Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1,802

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders

Carens, Joseph H.·1987·The Review of Politics
DOI 10.1017/s0034670500033817
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Many poor and oppressed people wish to leave their countries of origin in the third world to come to affluent Western societies. This essay argues that there is little justification for keeping them out. The essay draws on three contemporary approaches to political theory — the Rawlsian, the Nozickean, and the utilitarian — to construct arguments for open borders. The fact that all three theories converge upon the same results on this issue, despite their significant disagreements on others, strengthens the case for open borders and reveals its roots in our deep commitment to respect all human beings as free and equal moral persons. The final part of the essay considers communitarian objections to this conclusion, especially those of Michael Walzer.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1017/s0034670500033817

Cites

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cited by

See all 1,802

Metadata

Authors
Carens, J. H.
Venue
The Review of Politics
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Published
1987
Volume
49
Issue
2
Pages
251-273
ISSN
  • 0034-6705 (ISSN-L)
  • 1748-6858
DOI
10.1017/s0034670500033817
OpenAlex
W2110993056
Cited by
1,802
References
0
FWCI
7.46
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1017/s0034670500033817
The paper
Carens, J. H. (1987). Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders. The Review of Politics. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034670500033817

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.