I took part in a debate today with Martin Ruhs (Oxford) for Migration Mobilities Bristol on labour migration. I’ll put in a link to the full discussion when it is available, but meanwhile, here are my opening remarks:
We live in a world where extreme poverty coexists with great wealth and where the accident of birth with one nationality rather than another has more bearing on someone’s life prospects than anything else. We also know that migration from poor countries to wealthy ones is more effective in addressing global poverty than just about anything else. Migrants from poor countries to wealthy ones gain access to more productive economies, earn higher wages than they would have at home, and send back valuable remittances to a degree that vastly exceeds the value of foreign aid programmes.
Meanwhile, wealthy countries need migrant labour to do the jobs that too few of our own citizens will do: agriculture and food, social care, health, construction, hospitality. (Jobs, actually, that once were invisible but which COVID has brought home the value of.) But immigration is also a hot-button electoral issue and nativist parties have enjoyed great success in promoting restrictionist policies that pander to anti-immigrant sentiment among electorates.
In response to this conflict between what is economically desirable (for both sides) and what is politically palatable to electorates, many economists have argued for the idea of a trade-off between openness and rights, suggesting that we can make the labour migration that “we” need more palatable to electorates to the extent to which the inferior and temporary status of those migrants is made concrete by depriving them of some rights. Here, migration is conceived of in transactional terms: “We” get a flexible and exploitable labour force, perhaps plugging key skills gaps; “they” get more money and voters don’t feel threatened that these incomers will displace them in “their own” country.
Notice that the argument contains the assumption that states are entitled to exclude immigrants in general or to admit them at their discretion, and that they are entitled to discriminate among would-be migrants on grounds of their usefulness. Since such assumptions are widely shared, perhaps they are, in pragmatic terms, a reasonable assumption for discussing policy. However, it is worth at least noting that many people, including me, contest these assumptions as a matter of political morality, even though our contestation may not make much difference in reality.
The argument can be challenged on facts and on principles. On the facts, I note (1) that a lot of the evidence for an openness-rights trade-off comes from undemocratic countries such as the Gulf states and Singapore, so we need to be wary about how far it generalizes to democratic ones (2) that insofar as opposition to migration in wealthy countries is based on the perception (however misguided) that cheap foreign labour threatens wages and jobs, it is hard to see how that opposition is going to be assuaged by increasing the numbers of rightless and exploitable people in the labour force.
The principles cover two basic areas: exploitation and democracy. The exploitation point is surely familiar: if we put people in a weaker bargaining position by denying them options, we make them vulnerable to those who would take advantage of them. So, for example, if we tie people to one employer or one line of employment and therefore make it harder for them to walk out, we make it easier for employers or managers to threaten them for not working unpaid overtime, to get them to put up with hazardous working conditions, or for refusing to give in to sexual demands etc. Still, there’s a familiar response which we know from debates on sweatshops or sex work: these people are making a choice to accept employment on these terms and we risk disrespecting their agency and denying them a chance to be better off than they otherwise would be, if we close off a route to employment that wouldn’t exist, but for those rights restrictions.
The democracy point kicks in for anyone who thinks it wrong to have people living and working on the territory, being subject to laws, but having no say over them. Some economists believe that we can get round this objection by giving people only short-term visas, so temporary workers (in this respect, as if they were mere tourists) aren’t around long enough to develop a claim to membership. But even if the workers themselves aren’t individually wronged by such a policy, there’s an issue about a democratic society in which a lot of the productive activity is carried out by people without political rights and in which others (who may not be working at all) have disproportionate weight in political decision-making. In fact I worry that in circumstances where we will, because of labour shortages and demographic changes, need migrant workers anyway, the openness-rights trade-off argument can be used as an alibi for denying workers rights and installing a permanent two-tier society.
Finally, I think there’s an issue around the framing of the openness-rights tradeoff. As presented, the policy is one of producing the best outcome in global terms, subject to a constraint, the attitudes of wealthy-country electorates. But if immigration policy is a matter of our collective choice – after all the wealthy country electorates are “us” — then we can’t represent ourselves as doing the best thing when doing an even better thing is within our power. So if it is true that being more open to migrant labour helps alleviate global poverty, that is a policy that we could choose without forcing unpalatable choices on those migrant workers. We could admit them without subjecting them to precarious terms that expose them to domination and exploitation, we simply choose not to and we shouldn’t make out that when we do that, we’re doing the moral thing.
{ 14 comments }
RobinM 12.10.20 at 6:18 pm
I agree, that the circumstances afflicting many people in the world are heart-breakingly awful and that that shouldn’t be ignored. But what I find troubling about your discussion of the matter here—and elsewhere?—is that you seem to juxtapose to that awfulness and misery a receiving place which you do not view as complex and housing its own awfulness and misery. In fact, unless I’m missing something, you don’t really examine the receiving places at all. They’re just vessels whose plenitude ought to be available to all but which are otherwise empty of people—people in many respects like those you envisage as finding relief by immigrating into them, some of them harbouring very non-admirable tendencies, but many of them seeking, some of them quite desperately, the same sorts of things for themselves and those they care for that the migrants are legitimately seeking.
In short, while I appreciate that you’re positing that it is the politically moral thing to do, to let the migrants have ready access to Britain and elsewhere, I think your political-moral position is incomplete. I’d like to see the situation more fully developed to take account of the circumstances among the receivers.
MisterMr 12.10.20 at 6:48 pm
Often people do not want immigration because they think migrants drive down wages in some occupations that we don’t want to do anymore, but maybe we still would do them if wages were, say, double.
Revoking rights to migrants is stupid from this point of view because, as you say, it drives down their bargaining power even more. However people who really don’t want migrants probably hope that by mistreating them they won’t come anymore, so they will just go on mistreatimg them as long as they think there are too many migrants.
Since the economic problems that arr blamed on mogrants are not really caused by them, it means that people will go on mistreating migrants forever, potentially with increasing levels of mistreatment.
This sucks.
Sam Tobin-Hochstadt 12.10.20 at 7:36 pm
I certainly agree that the migration policies of wealthy western countries makes it clear that “we” are not doing the moral thing. But “we” always covers a multitude. If we sharpen it to “I”, we are left with the question of whether I should argue for the kind of restricted membership in the community that you outline here. As you point out, this would be of substantial benefit to potential migrants, but would undermine the political equality that’s important to our communities. And as you also point out, adopting a genuinely moral migration policy seems unlikely in even the medium term.
nickj 12.10.20 at 9:31 pm
“the jobs that too few of our own citizens will do”
aka the jobs that employers exploit migrants to do rather than offering decent terms and conditions.
Moz in Oz 12.11.20 at 1:52 am
One other aspect is how hard we work to make sure that conditions are unpleasant in the source countries. Not just having wars in other people’s countries, it’s the extractive economic model “we lent a lot of money to your last dictator and you have to pay it back” and “we destroyed your small farmers so now you have to grow cash crops and import food” etc. Plus we keep stealing their best and brightest making it very hard to find a good doctor in those countries, let alone a good national leader.
That latter is really a “hidden” dark side… everything from scholarships to selling education is often shockingly explicit that it’s about finding the best and brightest from poor countries and making sure those countries get no benefit from them. With a small exception for those whose only value is money, but even then it’s often not the university graduates on the path to citizenship that are sending money home, it’s the labouring classes.
J-D 12.11.20 at 2:26 am
The question then is this:
Would the awful misery that exists in rich countries be eliminated, reduced or mitigated by the proposal under discussion, which is to create a new special status (with restricted rights) for some or all immigrant (or temporary immigrant) workers?
The answer to the question is: No. Well, that was easy.
John Quiggin 12.13.20 at 3:02 am
One practical issue is that, once people have established themselves with jobs, homes and so on, it becomes more and more difficult to sustain a sharply defined two-class system. The Turkish Gastarbeiter in Germany provide one example.
More generally, people are going to meet life partners, have children, form close working relationships and so on, regardless of what lines are drawn between them. Even with strenuous attempts to create a hostile environment, as the UK is doing, it’s hard for governments to do more than slow this down, except with measures that impose big constraints on the native-born population.
MisterMr 12.13.20 at 8:37 am
@John Quiggin 7
In my opinion, the “hate the foreigner” thing is mostly a form of scapegoating: there are some things that don’t work in our society, like increasing inequality, but since we can’t think of an explanation/solution for this because it goes against our ideology or is conflictual, we blame it all on random group of immigrants A.
Once A are naturalized, say 30 years later, they will be recruited and everyone will hate group of immigrants B, and so on.
SamChevre 12.13.20 at 2:47 pm
I think my disagreement starts here:
the jobs that too few of our own citizens will do: agriculture and food, social care, health, construction, hospitality.
When level of immigration were substantially lower, our own citizens WERE willing to do these jobs–they paid wages significantly higher relative to the median income than they do now (agriculture, construction) and/or were done by people (primarily married women) who did not earn market wages, but were supported by people who did and who earned higher wages. (Slaughterhouses used to pay well enough for one worker to buy a house and support a family.)
One of the largest reasons rich-country workers oppose immigration is that it reduces wages.
MisterMr 12.13.20 at 7:26 pm
SamChevre @9
“One of the largest reasons rich-country workers oppose immigration is that it reduces wages.”
I think the main reason workers oppose immigration is that they believe that it reduces wages, but I don’t think it is true.
The reason immigration is supposed to reduce wages is that there is an increase in the number of workers, so given a fixed amount of capital (factories and such) the competition among workers increases, the competition among capital doesn’t, so wages fall.
But the amount of capital isn’t really fixed: in periods of boom, there will be a lot of investiment and the quantity of capital increases (materially, more factories), in periods of bust, factories close down so the amount of capital diminishes.
This is the reason the wage share tends to increase in periods of economic boom, because labor becomes more scarce relatively to the amount of capital.
My opinion is that, if we look at the economic cycle, this profit squeeze is what causes the start of the recession, as at some point capitalists stop to invest because profits are squeezed too much and this causes a shortfall in demand (as usual, my opinion consists in reharsed Marx).
So if we look only at the cyclical component of wages, immigration temporaneously keeps wages down, but this just prolongs the boom, so in material terms immigration doesn’t really keep wages down: without immigration, the profit squeeze would just happen earlier.
But if we look at things long term, we see that in time busts tend to happen earlier, at lower wage shares. This in my opinion depends on the less redistributive economic regime (e.g. less progressive taxation) that means that investiment represents an higer share of aggregate demand during the whole cycle, so that even if cyclically the bust is caused by a profit squeeze, incresing profits by e.g. decreasing taxes doesn’t lead to higer overall investiment, but just to a more procyclical economy where busts happen at a lower wage level, and arguably to bubbly finance.
Now I’m sure that if I say this to some blue collar guy who sees his expected wage fall he will never believe me, and he will more likely blame this on migrants, but this doesn’t mean that actually migration does cause a fall in the wage share: otherwise we would see some countries with positive migration and a fall in the wage share, and other countries with negative migration (from which workes are going away) with increasing wage shares, whereas in reality the wage share is falling everywhere AFAIK.
This same argument applies to net import/exports: if being a net importer causes low wages, then countries that are large net exporters like China or Germany should see the wage share to rise, whereas AFAIK in recent decades it fell in both.
KIEN CHOONG 12.14.20 at 3:09 am
Thanks, interesting post. Let me ask you this. If a country has laws that affect the wellbeing of a person, but that person has no say over that law, is that country democratic? Is it also relevant whether that person is a resident within that country or not?
Maybe you should reconsider your assumption that Western countries are democracies!
J-D 12.14.20 at 4:05 am
You think increasing inequality is a problem; I think it is a problem; but it doesn’t follow that everybody thinks it’s a problem.
There may be a few people who think ‘increasing inequality is a problem, but I don’t know what we can do about it’, but I don’t think there are many; I think there are far more people who think ‘it’s not true that inequality is increasing’.
MisterMr 12.14.20 at 6:53 pm
@J-D 12
“You think increasing inequality is a problem; I think it is a problem; but it doesn’t follow that everybody thinks it’s a problem.”
Yeah but increasing inequality means that the bottom 80-90% is worse off in relative terms, that also means that the great majority of the people perceive their bargaining power going down.
Even if many people are not pissed of by inequality per se, they are pissed off by the effects of inequality on their life, they just don’t conceptualize it as “inequality” but as “someone is eating my lunch”.
J-D 12.14.20 at 10:34 pm
Yes. You are agreeing with the exact point I was making.
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