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This article interrogates the widely held, but rarely defended, view that states wield legitimate power over potential immigrants when and because they refrain from violating their human rights. I reconstruct a strong argument for this view, which turns on a claim about the limited power states claim over migrants. Drawing on recent empirical work, I show how this argument is inapplicable to the border regimes of a set of wealthy democracies. These regimes are characterized by a practice that is coordinated and extraterritorial in a way that undercuts the case for holding them to a minimal legitimacy standard. By participating in this practice, these states wield significant power over potential immigrants. I argue that this power exposes potential immigrants to novel risk, which in turn triggers a demand for the satisfaction of a higher standard of legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU's power is expanding, calling for reassessments of its normative legitimacy. This article proposes a novel criterion for assessing the EU's legitimacy: symmetry in the delegation of power. We illustrate the usefulness of this criterion through an analysis of the European border regime. Existing analyses of the border regime have tended to dismiss it as weak and intergovernmental. We show, to the contrary, that it is both strong and weak. The EU wields significant power in border control but lacks power altogether in immigration policy. This asymmetry has rendered the EU incapable of discharging the moral responsibilities that arise in migration control, posing a novel legitimacy challenge. Finally, we argue that the symmetry criterion generalizes and can shed light on the EU's legitimacy beyond the area of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]