Many low-income countries and development organizations are calling for greater liberalization of labor immigration policies in high-income countries. At the same time, human rights organizations and ...migrant rights advocates demand more equal rights for migrant workers.The Price of Rightsshows why you cannot always have both.
Examining labor immigration policies in over forty countries, as well as policy drivers in major migrant-receiving and migrant-sending states, Martin Ruhs finds that there are trade-offs in the policies of high-income countries between openness to admitting migrant workers and some of the rights granted to migrants after admission. Insisting on greater equality of rights for migrant workers can come at the price of more restrictive admission policies, especially for lower-skilled workers. Ruhs advocates the liberalization of international labor migration through temporary migration programs that protect a universal set of core rights and account for the interests of nation-states by restricting a few specific rights that create net costs for receiving countries.
The Price of Rightsanalyzes how high-income countries restrict the rights of migrant workers as part of their labor immigration policies and discusses the implications for global debates about regulating labor migration and protecting migrants. It comprehensively looks at 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.
This groundbreaking study explores the recent dramatic changes brought about in Japan by the influx of a non-Japanese population, Filipina brides. Lieba Faier investigates how Filipina women who ...emigrated to rural Japan to work in hostess bars-where initially they were widely disparaged as prostitutes and foreigners-came to be identified by the local residents as "ideal, traditional Japanese brides."Intimate Encounters, an ethnography of cultural encounters, unravels this paradox by examining the everyday relational dynamics that drive these interactions. Faier remaps Japan, the Philippines, and the United States into what she terms a "zone of encounters," showing how the meanings of Filipino and Japanese culture and identity are transformed and how these changes are accomplished through ordinary interpersonal exchanges. Intimate Encounters provides an insightful new perspective from which to reconsider national subjectivities amid the increasing pressures of globalization, thereby broadening and deepening our understanding of the larger issues of migration and disapora.
Multinational Maids offers an in-depth investigation into the international migrations of Filipino and Indonesian migrant domestic workers. The author taps on her rigorous study of more than 1,200 ...subjects' migration trajectories to reveal how these migrants work in a series of overseas countries to improve their lives and, in some cases, seek permanent residence in another country. Challenging the portrayal of Asian migrant domestic workers as victims of globalization, Multinational Maids reveals migrants' agency and strategic thinking under conditions of constraint. At the market level, the establishment of guestworker programmes for migrant domestic workers in multiple countries has created a global labour market. A transnational diaspora shapes migrants' evolving destination imaginaries, while manpower recruitment and placement agencies create transnational mobility structures. In addition, differing destination hierarchies and degrees of access to resources lead to the adoption of divergent stepwise trajectories. Written in an accessible manner, Multinational Maids appeals to migration scholars, policymakers, activists and students.
Born out of place Constable, Nicole
2014., 20140404, 2014, 2014-03-14
eBook
Hong Kong is a meeting place for migrant domestic workers, traders, refugees, asylum seekers, tourists, businessmen, and local residents. In Born Out of Place, Nicole Constable looks at the ...experiences of Indonesian and Filipina women in this Asian world city. Giving voice to the stories of these migrant mothers, their South Asian, African, Chinese, and Western expatriate partners, and their Hong Kong–born babies, Constable raises a serious question: Do we regard migrants as people, or just as temporary workers? This accessible ethnography provides insight into global problems of mobility, family, and citizenship and points to the consequences, creative responses, melodramas, and tragedies of labor and migration policies.
Since the Korean War,gijichon-U.S. military camp towns-have been fixtures in South Korea. The most popular entertainment venues ingijichonare clubs, attracting military clientele with duty-free ...alcohol, music, shows, and women entertainers. In the 1990s, South Korea's rapid economic advancement, combined with the stigma and low pay attached to this work, led to a shortage of Korean women willing to serve American soldiers. Club owners brought in cheap labor, predominantly from the Philippines and ex-Soviet states, to fill the vacancies left by Korean women. The increasing presence of foreign workers has precipitated new conversations about modernity, nationalism, ethnicity, and human rights in South Korea. International NGOs, feminists, and media reports have identified women migrant entertainers as "victims of sex trafficking," insisting that their plight is one of forced prostitution.
Are women who travel to work in such clubs victims of trafficking, sex slaves, or simply migrant women? How do these women understand their own experiences? Is antitrafficking activism helpful in protecting them? InOn the Move for Love, Sealing Cheng attempts to answer these questions by following the lives of migrant Filipina entertainers working in variousgijichonclubs. Focusing on their aspirations for love and a better future, Cheng's ethnography illuminates the complex relationships these women form with their employers, customer-boyfriends, and families. She offers an insightful critique of antitrafficking discourses, pointing to the inadequacy of recognizing women only as victims and ignoring their agency and aspirations. Cheng analyzes the women's experience in South Korea in relation to their subsequent journeys to other countries, providing a diachronic look at the way migrant issues of work, sex, and love fit within the larger context of transnationalism, identity, and global hierarchies of inequality.
In this book, Mireya Loza sheds new light on the private lives of migrant men who participated in the Bracero Program (1942-1964), a binational agreement between the United States and Mexico that ...allowed hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers to enter this country on temporary work permits. While this program and the issue of temporary workers has long been politicized on both sides of the border, Loza argues that the prevailing romanticized image of braceros as a family-oriented, productive, legal workforce has obscured the real, diverse experiences of the workers themselves. Focusing on underexplored aspects of workers' lives--such as their transnational union-organizing efforts, the sexual economies of both hetero and queer workers, and the ethno-racial boundaries among Mexican indigenous braceros--Loza reveals how these men defied perceived political, sexual, and racial norms.Basing her work on an archive of more than 800 oral histories from the United States and Mexico, Loza is the first scholar to carefully differentiate between the experiences of mestizo guest workers and the many Mixtec, Zapotec, Purhepecha, and Mayan laborers. In doing so, she captures the myriad ways these defiant workers responded to the intense discrimination and exploitation of an unjust system that still persists today.
InConflicting Commitments, Shannon Gleeson goes beyond the debate over federal immigration policy to examine the complicated terrain of immigrant worker rights. Federal law requires that basic labor ...standards apply to all workers, yet this principle clashes with increasingly restrictive immigration laws and creates a confusing bureaucratic terrain for local policymakers and labor advocates. Gleeson examines this issue in two of the largest immigrant gateways in the country: San Jose, California, and Houston, Texas.
Conflicting Commitmentsreveals two cities with very different approaches to addressing the exploitation of immigrant workers-both involving the strategic coordination of a range of bureaucratic brokers, but in strikingly different ways. Drawing on the real life accounts of ordinary workers, federal, state, and local government officials, community organizers, and consular staff, Gleeson argues that local political contexts matter for protecting undocumented workers in particular. Providing a rich description of the bureaucratic minefields of labor law, and the explosive politics of immigrant rights, Gleeson shows how the lessons learned from San Jose and Houston can inform models for upholding labor and human rights in the United States.
InThe Politics of Social Inclusion and Labor Representation, Heather Connolly, Stefania Marino, and Miguel Martínez Lucio compare trade union responses to immigration and the related political and ...labour market developments in the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The labor movement is facing significant challenges as a result of such changes in the modern context. As such, the authors closely examine the idea of social inclusion and how trade unions are coping with and adapting to the need to support immigrant workers and develop various types of engagement and solidarity strategies in the European context.
Traversing the dramatically shifting immigration patterns since the 1970s, during which emerged a major crisis of capitalism, the labor market, and society, and the contingent rise of anti-immigration sentiment and new forms of xenophobia, the authors assess and map how trade unions have to varying degrees understood and framed these issues and immigrant labor. They show how institutional traditions, and the ways that trade unions historically react to social inclusion and equality, have played a part in shaping the nature of current initiatives.The Politics of Social Inclusion and Labor Representationconcludes that we need to appreciate the complexity of trade-union traditions, established paths to renewal, and competing trajectories of solidarity. While trade union organizations remain wedded to specific trajectories, trade union renewal remains an innovative, if at times, problematic and complex set of choices and aspirations.
