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This chapter examines the potential interrelationships between migrant rights and national policies for admitting migrant workers. It explains how we can expect high-income countries to regulate the rights of migrant workers as part of their labor immigration policies. It develops a basic approach that conceptualizes the design of labor immigration policy in high-income countries as a process that involves “choice under constraints.” It shows that nation-states decide on how to regulate the number, selection, and rights of migrant workers admitted in order to achieve a core set of four interrelated and sometimes competing policy goals: economic efficiency, distribution, national identity and social cohesion, and national security and public order. Although their importance and specific interpretations vary across countries, and over time, the chapter argues that each of these objectives constitutes a fundamental policy consideration that policymakers can and do purposefully pursue in all countries.

This chapter examines the key features of labor immigration programs in high and middle-income countries in practice. After providing an overview of existing academic and policy literature that comparatively discusses labor immigration policies in different countries, the chapter constructs and analyzes two separate indexes that measure the openness of labor immigration programs in forty-six high- and middle-income countries to admitting migrant workers, as well as the legal rights (civil and political, economic, social, residency, and family reunion rights) granted to migrant workers admitted under these programs. The empirical results show that labor immigration programs that target the admission of higher-skilled workers are more open and grant migrants more rights than programs targeting lower-skilled workers. Among programs in upper-high-income countries, labor immigration programs can be characterized by a trade-off between openness and some migrant rights.

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.

This chapter examines the drivers of the relationships between openness, skill levels of workers, and migrant rights in high-income countries. It considers each of the three relationships—between openness and skills, rights and skills, and openness and rights—providing short case studies of where they occur, and why. It also looks at examples of policies that are not characterized by these relationships and analyzes the reasons for these exceptional cases. The case studies cover a wide range of political systems, welfare states, labor markets, and geographic regions of the world. They thus include labor immigration policies that are made in different national policy spaces. The chapter shows that policy decisions on how to regulate the admission and rights of migrant workers in high-income countries are firmly based on assessments of the consequences of admitting migrants as well as granting/restricting rights for the national interests of migrant-receiving countries.

This book examines how and why high-income countries restrict the rights of migrant workers as part of their labor immigration policies, along with the implications for policy debates about regulating labor migration and protecting migrants. It seeks to reframe the theoretical debates about the tensions between human rights and citizenship rights, the agency and interests of migrants and states, and the determinants and ethics of labor immigration policy. The book analyzes the characteristics and key features of labor immigration policies and restrictions of migrant rights in more than forty high-income countries as well as policy drivers in major migrant-receiving and migrant-sending countries. This introductory chapter explains the aims, approach, and main arguments of the book, as well as its terminology and scope, and provides an overview of the chapters that follow.

This chapter examines how high-income countries' restrictions of labor immigration and migrant rights affect the interests of migrants and their countries of origin, and how migrants and sending countries have engaged with these restrictions in practice. Labor immigration policies are “made” in receiving countries, but they have important consequences for migrants and their countries of origin. The chapter first provides an overview of the interrelationships between labor emigration, rights, and human development before discussing how migrant workers and their countries of origin respond to the trade-off between openness and rights in practice. Given that the human development of people is multidimensional and includes more considerations than just access to legal rights, it is not surprising to see migrant workers making “sacrifices” in some dimensions of development in exchange for advancing others.

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 why so few countries have ratified international legal instruments for the protection of the rights of migrant workers. The existing literature has identified a host of legal issues and complexities as well as a lack of campaigning and awareness of the United Nations Convention on Migrant Workers (CMW) and other international conventions as key factors. The chapter argues that the primary explanation for the low level of ratifications of international migrant rights conventions lies with the effects of granting or restricting migrant rights on the national interests of migrant-receiving countries. It concludes by conceptualizing migrant rights as a subset of citizenship rights and suggests that policy decisions about the regulation of the rights of different types of migrant workers are, in practice, an integral part of nation-states' overall labor immigration policies.