Democratising Migration from the Bottom Up: The Rise of the Global Migrant Rights Movement

Abstract

This paper discusses the link between international migration and democratisation from an actor-oriented perspective on the basis of the mobilising efforts by key civil society actors engaged in the promotion of the rights of migrant workers through developing strategies towards movement building and by capitalising on political opportunities that have appeared on the global level. Being pitched at the global level and at organising patterns via the network form, the analytical framework developed takes as its starting point global justice perspectives and then builds upon insights from social movement and constructivist International Relations scholarship. It is argued that what is emerging are (1) movement practices in migrant rights networks which are putting forward increasingly coherent claims that transcend the conventional thinking about global governance and human rights (rights-assuming advocacy); and (2) that such practices are effectively transgressing interstate political arenas (participatory, rights-producing politics). It is on the basis of the cooperation between the 2 main protagonists, trade unions and migrant rights associations, that strategic positioning of migrant rights issues within the global policy debate is taking place, with the aim of promoting a rights-based approach (RBA) to migration and its governance. The combination of rights-producing politics and rights-assuming advocacy is expressed in the RBA to migration which involves the reframing of migrants rights as well as attempts to democratise migration governance in participatory terms.

EXTRACTO El presente documento comenta el enlace existente entre migración internacional y democratización desde el punto de vista de un participante, sobre la base de los esfuerzos de movilización por parte de actores de la sociedad civil involucrados en la promoción de los derechos de los trabajadores migratorios mediante el desarrollo de estrategias orientadas hacia la creación de un movimiento y la capitalización de las oportunidades políticas que aparecen a nivel global. Por estar inclinado hacia el novel global y los patrones de organización vía el formato de redes, el marco analítico desarrollado toma, como su punto inicial, las perspectivas globales de justicia y construye -a partir de su comprensión de los movimientos sociales y el constructivismo- una escolaridad de relaciones internacionales. Se argumenta que lo que emerge es: (1) prácticas de movimiento en redes de derechos de los inmigrantes que presentan y plantean reclamos crecientemente coherentes que van mucho más allá del pensamiento convencional sobre gobernanza global y derechos humanos (la abogacía de la adopción de derechos) y (2) que tales prácticas efectivamente transgreden las arenas políticas inter-estatales (políticas de participación y de generación de derechos). Es sobre la base de la cooperación entre dos principales protagonistas, las uniones de comercio y las asociaciones de derechos de los inmigrantes que se está llevando a cabo el debate del posicionamiento estratégico de los temas de derechos de los inmigrantes, con el ánimo de promover un enfoque basado en derechos (RBA por sus siglas en inglés) en materia de la migración y su gobernanza. La combinación de las políticas de generación de derechos y la abogacía de la adopción de derechos se expresa en el RBA de la inmigración, que involucra el replanteamiento de los derechos de los inmigrantes y de sus intentos para democratizar la gobernanza de la inmigración in términos de participación.

Keywords:

• global migration governance
• migrant rights
• advocacy networks
• global migrant rights movement
• rights-based approach
• democratisation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Anders Uhlin, Department of Political Science, Lund University/Sweden and Professor John Keane, Sydney Democracy Network, Sydney University/Australia for their observations on earlier drafts. I am particularly indebted to the two anonymous reviewers whose comments have assisted me greatly in shaping up the argument and flow of this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The author of this paper has attended most of these global fora over the last 10 years. The observations made and arguments advanced are based on participant and event observation as well as interviews with key representatives of relevant organisations conducted over the period of 2003–2012.

2 For a more detailed review of the literature, see Basok and Piper (2012).

3 Lewis, Dwyer, Hodkinson, and Waite (2014) refer to this state of affairs as ‘hyper-precarity’.

4 Political scientists would refer to this as ‘forum shopping’. From a human and labour rights perspective, however, this pertains to ‘forum shifting’ as civil society organisations have no access to such fora and hence no choice as the phrase ‘shopping’, by contrast, implies.

5 The main rights issues for migrant rights advocates revolve around the strict temporary character of migration (one to three years), the lack of family unification, the involvement of private, profit-oriented recruitment agencies and the employer-tied nature of work permits which exposes migrants to high levels of dependency and abuse at the workplace.

6 For a full list, see ILO (2006).

7 A distinction needs to be made here between institutional cosmopolitanism as promoted by Pogge (2001) and Neo-Kantian approach offered by Benhabib (2007) who argues for taking the question of political membership and democracy in a specific civic entity seriously. She does, however, not believe in a system of global justice and removes this discussion from the global governance debate. Striking is that the role of trade unions or the labour movement more broadly is completely absent from these accounts.

8 This is her real name: she is a public figure who regularly appears in the public sphere (media etc.) and on her organisation's website.

9 The annually held ILC is the venue where the ILO's policy direction, including new conventions, are discussed in the tripartite fashion that characterise the composition of the ILO: that is, workers' organisations, employers' organisations, and governments.

10 As became clear in conversations the author had with Melissa and other activists during the ILC in Geneva.

11 Those are: Building and Woodworker International, International Confederation of Trade Unions, Public Services International, the Canadian Trade Union Council, and The American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Additional information

Nicola Piper holds a Ph.D. in Sociological Studies from the University of Sheffield/UK and currently is Professor of International Migration at the University of Sydney, Australia, as well as Affiliate Professorial Fellow at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, Freiburg University, Germany. She is external advisor on migration research to the UN Research Institute for Social Development, Geneva, and co-founder and Vice-President of the Global Migration Policy Associates initiative. Her research focuses on international migration for work, migrant labour and social rights, global and regional governance of migration as well as gender and migration. Her recent publications include the edited volumes New perspectives on gender and migration: Livelihoods, rights, and entitlements (2008), South–South migration: Implications for social policy and development (with Katja Hujo, 2010) and the co-authored book Critical perspectives on global governance: Rights and regulation in governing regimes (with Jean Grugel, 2007).