The indirect gender discrimination of skill-selective immigration policies

ABSTRACT

The immigrant admission policies of states often demonstrate a strong preference for ‘highly skilled’ migrants, while making it more difficult for ‘low-skilled’ migrants to enter. Although those policies only exclude low-skilled workers on paper, empirical evidence has shown that they may also have a disproportionate impact on the admission of female would-be migrants. In other words, it indirectly discriminates against them. In this paper, I argue that such indirect discrimination is wrongful because it worsens existing disrespect towards women, and should therefore be recognised as problematic by those who already acknowledge the wrongfulness of direct gender-based discrimination in immigration policy. It worsens disrespect because immigration policy makers have negligently failed to consider the social meaning of women’s difficulty in being admitted under the ‘skilled’ category, which worsens demeaning stereotypes about female workers in patriarchal societies. As a result, it gives us a pro tanto reason to object to states’ employment of talent-based immigration selection.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• discrimination
• skilled migration
• social equality
• feminism

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2016 Association for Political Thought conference in St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and the postdoc workshop at the McCoy Center for Ethics. I am grateful to the participants for their valuable feedback. I also want to thank Sarah Fine, Andrea Sangiovanni, Laura Valentini, Zofia Stemplowska, Chong-Ming Lim, and last but not least, an anonymous CRISPP reviewer.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Notably, a host of other countries also use skill-based admission criteria, including the USA, Canada, and Australia. See Lim (2017) for a more detailed description of those immigration policies.

2. It has been suggested that my claim that agents owe a ‘duty of care’ to culturally subordinated groups is potentially infantilising to those groups. It marks them out as helpless, weak, and in need of coddling by those who are stronger and more powerful. However, the term is a purely technical one that need not contain such implications. That I owe a ‘duty of care’ to my employees does not mean, for example, that I have such an orientation towards them. Similarly, the fact that my favourite manufacturer of spaghetti sauce owes me a duty of care to produce uncontaminated cans of sauce need not imply that it treats me in an infantilising way.

3. I thank Laura Valentini and Zofia Stemplowska for this point.

4. For example, on Owen Fiss’s account (Fiss, 1976), direct discrimination is wrong when it worsens the status of an already marginalised group, understood to encompass members of that group in general, and not just the status of an individual member of that group.

5. I leave open the possibility that the pattern of female migration I have identified may also serve to worsen sexist norms in sending states, and not just receiving ones. For example, if women are also commonly perceived as the passive dependents of men in the sending state, this belief may be further confirmed by the observation that women are only able to leave because of their male partners’ overseas job offers.

6. I thank an anonymous CRISPP reviewer for this point.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Desiree Lim

Desiree Lim is a postdoctoral fellow at the McCoy Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford University. She will join the Pennsylvania State University’s philosophy department as Assistant Professor of Philosophy in August 2018. Her current research focuses on the ethics of present-day migration and citizenship policy, paying special attention to gendered and racialised implications.