Restricting emigration
Should countries restrict labour emigration to other countries where migrants risk being exploited or abused?
Abuse and exploitation of migrant workers in Gulf States is common and well-documented, and women domestic workers are at special risk. Sending states—often relatively poorer South Asian states—are limited in the ways that they can protect the rights of their citizens when they are labouring abroad. One strategy that sending states have deployed is the adoption of ‘emigration bans’ or ‘emigration conditions’. Emigration bans restrict citizens from taking up temporary labour market contracts, usually in specific states, but sometimes in general. ‘Emigration conditions’ require would-be migrants to meet specific requirements in order to be permitted, by the sending state, to take up a labour market contract abroad. In this article, I examine whether it is morally permissible for source countries to prohibit migration to countries where they risk being exploited or abused. I examine the reasons states give to justify emigration bans and conditions: the ‘structured vulnerability’ reason; the ‘gendered structured vulnerability’ reason; and the ‘gendered paternalism’ reason. Overall, I agree that the reasons motivating the bans and conditions are good ones—though I offer some criticism of the reasons I describe as ‘gendered paternalism’. But, since there is only limited evidence of the effectiveness of bans and conditions in achieving substantive benefit for labour migrants, and on the contrary evidence of the real harm they can sometimes generate, I argue that, absent positive evidence of success in achieving their objectives, they ought to be rejected in practice even if they are permissible in principle.
Patti Tamara Lenard’s highly informative and thought-provoking paper “Restricting emigration for their protection? Exit controls and the protection of (women) migrant workers” is a much-needed addition to the normative literature on gender and migration. She explores therein the ethics of bans on the emigration of migrant workers, particularly women, from South Asian states to Gulf States. Such bans, Lenard explains, have sometimes been enacted in response to abuses of South Asian migrants in “receiving nations” (including, but certainly not limited to, Gulf States). Their stated goal: to pressure “receiving nations” into implementing protections of temporary migrant workers from the “sending nation” that pursues the bans. They are usually enacted in the aftermath of high-profile instances of abuse of migrant workers, examples of which are shared by Lenard.
In response to Lenard’s paper, we start by deconstructing the dominant public discourse on the abuse of migrant women that frames the debate on the application of emigration bans or conditions for women to migrate. We complicate that discourse with findings highlighting a more contrasted canvass of women’s labour migration which is not all about labour abuses and includes important benefits. We argue that given the existence of such benefits, the case for exit bans or conditions is questionable. In the second section, the problem of exit controls is situated in the wider context of the restricted gender roles and women’s autonomy in sending countries. This enables us to highlight how an entire corpus of policies and societal norms shape women’s options in a manner that discriminates not only against their mobility rights, but other human and labour rights as well. This leads us to challenge Lenard’s moral justification for exit controls. In the final section, we agree that emigration bans are not effective, but take the argument further by reviewing the effect of exit controls. This allows us to conclude that emigration bans are not so much about controlling migration per se. Instead, they seem to be motivated primarily by the sending country’s will to address politically concerns of a patriarchal nature, which see in women’s emigration a threat to prevailing gender roles and other gendered patterns of social reproduction.
Patti Lenard (2021) argues that temporary emigration bans are not inherently morally impermissible; if such bans were to effectively help defend human rights, then we might have good moral reasons to permit those bans. Such bans are, however, unlikely to be morally permissible as a matter of practice; Lenard argues that, under most real-world circumstances, they are likely to do more harm than good. In this paper, I want to offer both some support and some criticism for Lenard’s view. I want to support her assessment of the moral impermissibility of such bans as a matter of practice; indeed, I want to add some weight to that assessment, by providing some additional reasons for this evaluation. I want to criticize, however, Lenard’s defence of the theoretical moral permissibility of such bans. There is, I believe, an asymmetry between the right to exit and the right to enter, such that even temporary and limited violations of the former cannot be justified with the tools Lenard provides.
In her paper “Restricting Emigration for Their Protection? Exit controls and the protection of (women) migrant workers”, Patti Lenard raises important, thought-provoking points on common dilemmas faced by migrant origin countries attempting to promote overseas opportunities for their citizens while protecting their rights abroad. This is particularly challenging in sectors, such as domestic work, that are outside the purview of the labour law and enjoy only rudimentary legal protection; and where the isolated nature of the workplace and the absence of informal networks exposes migrant workers to heightened risks.
I consider three related objections raised by my respondents. First, they say, I am too prepared to permit the violation of the right to exit; in particular, they argue that even evidence that emigration bans and conditions work would be insufficient to justify constraining the right to exit. Second, they allege, states that offer “protection” reasons for bans and conditions are insincere, and in any case, the importance of protecting human rights abroad is insufficient to permit the violation of the right to exit; in particular, the bans violate the autonomy of women migrants in problematic ways, even if they would result in better protection abroad. Third, they argue, women-specific constraints in particular threaten to undermine rather than further the protection of women’s human rights.