Published by MIT Press, 128 pp, hardcover

When a cargo ship carrying nearly 500 Sri Lankan asylum seekers approached the waters of British Columbia in August, the debate it produced regarding how strict or relaxed our immigration policy should be was intense. Citizens called in to radio shows and wrote letters to newspapers, magazines, and their MPs, all in an attempt to voice their feelings.

And so it’s good timing for the release of Immigrants and the Right to Stay by Joseph Carens, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. The book makes a contentious yet interesting argument that goes beyond those who support the asylum claims of people like the Sri Lankans who arrived here.

Carens’s central question is what we should do with illegal immigrants, those who have entered the country without proper consent. Rather than levelling the blanket argument that they should be deported upon being found out, he makes the case that if they have set down roots in their adopted land they should be considered citizens. This is less a political argument intended to support the line of the left, the right, or any other ideological group than it is a moral claim about what makes a person a citizen.

Carens notes that many immigrants who enter a country illegally settle there long enough that they have fully naturalized children, work and live in stable conditions, and adopt many of the habits and norms of their new land. Laws that say they should be deported—of the kind enforced with particular strictness in the United States—should therefore be struck down. “Even if someone has arrived only as an adult,” writes Carens, “it seems cruel and inhumane to uproot a person who has spent fifteen or twenty years as a contributing member of society in the name of enforcing immigration restrictions.”

Immigrants and the Right to Stay focuses on the American experience with illegal immigration, but the argument applies to Canada as well. If global trends in migration continue, we will see the number of people entering Canada rise, and we’ll have to really think deeply about what makes a person a citizen, and resolve to avoid the reactionary tendency to say “Kick ’em out.” Although the slim book does not offer many specific policy recommendations, its essentially moral point that “Irregular migrants should be granted amnesty”¦if they have been settled for a long time” should inform the way we approach discussions of the issue.