In 1882, the US government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act banning the entry of Chinese people into the United States. The act was the product of a decades long campaign by white nativists against the influx of Chinese workers to California. It was the first act in US history to exclude people on grounds of race. Looking back, the Chinese Exclusion Act seems clearly unjust. Immigration policy should not discriminate on racial grounds. But if the Chinese Exclusion Act was unjust, does this have any implications for immigration policy in the present day? Rufaida Al Hashmi, from Oxford University, believes so. She thinks that unjust restrictions in the past can ground a right to admission in the present. In her view, we can and should use immigration policy to help correct historic wrongs. But how can wrongs committed against people who are now long dead ground rights for present populations? Who exactly has these rights and how can we identify them? And why is immigration a good means to correct historic wrongs when current populations may have no desire to migrate?

Rufaida Al Hashmi is a doctoral student at Nuffield College, Oxford. Her article, Historical Injustice in Immigration Policy, was published in Political Studies in 2021. 

Cover art by Raphael Perez.