Week 5: Legal rights and workplace protections for migrant workers

It is often stated that ‘charity begins at home’. This popular truism builds upon a powerful image of the world which divides humanity into insiders and outsiders. Insiders are typically defined on the basis of shared race, ethnicity, or religion. Outsiders are typically defined on the basis of markers of difference, such as having a different skin colour, a different language, a different faith, or even different clothes or food. Hostility towards outsiders is a recurring feature of human history, with the most extreme examples involving entire groups of people being targeted for extermination.

Divisions between insiders and outsiders have major implications for migration. Tremendous amounts of wealth and energy are now devoted to preventing ‘undesirable’ outsiders from crossing international borders. Securing legal permission to move from one country to another has never been harder for people with the ‘wrong’ passport, with elaborate application procedures and challenging financial requirements being placed upon people seeking to move for work, to study, or to even visit as tourists. Migrants who are unable to secure legal permission to travel are, in turn, faced with all kinds of barriers which are designed to make movement as difficult and dangerous as possible. Efforts to prevent movement rarely reduce the number of people on the move to any degree. They instead increase the dangers and vulnerabilities associated with movement.

These efforts to prevent movement are not inspired by humanitarian sentiments. They are instead primarily motivated by cultural and economic anxieties. However, we also have many cases where the language of preventing trafficking or slavery has been invoked to present an humanitarian wrapping for policies decided on other grounds. When Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring his intention to ‘build a wall’ in 2017, he publicly justified his decision in terms of preventing ‘illegal immigration, drug and human trafficking, and acts of terrorism’. Building a wall is clearly not a policy that arises out of a concern for migrants, but this is nonetheless where many anti-trafficking and anti-slavery policies end up: more and more border protection. This is not helpful. Efforts to prevent movement are often part of the problem, rather than the solution.

It is also important to recognise that governments are not opposed to all migrants. Despite the rhetoric of ‘defending the border’, governments routinely turn to migrant workers in order to help satisfy their labour needs. Some workers with ‘exceptional skills’, such as doctors, academics or engineers, secure work visas with few complications. Other workers secure entry on tied visas which severely limit their options and opportunities. The main attraction of this latter category is that workers on tied visas are typically paid less, have to work longer, and have poorer working conditions than their local counterparts. They also work under the shadow of potential deportation.

These conditions can be primarily traced to their work visas, so the most effective way of addressing systems of migrant labour exploitation involves improving the terms of work visas to include statutory time off, increased wages, binding restrictions on hours worked, the legal right to change employers, and a pathway to becoming a citizen of the country where migrant labourers often live and work for many years. What this means, in essence, is working to close the gap between the rights and protections enjoyed by local workers – the insiders – and the much weaker rights and protections enjoyed by migrant workers – the outsiders. Laws governing local workers can be far from ideal, but they are generally preferable to protections afforded to migrant labourers.

This is not a situation where there are no obvious solutions available. It is instead a situation where there are obvious solutions available which governments remain reluctant to implement. They instead desire a pool of migrant workers whom they can exploit with few consequences. Migration has always been an important pathway for advancement and opportunity, and people will continue to seek to improve their fortunes through mobility, yet governments throughout the globe currently have little or no interest in supporting migrant rights.