Valeria Ottonelli and Tiziana Torresi’s The Right Not to Stay is a welcome intervention in the ethics of temporary labor migration. The authors maintain that the debate is captured by a framing expressed by Martin Ruhs’s famous rights versus numbers dilemma (The Price of Rights, 2013). This analysis suggests a trade-off between openness to labor migration and the granting of equal rights after admission. Given that migration even with reduced rights has substantial positive effects on welfare, some have justified temporary migration programs from the perspective of global justice. Assuming migrants make this choice voluntarily, the trade-off is permissible. Others, conversely, have rejected the trade-off as an instance of structural injustice, arguing that labor migrants only settle for temporary migration as a second-best alternative under conditions of exploitation; instead, they call for expanded political and social rights, up to and including a form of citizenship.
Ottonelli and Torresi resist this framing. They do not agree that citizenship is the suitable solution to the normative problems created by temporary labor migration and that states not offering full inclusion to temporary migrants are necessarily acting unjustly. But interestingly, their reasoning differs from the global utilitarian perspective, because it does not justify trading off rights for increased opportunities of migration. In effect, their contribution reframes the question, asking instead what the liberal commitment to equality actually requires in the case of temporary labor migrants.
The authors argue that temporary migration projects create a fundamental tension for liberal theory and are not simply a non-ideal problem. They maintain that these projects create a dislocation between the social space that migrants (temporarily) inhabit and their social bases of self-respect, which are found “partly at home and partly in the virtual social space created by their geographies and temporal displacement” (p. 57). This separation makes it rational for the temporary labor migrant to trade away equal status in the receiving society to advance their home-centered project. However, it also creates a tension between two commitments of liberal egalitarianism; namely, the recognition of people’s right to pursue their own life plans and the duty to establish equal social relations. Ottonelli and Torresi’s proposal out of this impasse is a regime of special rights for temporary labor migrants that would address the risk of vulnerability and marginalization they face without imposing on them the conditions of full membership that clash with their personal projects.
The main theoretical contribution of the book is found in the chapters exploring the concept of voluntariness and the principle of accommodation. These discussions are informed by a methodological commitment to moral parity between migrants and nonmigrants, driven by a normative commitment to viewing migrants as “agents, rather than passive recipients of benefits, or of distributions of resources and opportunities” (p. 70). In addressing the question of voluntariness, Ottonelli and Torresi argue that choice can be viewed as voluntary if four necessary and sufficient conditions are met: the choice must not be coerced, made with adequate knowledge, with the available alternatives sufficiently good, and exit options available. Because the methodological requirement of parity rules out an overly demanding interpretation of these conditions, the upshot is that a choice to migrate under conditions of structural injustice can be done voluntarily. This discussion is extremely helpful and potentially extends beyond the ethics of migration; however, it does seem unfortunately to limit the scope of the argument. The focus is meant to be on low-skilled labor migrants, but the requirement of exit options makes most existing temporary migration (outside the common European markets) involuntary on this definition.
Ottonelli and Torresi continue to argue that the liberal state is obliged to treat people as bearers of life plans, which means “setting up a system of rights that creates and protects the conditions in which people can actively pursue their projects and their conception of the good” (p. 94). The novel claim is that this principle of accommodation extends to all migrants within the state’s territory and that migrants’ life plans should be accommodated as migration plans; that is, viewing migration as a constitutive element of their project. This accommodation, however, cannot be achieved through citizenship rights and so requires an alternative approach.
The institutional solution offered in the book, therefore, is not a diminished version of citizenship rights but a differentiated set of rights that respect migrants as equal agents who are entitled to fair accommodation. The authors suggest that these rights may require departure from strict equality in welfare and labor rights. In some cases, this may result in looser regulation: for example, work contracts may be exempt from provisions meant to secure a balance between work and leisure or from requirements of paths for career development, because they may clash with migrants’ strategy of maximizing earnings (pp. 120–21). In other cases, receiving states may incur extra duties—for example, a duty of adequate educational and care support for family members left in the migrants’ home state—to compensate for the “care drain” (pp. 126–27). Ottonelli and Torresi also argue that migrants’ political rights are not suitably protected through voting rights, given their lack of engagement with the host society. Instead, they maintain that the political representation of temporary labor migrants is best achieved through migrant NGOs, trade unions, and migrant worker organizations (pp. 159–67).
This innovative approach will undoubtedly draw criticism. For proponents of social equality, any divergence from a strict equality of rights is suspicious and requires particularly strong justification. Here, I expect it is the proposal for special labor rights that will draw the most fire. Although the authors engage with the possible objection that this would result in social dumping (pp. 134–38), my sense was that more is needed to assuage this considerable worry. It is also unclear why the justification for differentiated labor rights would not extend to all citizens. Suppose, for example, that I prefer to trade away leisure time to maximize income for the purpose of early retirement. Ottonelli and Torresi discuss this potential critique very briefly (p. 57), viewing this kind of trade-off as self-defeating and irrational when it occurs within the same social space. Yet, this seems to assume a unified view of society that may not hold true for all citizens.
In addition, there is clearly a worry that the costs of the special rights regime the book advances (specifically, regarding welfare rights) will result in states becoming reluctant to accept temporary migration. The authors’ response to this concern oscillates between arguing that this would not necessarily be the case (e.g., p. 134) and maintaining that questions of admission are irrelevant to their focus on fair treatment (e.g., p. 140). I was not convinced: restricting opportunities for migration is as obstructive to individuals’ life plans as less-than-accommodating migration options are, if not more so. The rights versus numbers dilemma, in other words, will be hard to define away.
Overall, The Right Not to Stay is a highly original book. Ottonelli and Torresi advance a coherent and well-argued, if controversial, proposal for addressing the dilemmas of temporary migration. In the challenge it presents to the foundational assumptions of the current debate on migrants’ rights, this book will certainly push the conversation forward in productive ways.
