequent right to enter another country, is suprising to me. As Phillip Cole pointed out “one cannot consistently assert that there is a fundamental human right to emigration but no such right to immigration; the liberal asymmetry position is morally ethical, but also conceptually incoherent” (Cole, 2000, 46). Cole argues that in case of nation state, the right to exit one’s state is dependent upon entry elsewhere because there is no livable ‘space’ of statelessness (2011, 203-204). I share the same conviction that the notions of depart and entrance are conceptually intertwined. An analysis of the concept of rights, duties and democratic legitimacy will demonstrate that there is a moral right to leave and a subsequent moral right to enter a country.Show less