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This chapter examines cross-border movements of people so as to outline the contours, examine the underlying factors, analyse the implications of globalisation, explore future prospects, and consider issues and problems of governance. It sketches a profile of international labour migration over the past fifty years and situates it in an historical perspective to highlight the contrast between the old and the new. It also draws a distinction between different categories of labour flows in the contemporary world economy. It then examines the underlying factors with an emphasis on structural determinants at the macrolevel. It also attempts to explain why the gathering momentum of globalisation has coincided with a discernible slowdown in migration during the last quarter of the 20th century, to analyse how globalisation might influence emigration pressures on the supply side and immigration needs on the demand side.

This chapter examines the implications of the analysis in this book for human rights debates and the rights-based approaches to migration advocated by many international organizations and nongovernmental organizations concerned with protecting and promoting the interests of migrant workers. It highlights the danger of a blind spot in human rights–based approaches to migration, which are often focused on protecting and promoting migrant rights without taking into account the consequences for nation-states' policies for admitting new migrant workers. The trade-off between openness and some specific migrant rights in high-income countries' labor immigration policies means that insisting on equality of rights for migrant workers can come at the price of more restrictive admission policies and, therefore, discourage the further liberalization of international labor migration.

This chapter examines the ethics of labor immigration policy, moving the discussion from a positive analysis of “what is” to the equally important normative question of “what should be.” If high-income countries' labor immigration policies are characterized by a trade-off between openness and some rights for migrant workers, the chapter asks what rights restrictions—if any—are acceptable in order to enable more workers to access labor markets in high-income countries. It proposes a pragmatic approach that takes into account existing realities in labor immigration policymaking and gives more weight to the interests of migrants and countries of origin than most high-income countries currently do when designing labor immigration policies. Based on this approach, the chapter asserts that there is a strong normative case for tolerating the selective, evidence-based, temporary restriction of a few specific migrant rights under new and expanded temporary migration programs that help liberalize international labor migration.

Migration is the exception rather than the rule, but international labor migration is likely to increase because of persisting demographic and economic inequalities at a time when revolutions in communications, transportation, and rights make it ever easier to learn about opportunities abroad, move to them, and stay abroad. When faced with migration crises, the default management tool of governments involves adjusting the rights of migrants, prompting clashes with UN agencies and non-governmental organizations that urge equal rights for migrants. In an ideal world, there would be few barriers to migration and equal rights for migrants, but this ideal world is unlikely until the differences between countries that encourage migration are reduced.

This chapter explores how Bangladeshis have begun to make their way in and around the global economy, with a look at employment in the readymade garments (RMG) industry, international labour migration, and microfinance. It examines the origins, scale, and social transformations engendered by each of these sectors, in which millions of Bangladeshis have come to be involved. Chapter 8 shows how elite interests were advanced, or not harmed, by the rapid growth of each of these sectors. Despite the benefits each has brought, Bangladeshis are positioned at the bottom of global value chains and, through their employment in each, are exposed to new volatilities and harms from within the global economy, which to date the state has struggled to protect them against.

This chapter examines gendered expectations resulting not only from the intersecting relations of race and class but also from the age as well as the inequality of nations that gives rise to particular patterns of international labor migration. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic observations and twenty in-depth interviews with Latina/o adolescent street vendors (sixteen girls and four boys) in Los Angeles, the chapter investigates how Latina girls negotiate a triple shift: street vending, household work, and schoolwork. It also explores the continuities between gendered household divisions of labor and street vending, whether the girls see “third-shift” work obligations as a burden or as a source of empowerment, and how the work that girls do as street vendors both perpetuates and challenges gendered expectations.