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This chapter examines EU policies concerning social exclusion, migrant integration, labour migration, and asylum in the early 21st century. A two-pronged approach analyzes EU efforts in the realm of migrant integration together with its interventions in the area of immigration and asylum. A new anti-discrimination orientation is being turned into mandatory EU directives and EU-sponsored transnational development programmes, but this reorientation towards diversity, social inclusion, and equal opportunity is part of a new European Social Model, which is conditioned by a neo-liberal policy dynamic. The contours of the EU’s modernized Social Model are those of a post-national workfare regime. This has critical implications for the transformation of the frameworks of citizenship marking the post-war European welfare states in general, and the incorporation of immigrants and ethnic minorities in European societies in particular. The first part of the chapter explores the changing conditionality posed by the neo-liberal turn and changing frameworks of citizenship with regard to the inclusion of resident denizens and citizens with migrant background. That is, it focuses on the actual condition of being a citizen. The second half of the chapter discusses the changing conditions for becoming (or not becoming) a citizen, framed by a newly emerging supranational political economy of border control, migration management, and asylum.

The chapter briefly describes the rate of growth of international migration, arguing that the most rapidly growing segment is the migration of skilled workers from developing to industrialized countries. It also clarifies the purpose of this section of the book, which is to examine the causes of the brain drain at the international level, and its consequences for the sending countries.

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 focuses on the impact of temporary migration on migrant communities in cities. It shows that migrant workers in Chinese cities are disadvantaged in terms of employment opportunities and accessibility to services and welfare benefits, such as unemployment allowances and formal employment contracts. While it has become easier for many migrants to work, stay, and earn a cash income in the cities, many of them live in the migrant-concentrated communities, which are the most disadvantaged communities with poor living conditions.

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 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 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 explores three questions: what global institutions regulate the international migration of low‐skilled workers (ILO and UN Conventions, regional and bilateral agreements), what processes have shaped and influenced the development of international institutions governing low‐skilled migration (post‐war development in Europe for 1949 ILO, oil shock and recruitment halt for 1975, UN in 1990), and what rationale would there be for multilateral regulation in this area of international migration (rights to protect low‐skilled migrants; efficiency with more movement, assuming full employment). In each case it argues that the global governance of low‐skilled labour migration has been characterized by a ‘rights vs numbers’ trade‐off.

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 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 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 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.

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 provides a general portrait of new migration trends to Israel and the general characteristics of the migrants themselves. The general overview is organized along two major axes that characterize migration flows to Israel since the end of the 1980s: Jewish migration under the law of return and non-Jewish and non-Palestinian flows of labor migrants. In the conclusion we expand on several challenges that have emerged within the Israeli context of immigration during the last decades: (1) migration from the former Soviet Union; (2) migration from Ethiopia; (3) non-Jewish migration under the auspices of the law of return; and (4) non-Jewish labor migrants. These challenges are likely to leave their imprint on Israel's regime of incorporation and society.