Migrant Workers, Markets, and the Law
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| Author(s) | Ghai, Yash |
|---|---|
| Abstract | The pressures for international human rights have come from the West. It has sought to emphasise the common humanity of the peoples of the world by declarations about the inherent dignity of the person and the universalism and inalienability of his or her rights. The ideas themselves are not new; what is new is that the international community claims a responsibility for the protection of rights, and thus empowers a citizen vis-à-vis his or her state, and other states. Rights are no more a matter of only domestic jurisdiction. This globalisation is undermined by the persistence of the state as the framework for the definition, enjoyment, and qualifications of rights and by the special status accorded to citizenship. Nowhere is this dilemma more clearly highlighted than in the case of migrants’ rights. The West, the champion of universalism and inalienability, has been reluctant to recognise the equality of migrants with nationals, and migrants rights have been something of a Cinderella in the family of human rights (as is clear from the slow progress over, and the limited scope of, the 1990 Migration Convention and its studied disregard since its formal adoption). It is necessary to guard against the optimism that the world has achieved other kinds of rights, for the fact is that the international human rights movement has made remarkably little impact on international practice, as we are reminded daily. It exists primarily in the sphere of rhetoric and ideology, and even there it has become a matter of great controversy (Ghai 1994). Yet migration, by itself and as part of globalisation processes, has made the most fundamental challenges to the state, making borders porous, attenuating the bonds of citizenship (extending more and more rights to nonnationals), and detracting from the distinctiveness of “national” cultures, making multiculturalists of us all. By a further irony it is in the West that these developments have advanced the most, for with the lapse of the economic hegemony of the West, migration has become increasingly a south-south phenomenon. It is in the new labour-importing countries like Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia (Battistella 1993) and the Gulf states (Amjad 1989) that there occur the most serious violations of the (internationally defined) rights of migrants. It is necessary to caution people against optimism regarding the positive impact on human rights of globalisation processes. |
| Pages | 145-182 |
| Article | Access to Article |
| Source | Global History and Migration |
| PubDate | 1997 |
| ISBN_ISSN | 0-8133-312-2 |
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