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The trend in Western liberal democracies is to extend to long-term residents most, if not all, the legal rights of citizens and improving their access to citizenship for immigrants and their descendants. The situation is different in developed East Asian societies, where the most migrant workers work under short-term contracts without the possibility of becoming equal members of the political community. It is argued that the special circumstances in East Asian societies may justify arrangements for differential rights. The practice of hiring foreign domestic workers ‘fits’ better with the Confucian cultural heritage in East Asia; there are cultural particularities underpinning the system in East Asia which may not be shared elsewhere.

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 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 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 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 argues that rethinking the boundaries of labour law must include considering a broad range of public policy measures that not only intersect with labour law, but shape it. In particular, trade liberalisation and restrictions to the movement of persons influence our understandings of how labour is meant to be regulated. The chapter offers a brief historical framing and a discussion of some of the contemporary empirical literature, to capture employment effects of an asymmetrical liberalisation that has fundamentally called into question the embedded liberal compromise made by industrialised market economies. It argues that efforts to rethink the boundaries of labour law must engage with trade law and immigration law. In the process, it challenges the binary between trade versus aid. It suggests that it is neither acceptable nor strategically wise to resist the movement of persons for work and its development implications; rather it is time to focus carefully on the terms of that movement. Support for a notion of ‘reasonable labour market access for migrant workers’ must be accompanied by a ‘decent work complement’, which might take the form of a ‘reverse’ social clause.

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 focuses on migrants, which comprise approximately 191 million individuals, or 3% of the world's population. Topics discussed include the human rights of migrants, mechanisms for the protection of migrants, and the plight of migrant workers.

From the 1960s through the 1990s, millions of Mexican immigrants, Tejanos, and Mexican Americans journeyed through the rural U.S. South as agricultural migrant workers and tens of thousands settled there. Chapter Four argues that Mexicanos of this generation arrived to southern Georgia’s agricultural areas with diminished expectations of citizenship in the Americas’ neoliberal era. Though locals initially treated them as objects of curiosity or hostility, soon influential white employers and church leaders both Catholic and Evangelical framed Mexican migrants’ lifestyles as archetypical examples of upright working poor who merited the opportunity to stay in town, earn wages, attend school, and receive charity despite their foreign accents and racial difference. Mexicanos reciprocated the interest, and did not become involved in labor or political organizing, albeit for their own reasons. In this way, a fragile peace around immigration issues settled over southern Georgia and much of the rural agricultural South through the end of the 1990s, even as farmworker organizing and populist anti-immigrant backlash took hold elsewhere in the country during the same period.

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.

This chapter presents a synthesis of the conclusions of the preceding chapters in this book. It explores how Chinese labour market reform has changed the allocation and renumeration of labour, and contributed to the creation of a functioning labour market. It examines the various labour market characteristics which make this journey incomplete, and describes a vision of China with a functioning labour market.

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 discusses research and policy approaches to assessing labour shortages and the implications for immigration policy in the UK and the US, with a particular focus on the potential lessons of the UK's Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) for current debates about immigration reform in the US. The MAC's approach to assessing labour shortages and the review of particular British labour markets employing or requesting migrants highlight the importance of obtaining and reviewing both top‐down and bottom‐up data on labour supply and demand, and of considering the alternatives to migrant workers in response to perceived labour shortages in specific sectors and occupations. These are the two key insights of the current British model for US debates about labour shortages and immigration reform.

The chapter examines the question of whether there is a relationship between women's poor access to productive resources such as land, property, income, employment, technology, credit, and education, and their likelihood of experiencing gender-based violence and abuse. It begins with a discussion of the feminist political economy method, which seeks to comprehend broader, global political-economic structures that underpin gender inequality and women's vulnerability to violence. It then illustrates with specific examples how the feminist political economy method might be used to analyse violence against women in four strategic sites: (i) neo-liberal economic restructuring and men's reaction to the loss of secure employment; (ii) economic destabilisation and transition; (iii) the growth of a sex trade around the creation of free trade zones; and (iv) the transnational migration of women workers.

This chapter discusses how migrant workers of Kanagawa City Union (KCU), who are largely from Latin American countries, participated in the annual negotiation meeting with government representatives and the union's well-known activity called ‘Day Long Action’. Japanese is predominantly used in these events, with little effort to translate for non-Japanese-speaking participants. While the previous chapter looks at an instance where migrant protesters challenge the gap between their visibility and audibility, this chapter shows that they strategically use such a gap for their own benefit. For some migrants, being unable to understand Japanese is not a hindrance but a convenient pretext to follow what they are ordered to do. In this regard, silence gives them an opportunity to perform their loyalty to the trade unions they belong to. Demonstration of such loyalty is a key strategy for KCU migrant members because it is Japanese unionists who ultimately handle migrants' labour disputes.

This chapter describes instances where the voice of migrant protesters is made simultaneously both audible and inaudible through people who act as their agents. In particular, it looks at three different groups who assume such roles: migrant volunteers at the China Japan Volunteer Organization (CJVO), immigration lawyers, and interpreters. With their professional expertise on legal matters, familiarity with Japanese culture and language as well as those of migrant workers, these agents play an important role in migrant activism. They facilitate negotiations between migrant workers and their employers, represent them at court, and help migrant workers to communicate with their Japanese counterparts. Crucially, they act not only as the spokespersons of migrant protesters, but also as mediators. They interfere with the interaction between migrants and their employers, quietly and sometimes without the knowledge of migrants, to achieve what they see as the best course of action for the migrant protesters. In this way, they play an indispensable role in creating the ‘voice’ of migrants. While migrant protesters become visible and audible thanks to those who assume the role of their spokespersons, they do so, however, at the cost of losing control of their own voices.

This chapter deals with the legislation and policies aimed at maximising levels of employment. It is argued that these policies brought together the areas of social security, tax, and employment law — traditionally considered as distinct — in pursuit of a single goal. From the social security side it analyses the content and impact of the various ‘New Deals’ — from tax law the role of tax credits, and from employment law the newly introduced National Minimum Wage and changes to the laws in the areas of discrimination (especially disability and age discrimination), training, and migrant workers. Finally, the development of British policy is placed in an international comparative setting.

This chapter focuses on the Nambu Foreign Workers Caucus (FWC), the migrant workers' branch of the trade union, National Union of General Workers Tokyo Nambu (hereafter referred to as Nambu), and largely led by English-speaking migrants. It traces the events where the FWC split from Nambu, a trade union largely composed of Japanese-speaking members, to form a new union called Tozen. At the heart of the split was the question of silence. Many Nambu FWC members were troubled not only because they had been silenced by Japanese union members for their inability to speak Japanese, but also because their silence was linked to a sign of powerlessness. They were regarded as helpless victims, unable to act and speak on their own. By looking at Tozen's activities, the chapter also investigates how the union, driven by the need to make noncitizens audible, handles linguistic diversity among its members.