In the recent debate on immigration justice, some people such as Phillip Cole, Javier Hidalgo, Jan Brezger, and Andreas Cassee contend that arguments in favor of immigration controls can be applied to support compatriot deportation. Nonetheless, in theory and practice, few scholars advocate compatriot deportation. Consequently, defenders of immigration controls need to explain why arguments in favor of immigration controls do not at the same time lead to compatriot deportation. Given this task, this paper first aims to develop a practical argument inspired by Onora O'Neill to explain the asymmetry between compatriot deportation and immigration controls. On this view, even would-be immigrants can agree with this asymmetry, because a policy of deporting citizens in a destined country would hinder some immigrants’ plan of establishing various relationships with the local citizens. Accordingly, this asymmetry is an underlying assumption in the practice of immigration. The second aim of this paper is to show why the practical argument developed here is better than alternative explanations in the current literature, including the humanitarian argument, the special relationship argument, the nationalist argument, and the functionalist argument. I argue that these alternative explanations fail to satisfy the criteria of comprehensiveness, particularity, and non-circularity.
