1 Introduction The Human Rights of Non-citizens Molly Land, Kathryn Libal, and Jillian Chambers Biden will turn Minnesota into a refugee camp – and he said that – overwhelming public resources, overcrowding schools and inundating your hospitals. You know that. It’s already there. It’s a disgrace what they’ve done to your state. It’s just – it’s absolutely – it’s a disgrace, OK? These were the words of the President of the United States at a September 2020 campaign rally in Duluth, Minnesota.1 These words are not only emblematic of now-standard fearmongering about the economic impact of accepting refugees. They also shine a spotlight on what we believe is a fundamental shift in discourse around non-citizens that has been building for some time, driven by populist, nativist, and racist tropes of the “other” – a shift from a language of compassion to one of indifference or apathy. According to the President, it is “disgraceful” to give refuge to those who are suffering, or to provide medical and other aid to those without. This book is an attempt to respond to that shift by exploring what, if any, obligations we as humans have to other humans. Featuring contributions drawn from a range of disciplinary perspectives, the chapters in the first part of this book seek to shed light on the original promise of human rights law and how that promise has failed – spectacularly so in many places – to provide a basis for ensuring rights. Human rights law, a supposedly universal body of law that applies to every individual, has long tolerated limits on human rights protections for non-citizens.2 States 1 2 J. Rose, “What Are the Presidential Candidates’ Views on Immigration?,” Delaware Public Media, October 14, 2020, www.delawarepublic.org/post/what-are-presidential-candidates-viewsimmigration. D. Weissbrodt, “Human Rights of Noncitizens,” in R. E. Howard-Hassmann and M. WaltonRoberts (eds.), The Human Right to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 21–29; A. Abizadeh, “Closed Borders, Human Rights, and Democratic Legitimation,” in D. Hollenbech (ed.), Driven from Home: Protecting the Rights of Forced Migrants (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2010), pp. 147–166; 1 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press