Refugees — people who have fled genuine persecution, war, or conditions that make their home country uninhabitable — have a specifically defined set of rights under international law that nations have agreed to honor and routinely fail to. The gap between the legal obligation and the political will to fulfill it is one of the starkest examples of the distance between formal rights and lived justice. Immigration justice more broadly asks: on what basis can a state exclude people from crossing a border, and what obligations are created by the history of one state's policies in the places from which migrants are fleeing?
Each step builds on the last.