The Ethics of Labor Migration: From Social Protection To Commodification

Growing scholarship critiques ideas of migration as a development tool, however it remains a key policy instrument for sending states who seek to foster development. These critiques point to the importance of how sending states perceive their roles in the lives of migrants abroad, suggesting that this relationship is often for the benefit of the state and not for the migrant. This research goes further by looking at the ethical implications of the ways sending states have discursively constructed their relationships with migrant laborers, asking what responsibilities are owed to migrants as they act as ‘agents of development.’ The thesis utilizes an ethical lens to examine sending states’ responsibilities towards their migrant populations, incorporating literature on ethics, citizenship, and the role of the state to argue that sending states have moral duties and responsibilities towards their migrant populations under notions of emigrant citizenship. Ideas of emigrant citizenship are interrogated in the cases of Mexico and the Philippines, and how each state utilized discourses of nationalism, patriotism, and guilt to assign value to their migrants abroad are also examined. Interviews with key officials and a review of policy documents are used to analyze how this relationship manifested itself in the ways in which those states engage with and protect migrant workers, drawing also on interview data with migrants in the United States and Hong Kong. While both the Mexican and the Philippine states are quick to engage with their migrant populations, they often do so in a way that further commodifies them as resources for home country development. In doing so, this research argues that they neglect to protect fully their migrant populations, leaving migrants to piece together their own forms of social protection in the absence of the state. This research shows how state-migrant relations that commodify migrants as agents of development have ethical consequences, undermining states’ duties and responsibilities to migrant welfare. Labor migration programs can do more to fulfill these responsibilities and redraw the way the state- migrant relationship is constructed, through practices of meaningful engagement and true emigrant citizenship