The Palgrave Handbook of International Labour Migration

Law and Policy Perspectives

M. Panizzon, G. Zurcher, E. Fornalé, M. Panizzon, G. Zurcher, E. Fornalé, Kenneth A. Loparo, Gottfried Zürcher

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349674879, 9781137352200
• eBook ISBN: 9781137352217
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Économie du travail

This Handbook focuses on the complexity surrounding the interaction between trade, labour mobility and development, taking into consideration social, economic and human rights implications, and identifies mechanisms for lawful movements across borders and their practical implementation.

Part I

Mobility Regime Perspectives: A Multi-Level Governance

1

Trade, Migration and the Crisis of Globalization

Lucie Cerna, James Hollifield and William Hynes

1. Introduction

The economic crisis, which began in 2008, caused a global shock, the reverberations of which are still felt today.¹ Unemployment has increased, growth remains anaemic and deficits continue to deepen (ILO, 2009a). Governments continue to face pressure to protect jobs and create new opportunities. A crisis of globalization has been building for years and the great recession has further undermined confidence in the benefits of maintaining an open economy. This can be seen not only in the stalled Doha Round of global trade talks but also in the lack of support for much-needed immigration reform across the OECD world. If political support for trade is weak in most advanced industrial democracies, support for more open immigration policies has all but collapsed (Hollifield and Martin, 2013).

Overall the shock has put pressure on governments to act. From emergency provisions, such as bailouts and stimulus packages, governments have scrambled to find solutions. One political response to the crisis has been calls for more restrictive immigration policies (Chaloff et al., 2012). The scale of the problem and the policy responses vary from country to country and from region to region. We argue that, on the whole, there has been a backlash against globalization,² very different to that in the 1930s. The world is more integrated and the nature of trade and commerce makes nations interdependent; with global supply chains, and fragmentation of production processes, unilateral protectionism makes little sense. But trade and immigration are often blamed for job losses and declining wages. Although technology, automation, changing demographics and shifting patterns of economic progress all play a role in shifting comparative advantage, singling out trade and immigration as the cause of economic decline is politically popular. Immigration policy and, to a lesser extent, trade have become highly politicized in recent years, and the economic crisis has made the backlash worse, notwithstanding multilateral regimes designed to mitigate neo-mercantilist policies.³

There are different definitions of international regimes,⁴ but Krasner (1982, p. 185) defines a regime as a set of ‘principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area’. While a multilateral regime exists in trade, there are only seeds of a regime in (labour) migration especially related to high-skilled immigration (HSI).⁵ The WTO mechanism commits members to legal obligations and the recourse to dispute settlement, helping to lock in trade openness. There is no corresponding World Migration Organization, even though a number of international organizations (inside and outside the United Nations system) deal with migration to some degree. So while there has been high-level political commitment to keeping trade open, despite significant declines in trade volumes and rising unemployment, international coordination has mostly averted protectionism (see Section 3). However, this has not been the case in immigration, which has been the main focus of a protectionist backlash (Section 4) during the current crisis.

We explore the role of international regimes in order to explain different responses to the economic crisis. This chapter looks at the impact of institutions by comparing two regimes, one where multilateral rules are strong and another where they are weak. We argue that multilateral frameworks can effectively short-circuit beggar-thy-neighbour policies caused by the crisis.

The chapter examines what factors have played an important role in influencing the openness/closure of HSI policies. Many governments have implemented short-term policies to deal with the economic crisis and to gain favour with their voters. However, labour shortages in certain high-skilled sectors (e.g. engineering, health care and higher education) persist despite the economic downturn. Therefore, some countries have considered HSI as a stimulus during the crisis. The chapter seeks to analyse how migration and trade policies have changed in terms of openness/closure due to the economic crisis and examines what impact the globalization backlash has had on these two types of policies.

The chapter seeks to make three contributions. First, it will help to clarify the relationship between trade and migration. Second, the chapter offers a typology of sources of policy openness and closure across a range of countries. Third, it challenges some conventional arguments about crises, business cycles and policy.

The chapter is set out as follows: Section 2 discusses the literature on international regimes in trade and immigration policy, while Section 3 turns to the impact of the economic crisis on trade policies. Examples of changes in migration policy across countries (such as protectionist or stimulus measures) are presented in Section 4. Some conclusions on the topic are offered in Section 5. The findings are based on reports from the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), the analysis of media coverage, and academic literature on the political economy of immigration and trade.

2. International regimes and policy responses

Much of the recent literature on the political economy of trade and migration offers a historical perspective (e.g. Lipson, 1982; Ruggie, 1982; Milner, 1988; Garrett, 1998; Hatton, 2007) and considers the impact of globalization and business cycles on openness and closure (Goldin, 1993; Timmer and Williamson, 1998; Hatton and Williamson, 2008, 2009; Hollifield and Wilson, 2010). There is also some literature analysing differences in trade and immigration ( Mayda and Rodrik, 2001; Hatton and Williamson, 2005; Hatton, 2007). A number of these authors focus on global governance and regimes (Ghosh, 2000; Straubhaar, 2000; Koslowski, 2004; Hollifield, 2008a). We consider the role of regimes in order to explain different responses to the economic crisis.

Helen Milner (1988) has demonstrated

how advanced industrial states in the 1970s were able to resist the kind of beggar-thy-neighbor policies that were adopted in the 1920s and 1930s. She argues that growing interdependence helped to solidify free trade coalitions among the OECD states in the post-war period, thus preventing a retreat into protectionism following the economic downturns of the 1970s and 1980s.

(Hollifield, 2008b, p. 208)

While preferences for trade can be largely explained by material interests, migration is much more complicated. It can be partly captured by economic interests (Freeman, 1995, 2002, 2006), but there are also powerful rights-based dynamics at play (see, for example, Hollifield, 1992, 1998). Ideas and institutions play an important role in determining migration openness and closure (Hollifield, 1998, p. 598).

‘Migration affects societies and their cultures in ways that trade does not; migration is typically more permanent than trade, it is a stock rather than a flow, and migrants eventually get the vote’ (Hatton, 2007, p. 373). None of the [existing international] agreements have achieved the status of a full international migration regime, which is capable of changing state behaviour (Hollifield, 2000, 2008a, p. 12). Instead of international organizations (e.g. ILO, IOM or UN), nation-states are mainly in charge of the rules for entry and exit of labour migrants in their territory. The ‘regime’ for international labour migration is based on weak institutions without a central norm, and its principal actors, the ILO and the IOM, have limited regulatory and institutional capacity.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/WTO regime was constructed through a multilateral process and based on principles, such as most-favoured nation status (MFN), non-discrimination and reciprocity. Multilateralism and international institutions and regimes were meant to solve collective action and international cooperation problems (Deardorf and Stern, 2002; Hollifield, 2008a, p. 14). However, ‘there has been little effort to regulate international labor migration on a multilateral basis. Even the insertion of a clause in the GATS dealing with the movement of natural persons (Mode 4) has done little to promote cooperation in the area of migration’ (Hollifield, 2008a, p. 14).

Most international regimes have had a long period of development, and they began as bilateral or regional agreements. The prerequisites for multilateralism (i.e. indivisibility, generalized principles of conduct and diffuse reciprocity)⁶ are difficult to achieve in the case of migration. The non-discrimination norm is non-existent, no mechanisms for the punishment of free-riders or systems for dispute resolution exist (Hollifield, 2008a, p. 14). As Hatton argues, ‘the reciprocity principle, significant in trade, is missing in the case of migration, which is driven largely by absolute advantage rather than by comparative advantage’ (Hatton, 2007, p. 373). Elevating migration – or more accurately a regime for governing migration – to the level of a global public good is extraordinarily difficult (Hollifield, 2011).

In recent years, the international competition for the ‘best and brightest’ has intensified (Mahroum, 2001; Chiswick, 2010). Since labour market shortages threatened economic growth and progress, governments needed to respond to the demands for more open HSI. They also had to react to the preferences of high-skilled workers for more restrictive policies. The number of high-skilled immigrants has increased (OECD, 2013). This has heightened tensions within countries between labour and capital. It will be up to the political parties in government to reconcile these tensions (Garrett, 1998). Labour market institutions can also play a larger role in the representation of affected groups. If an increasing number of high-skilled workers organize themselves in professional unions or associations (e.g. medical, engineering, law or IT sectors), they may become more powerful actors in lobbying the government. This can happen when labour market competition between native and migrant workers intensifies.

As some authors have claimed, labour market competition intensifies when unemployment rates increase and economic growth decreases because native and migrant labour forces are placed ‘in more direct competition than in periods of economic prosperity’ (Money, 1997, p. 693). As with trade, deteriorating economic conditions can lead to more negative attitudes of survey respondents towards immigration (Esses et al., 2001; Coughlin, 2002). Esses and co-authors suggest that even immigration policies designed to ‘ensure the economic prosperity of immigrants, such as employment-based policies favoring highly skilled occupations may also increase the likelihood that immigrants will be seen as competing with non-immigrants for resources and thereby increase resource stress and bias’ (Esses et al., 2001, p. 395). This finding is rather surprising since previous research has shown that immigrants, especially those requiring social services, were perceived negatively by the native population, although few immigrants had entitlements to these provisions. It seems that the negative perception can also occur in the case of (successful) high-skilled immigrants (Esses et al., 2001).

Research shows that voters’ perceptions of labour migrants can be negative, even if native workers are employed. According to Lahav (2004, p. 1169), ‘the fear of losing one’s job in a declining national labor market (societal conditions) appears to be a much more important factor than personal unemployment itself’. These findings are in line with US findings that personal economic circumstances play a smaller part in public opposition to immigrants than beliefs about the national economy and culture (Citrin et al., 1997).

Milner and Keohane analyse the effects of internationalization (i.e. processes generated by underlying shifts in transaction costs that produce observable flows of goods, services and capital) and argue that ‘governments will have to be concerned about threats of exit and hence non-investment by mobile capital’ since they benefit electorally from prosperity (Milner and Keohane, 1996, p. 250). Owners of mobile factors of production (i.e. financial capital) and firms, which are able to shift their production abroad, gain bargaining power over immobile factors of production (e.g. most low-skilled labour) and firms relying on locally specific assets. These actors may then be able to threaten an ‘exit’ in order to increase their influence (voice) in national politics (Hirschman, 1970; Garrett, 1998). In times of economic prosperity, multinational companies such as Microsoft have repeatedly threatened to relocate their operations and services outside the United States. Microsoft demonstrated credibility when it opened a subsidiary in Canada, a country with a more liberal HSI policy.⁷ According to Shughart et al., as a country’s economy goes through the business cycle, its policy mix shifts – workers receive greater leverage in economic downturns, whereas capitalists and owners are more influential during economic growth (Shughart et al., 1986). The power of actors thus varies according to economic conditions. The question remains as to how governments deal with these economi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Conceptualizing a Pluralist Framework for Labour Migration
• Part I: Mobility Regime Perspectives: A Multi-Level Governance
• Part II: Development Perspective: The Emerging Role of Private Sectors, Transnational Families and the Diaspora
• Part III: Labour (Human Rights) Standards Perspective: Migrant Workers’ Relationship with Migration Strategies
• Part IV: Asia
• Part V: Europe
• Part VI: Africa
• Part VII: Latin America
• Index