Dussel and Levinas on the stranger at the door: does “the Other comes first” tell a host country anything concrete?

Over the last decade millions of Venezuelans have crossed into Colombia. In 2021 the government offered most of those already here ten years of temporary protection. The decision was praised abroad and argued about at home, and still is.

I have been rereading Dussel, who learned from Levinas and then turned him outward. For Levinas, ethics begins in the face of the other person, which makes a demand on me before any contract or calculation. Dussel gave that face a social address: the poor, the colonised, the excluded, the one outside the system who is not counted. He called this position "exteriority".

A migrant at the border is almost a textbook case of exteriority. So the philosophy ought to have something to say. But what? "Respond to the face" is powerful at a doorway. It is much harder to turn into a quota, a budget for schools in a border city, or an answer to a Colombian who is also poor and asks, "And what about us?"

Is the ethics of the Other a foundation for policy, or a standing objection to every policy, a reminder of whom it leaves out? I am not sure the second is less valuable.