These essays include theoretical analyses by Richard Falk, Jack Donnelly, and James Rosenau. Chapters on sex tourism, international markets, and communications technology bring new perspectives to emerging issues. The authors investigate places such as the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, and the Philippines.
The contemporary world is defined by globalization. While global human rights standards and institutions have been established, assaults on human dignity continue. These essays identify the new challenges to be faced, and suggest new ways to remedy the costs of globalization.
These essays include theoretical analyses by Richard Falk, Jack Donnelly, and James Rosenau. Chapters on sex tourism, international markets, and communications technology bring new perspectives to emerging issues. The authors investigate places such as the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, and the Philippines.
The contemporary world is defined by globalization. While global human rights standards and institutions have been established, assaults on human dignity continue. These essays identify the new challenges to be faced, and suggest new ways to remedy the costs of globalization.
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These essays include theoretical analyses by Richard Falk, Jack Donnelly, and James Rosenau. Chapters on sex tourism, international markets, and communications technology bring new perspectives to emerging issues. The authors investigate places such as the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, and the Philippines.
The contemporary world is defined by globalization. While global human rights standards and institutions have been established, assaults on human dignity continue. These essays identify the new challenges to be faced, and suggest new ways to remedy the costs of globalization.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520936287 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 321 |
| Lexile: | 1620L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Globalization and Human Rights
By Alison Brysk
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2002 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-93628-7
CHAPTER 1
Who Has a Right to Rights?
Citizenship's Exclusions in an Age of Migration
Kristen Hill Maher
Transnational migration—or the flow of "bodies across borders"—presents a range of potential threats to human rights. The most politicized and visible among these threats are those posed to migrants by exploitative trafficking networks that profit from migrants' vulnerabilities, coercing them into circumstances that include life-threatening dangers, slave-labor conditions, or forced prostitution. These circumstances violate migrants' most fundamental rights and certainly deserve international attention. However, globalizing processes have also produced less visible but more numerous rights vulnerabilities among migrants who live as noncitizen residents in foreign states. Noncitizen populations pose a quandary for the administration of human rights because human rights norms have generally been enacted within the nation-state system and administered as the rights of citizens. That is, while the human rights regime is international, its greatest influence has been to establish standards for states' obligations vis-à-vis their own citizenries. Hence, even in Western states that are vocal champions of human rights, policymakers debate the extent to which they are responsible for protecting the full range of human rights for noncitizen migrants, particularly migrants lacking state authorization.
In the United States—the primary case examined in this chapter—policies and practices toward noncitizens often fail to uphold international human rights standards as outlined in the Universal Declaration or in later conventions regarding the rights of migrants. Human rights organizations have documented violations at the hand of Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and Border Patrol agents such as the excessive use of force (at times resulting in death), sexual abuse, and the denial of food and water. In the past several years, the Border Patrol has become much more careful about its public image, but it continues to adopt enforcement strategies that place border-crossing migrants at risk. For instance, San Diego's Operation Gatekeeper has adopted a conscious strategy of channeling crossing attempts east of the city, where apprehensions are easier but the terrain and weather conditions are much more dangerous. Following the implementation of this strategy, hundreds of migrants have died during border crossing from heat exposure, cold exposure, drowning, and dehydration. While the Border Patrol is less directly culpable for these deaths than in circumstances of violent confrontation, the current enforcement policy clearly prioritizes successful border control over the lives of migrants. Nonstate actors have reproduced these priorities in self-appointed citizen patrols that "arrest" migrants in border regions in confrontations that have sometimes turned violent, such as in the May 2000 Arizona incident in which ranchers on horseback shot at undocumented migrants with high-powered rifles.
Noncitizen migrants in the United States are also vulnerable to violations of political and social rights. Most prevalent among these are the violations of labor rights that regularly occur, with state agencies either cooperating or failing to intervene. There is ample evidence of employers who use threats of reporting workers to the INS in order to preempt organized demands, who report undocumented workers in retaliation for refusals to accept poor working conditions, or who call the INS to collect workers once production or harvest demands end (e.g., Bacon 1999: 161, 165; Calavita 1992). While individual workers hypothetically have the right to legally challenge unpaid salaries, poor working conditions, or abuses at the workplace, few have the resources to do so, and those who are undocumented risk not only the loss of a job but also deportation once they bring their plight to the attention of the courts. The relative priority of labor law in relation to immigration law has been ambiguous and often subordinated in practice.
Recent policies have also left open potential for rights violations in deportation, detention, and asylum procedures. Two acts passed in 1996—the Anti-Terrorism Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA)—struck a blow against the right of appeal in summary deportations of undocumented immigrants, a particular concern for those claiming asylum. The current expedited review process risks violating the international human rights principle of non-refoulement, as it undercuts asylum-seekers' capacity to demonstrate their credible fear of persecution upon return (Langenfeld 1999). The IIRAIRA also included a very controversial statute broadening the definition of a deportable crime, which has resulted in the deportations of even naturalized citizens who were earlier convicted of crimes that now constitute deportable offenses. In cases in which a return to the country of origin is not possible, such as to Cuba or Vietnam, these "criminal aliens" face indefinite detention, in violation of due process rights.
While the above policy shifts might be perceived to be anti-immigration in orientation, much of the policy in the 1990s would more fairly be represented as anti-immigrant, focused on limiting immigrants' rights (Jonas 1999: viii). California's infamous Proposition 187, which would have denied undocumented migrants access to even primary education or health care, represents the kinds of issues that continue to be debated at a national level. Should noncitizen immigrants have the same rights as citizens to Medicaid, Social Security, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), food stamps, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), educational loans and grants, unemployment compensation, or housing assistance? The policy response to date has been mixed, but there has been movement in the direction of denying all noncitizens social services, as in the case of the 1996 federal welfare reform (H.R. 3734), which made most noncitizens ineligible for most forms of assistance. Additionally, there have been recurring proposals to limit the access of the undocumented to citizenship (and hence to the economic and political benefits of citizenship), for instance, by changing the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in order to eliminate birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants.
What we see in these examples is a political culture in which universal personhood continues to be subordinated to citizenship as a basis for rights. That is, the violations and vulnerabilities of migrant rights enumerated in these examples can all be understood as extensions of a cultural logic in which even human rights are framed as entitlements exclusive to citizens. My analysis suggests that popular and political discourse in this context conceptualizes citizenship less in objective terms (as a legal status) than as a relational identity defined in opposition to "aliens," particularly in reference to labor migrants from less developed states. This constructed opposition—positioning migrants as lacking a legitimate claim to rights—has two dimensions, which I address below. The first dimension of the citizen-alien opposition rests on logics grounded in liberal notions of contract and property that position migrants as criminals, trespassers, and usurpers who have forfeited claims to rights by virtue of individual breaches of contract or law. The second reflects a neocolonial logic that legitimates differential claims to rights in accordance with an individual's position in a racialized international division of labor, equating the privileges that accompany First World status with a greater entitlement to rights.
These oppositions between citizens and aliens pose obstacles for migrants' claims to rights based on universal personhood, even within a state that formally supports international human rights norms. The nature of these obstacles is largely cultural—that is, they have to do with how rights, citizenship, and belonging are popularly conceived, and how popular conceptions shape policy and law. In making this claim, I am assuming a close connection between public policy and the hegemonic norms of political culture in civil society. This linkage is most overt in policies enacted through popular referenda, such as California's Proposition 187. However, it also exists in policy enacted through the legislative process, insofar as cultural norms limit what policymakers find imaginable and politically feasible. Cultural norms and constructions also undergird arguments in policy debates and inform the assumptions made about population groups (cf. Ingram and Schneider 1997; Stone 1997).
While this essay is written in a primarily theoretical mode, its argument is informed by empirical studies conducted in Europe and the United States, as well as by my own research on immigrant labor in southern California. It begins by reviewing why there has been so much recent migration into industrialized states and what consequences this migration has had for conceptions of membership and rights. It then elaborates how liberal and neocolonial logics are commonly used in U.S. political culture (and particularly in the Southwest) to frame citizenship in opposition to the migrant "alien" in ways that have consequences for migrants' claims to rights.
MIGRATION TRENDS AND MIGRANT RIGHTS IN INDUSTRIALIZED WESTERN STATES
Industrialized states have all experienced growth in immigration in the past twenty years, particularly from less developed regions. In the United States, immigration levels in the 1990s have been higher in proportion to its population than in any other period besides the turn of the century; in raw numbers, current immigration flows are the largest in history (Castles and Miller 1998). Why is this migration occurring? Many residents and policymakers of immigrant-receiving states share a common misperception that migration flows are the "rational" consequence of inequalities of wealth between states, that endless numbers of people from poor regions are clamoring to enter richer economies. The migration literature largely debunks this perception as a myth, explaining migration patterns as systemic rather than the product of individual aspirations for greater prosperity.
Most generally, this literature asserts that migrations are patterned rather than random flows of people from poverty to wealth. They occur within relatively predictable geographies, they are limited in their scope and endurance, and they are often stimulated by established relationships between the sending and receiving states, such as quasi-colonial bonds or a history of active labor recruitment (Sassen 1999; Castles and Miller 1998). In a globalizing economy, migration to industrialized states is also spurred by economic links formed through international investment and production. As borders open to flows of goods, services, information, and capital, there will also be cross-border movement of labor (Sassen 1996, 1988).
Finally, contemporary migration patterns reflect a shift in the structure of economies in receiving states. Given the turn from Fordist to post-Fordist production and toward flexible accumulation (Harvey 1989), industrialized economies have developed labor markets that have a shrinking number of primary sector jobs and a growing number of informal, part-time, or minimum wage jobs. The latter jobs—whether in the service sector, agricultural production and processing, construction, or high tech manufacturing—are increasingly performed by immigrant or migrant workers. This pattern exists not only in traditional countries of immigration, such as Canada, the United States, and Australia, but also in states that claim no significant history of immigration. A recent comparative study of immigrant labor in San Diego, California, and Hamamatsu, Japan, found that both economies have come to incorporate significant numbers of immigrant workers and exhibit similar patterns in the kinds of jobs in which immigrants predominate (Cornelius 1998).
What these trends indicate is that immigrant or migrant labor from less-developed states is becoming structurally embedded in the economies of industrialized states. Additionally, once immigrants predominate in given job categories, these jobs tend to become perceived as "immigrant jobs" (cf. Cornelius 1998; Ortiz 1996; Hossfeld 1988), or even as jobs only fit for immigrants, such that a division of labor that depends upon immigrant labor also is socially or culturally reinforced (Maher 1999). For all these reasons, migration into industrialized states does not appear to constitute a temporary or random flow easily stanched through stricter border regulation. Rather, it is an indelible part of the new political geography in a globalizing economy.
This migration poses serious challenges to the international nation-state system and to a state-centered administration of rights. The nation-state system presumes the territorial basis of each citizen community (Malkki 1994), the "national" basis of the citizenry (Anderson 1991), mutually exclusive political memberships (Brubaker 1989), and legal equality among all community residents (Fiss 1999). In contrast, international migration creates deterritorialized, transnational communities (Basch et al. 1994; Rouse 1995; Appadurai 1990), dual citizens with multiple political memberships (Hammar 1990), ethnically or "nationally" diverse populations, and internal distinctions in terms of legal statuses and rights (Bauböck 1991, 1994). In regard to this last effect of migration, consider the range of possible legal statuses, which include native-born citizens; naturalized citizens; permanent residents (or "denizens"); temporary residents, such as students or short-term workers; guests, such as tourists; and undocumented residents who have overstayed a short-term visa or entered the country without authorization. These multiple statuses are accompanied by differences in state-defined rights that, over time, can serve as the basis for a "class" or castelike social structure (Fiss 1998, 1999).
The inequalities in rights between residents of democracies has been identified as particularly problematic in countries like Germany, which until recently has made full citizenship status largely inaccessible to large numbers of Turkish guest workers, even through the third generation of their residence in the territorial state, given a definition of membership based on "blood" or heritage (Brubaker 1998). But even when there is relative institutional openness to mobility between statuses, as there is in the United States, transnational migration and the remaining institutional regulations produce social and legal inequalities between those of different legal statuses in relation to the state. While there is hypothetical mobility at the individual level, at a collective level, the residential community in the United States at any given point in time incorporates groups with differing rights and social stature, differences understood as ensuing from different legal statuses.
One political and scholarly response to migration's challenges to the administration of rights has been to turn to international law to establish and protect a more equal and universal basis for rights than membership of the territorial nation-state. At the end of World War II, international law regarding the rights of migrants focused primarily on refugees and rights to asylum. However, after widespread foreign labor recruitment to Europe and North America during the 1950s and 1960s and a rising swell of anti-immigrant sentiment since the 1970s, labor migrants have also become the focus of a series of international charters establishing a growing range of rights. The International Labor Office (ILO) Conventions of 1949 and 1975 provided for nondiscrimination in employment and some degree of cultural autonomy for migrants within the contracting states. United Nations charters such as the UNESCO Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice (1978) and the UN convention on the Protection of Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families (1990) collectively address a considerable range of economic, civil, and social rights of individuals as well as the cultural rights of migrant groups, such that migrants now claim rights to "employment, education, health care, nourishment, and housing [as well as] [t]he collective rights of nations and peoples to culture, language, and development" (Soysal 1994: 157).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Globalization and Human Rights by Alison Brysk. Copyright © 2002 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Transnational Threats and Opportunities
Alison Brysk
I. Citizenship
1. Who Has a Right to Rights?
Citizenship’s Exclusions in an Age of Migration
Kristen Hill Maher
2. Tourism, Sex Work, and Women’s Rights in the Dominican Republic
Amalia Lucia Cabezas
II. Commodification
3. Interpreting the Interaction of Global Markets and Human Rights
Richard Falk
4. Economic Globalization and Rights: An Empirical Analysis
Wesley T. Milner
5. Sweatshops and International Labor Standards: Globalizing Markets, Localizing Norms
Raul Pangalangan
III. Communication
6. The Ironies of Information Technology
Shane Weyker
7. Globalization and the Social Construction of Human Rights Campaigns
Clifford Bob
8. The Drama of Human Rights in a Turbulent, Globalized World
James Rosenau
IV. Cooperation
9. Transnational Civil Society and the World Bank Inspection Panel
Jonathan Fox
10. Humanitarian Intervention: Global Enforcement of Human Rights?
Wayne Sandholtz
11. Human Rights, Globalizing Flows, and State Power
Jack Donnelly
Conclusion: From Rights to Realities
Alison Brysk
Works Cited
Contributors
Index