This book provides the first systematic account of the premium costs that migrants pay to live and work abroad. Reducing the costs of international labour migration, specifically worker-paid costs for low-skilled employment, has become an important item on the global agenda over the last years and is particularly pertinent for the UN’s Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Recruitment costs alone amount in most migration corridors to anywhere between one and ten months of foreign earnings and many migrants may well lose between one and two years of foreign earnings, if all costs are considered. This book is intended as a primer for evidence-based policy for reducing the costs of international labour mobility. The contributors include academics from law, economics and politics, but also authors from international organizations, non-governmental organizations, as well as the voices of migrants. The hope of the editors is that this small collection sets the basis for evidence-based policies that seek to reduce the costs of international migration. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of migration, globalization, law, sociology and international relations, as well as practitioners and policy makers.

Migration presents a stark policy dilemma. Research repeatedly confirms that migrants, their families back home, and the countries that welcome them experience large economic and social gains. Easing immigration restrictions is one of the most effective tools for ending poverty and sharing prosperity across the globe. Yet, we see widespread opposition in destination countries, where migrants are depicted as the primary cause of many of their economic problems, from high unemployment to declining social services. Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets addresses this dilemma. In addition to providing comprehensive data and empirical analysis of migration patterns and their impact, the report argues for a series of policies that work with, rather than against, labor market forces. Policy makers should aim to ease short-run dislocations and adjustment costs so that the substantial long-term benefits are shared more evenly. Only then can we avoid draconian migration restrictions that will hurt everybody. Moving for Prosperity aims to inform and stimulate policy debate, facilitate further research, and identify prominent knowledge gaps. It demonstrates why existing income gaps, demographic differences, and rapidly declining transportation costs mean that global mobility will continue to be a key feature of our lives for generations to come. Its audience includes anyone interested in one of the most controversial policy debates of our time.

Migrant women are the primary source of paid domestic labor around the world. Since the 1980s, the newly prosperous countries of East Asia have recruited foreign household workers at a rapidly increasing rate. Many come from the Philippines and Indonesia. Pei-Chia Lan interviewed and spent time with dozens of Filipina and Indonesian domestics working in and around Taipei as well as many of their Taiwanese employers. On the basis of the vivid ethnographic detail she collected, Lan provides a nuanced look at how boundaries between worker and employer are maintained and negotiated in private households. She also sheds light on the fate of the workers, “global Cinderellas” who seek an escape from poverty at home only to find themselves treated as disposable labor abroad. Lan demonstrates how economic disparities, immigration policies, race, ethnicity, and gender intersect in the relationship between the migrant workers and their Taiwanese employers. The employers are eager to flex their recently acquired financial muscle; many are first-generation career women as well as first-generation employers. The domestics are recruited from abroad as contract and “guest” workers; restrictive immigration policies prohibit them from seeking permanent residence or transferring from one employer to another. They care for Taiwanese families’ children, often having left their own behind. Throughout Global Cinderellas, Lan pays particular attention to how the women she studied identify themselves in relation to “others”—whether they be of different classes, nationalities, ethnicities, or education levels. In so doing, she offers a framework for thinking about how migrant workers and their employers understand themselves in the midst of dynamic transnational labor flows.

Servants of Globalization offers a groundbreaking study of migrant Filipino domestic workers who leave their own families behind to do the caretaking work of the global economy. Since its initial publication, the book has informed countless students and scholars and set the research agenda on labor migration and transnational families. With this second edition, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas returns to Rome and Los Angeles to consider how the migrant communities have changed. Children have now joined their parents. Male domestic workers are present in significantly greater numbers. And, perhaps most troubling, the population has aged, presenting new challenges for the increasingly elderly domestic workers. New chapters discuss these three increasingly important constituencies. The entire book has been revised and updated, and a new introduction offers a global, comparative overview of the citizenship status of migrant domestic workers. Servants of Globalization remains the defining work on the international division of reproductive labor.

In Let Their People Come, Lant Pritchett discusses five "irresistible forces" of global labor migration, and the "immovable ideas" that form a political backlash against it. Increasing wage gaps, different demographic futures, "everything but labor" globalization, and the continued employment growth in low skilled, labor intensive industries all contribute to the forces compelling labor to migrate across national borders. Pritchett analyzes the fifth irresistible force of "ghosts and zombies," or the rapid and massive shifts in desired populations of countries, and says that this aspect has been neglected in the discussion of global labor mobility. Let Their People Come provides six policy recommendations for unskilled immigration policy that seek to reconcile the irresistible force of migration with the immovable ideas in rich countries that keep this force in check. In clear, accessible prose, this volume explores ways to regulate migration flows so that they are a benefit to both the global North and global South.

More workers are crossing national borders to look for jobs than ever before. Many migrants seek overseas employment with the help of agents or intermediaries. These "merchants of labour" include relatives who finance a migrant's trip, provide housing and arrange for a job abroad; public employment services; and private recruitment agencies. They also comprise an insalubrious underworld of smugglers and traffickers. The agents who recruit and deploy migrant workers are at the heart of the evolving migration infrastructure, i.e. the network of business and personal ties that is creating a global labour market. This book highlights best practices in the activities and regulation of these merchants of labour as well as innovative strategies to protect migrant workers, underlining the contribution of ILO standards. It covers a broad range of national and regional experiences and puts "merchants of labour" in the wider context of changing employment relationships in globalizing labour markets. The papers it contains are an important contribution to understanding a major mechanism facilitating the growth of the migrant labour force.

Aims to assist states in their efforts to develop new policy approaches, solutions and practical measures for better management of labour migration in countries of origin and of destination. Analyses effective policies and practices and draws on examples from OSCE participating States as well as other countries that have experience in this field.

Migrant workers from the Philippines are ubiquitous to global capitalism, with nearly 10 percent of the population employed in almost two hundred countries. In a visit to the United States in 2003, Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo even referred to herself as not only the head of state but also “the CEO of a global Philippine enterprise of eight million Filipinos who live and work abroad.†Robyn Magalit Rodriguez investigates how and why the Philippine government transformed itself into what she calls a labor brokerage state, which actively prepares, mobilizes, and regulates its citizens for migrant work abroad. Filipino men and women fill a range of jobs around the globe, including domestic work, construction, and engineering, and they have even worked in the Middle East to support U.S. military operations. At the same time, the state redefines nationalism to normalize its citizens to migration while fostering their ties to the Philippines. Those who leave the country to work and send their wages to their families at home are treated as new national heroes. Drawing on ethnographic research of the Philippine government's migration bureaucracy, interviews, and archival work, Rodriguez presents a new analysis of neoliberal globalization and its consequences for nation-state formation.

This book focuses on security practices, civil liberties and the politics of borders in liberal democracies. In the aftermath of 9/11, security practices and the denial of human rights and civil liberties are often portrayed as an exception to liberal rule, and seen as institutionally, legally and spatially distinct from the liberal state. Drawing upon detailed empirical studies from migration controls, such as the French waiting zone, Australian off-shore processing and US maritime interceptions, this study demonstrates that the limitation of liberties is not an anomaly of liberal rule, but embedded within the legal order of liberal democracies. The most ordinary, yet powerful way, of limiting liberties is the creation of legal identities, legal borders and legal spaces. It is the possibility of limiting liberties through liberal and democratic procedures that poses the key challenge to the protection of liberties. The book develops three inter-related arguments. First, it questions the discourse of exception that portrays liberal and illiberal rule as distinct ways of governing and scrutinizes liberal techniques for limiting liberties. Second, it highlights the space of government and argues for a change in perspective from territorial to legal borders, especially legal borders of policing and legal borders of rights. Third, it emphasizes the role of ordinary law for illiberal practices and argues that the legal order itself privileges policing powers and prevents access to liberties. This book will be of interest to students of critical security studies, social and political theory, political geography and legal studies, and IR in general.

Two social scientists chart the consequences of the global economy on women across the world, revealing the underground economy that has turned many poor women into virtual slaves.