Title: Towards a system of recompense for international labour migration.

POPLINE Document Number: 018193

Author(s):

Bohning WR

Source citation:

Geneva, Switzerland, International Labour Organizatoin, 1982 Feb. 81 p. (International Migration for Employment Working Paper)

Abstract:

The discussion traces the forerunners of the concept of recompense and the reasons why foreigners are admitted and international migration occurs. It is on these fundamental factors that the idea of pay for another country's labor can and must be established. Attention is also directed to migration characterized by human resource transfer (scope, official or business migration, contract migration, settlement migration, free migration, and irregular migration) and they why, how and how much of recompense (justification, procedure, and amount). Recompense is meant to designate a payment for another country's human resources when one wants to use them. It stands a chance of becoming accepted and acted upon only if 2 conditions are met: it must related to economic or production requirements; and it must be powerfully supported in national and international political arenas. Jagdish Bhagwati was the first to articulate distinct links between the apparent inability of 3rd world countries to catch up with the developed nations and the large scale movement of professional, technical, and kindred workers from the 3rd world to the developed one. He proposed to levy a surtax on the income accruing to brain drain immigrants in developed countries with a veiw toward transferring the receipts to developing countries. It is the state as an institution rather than the migrant as an actor who crucially determines contemporary patterns of migration. A summary table provides a first impression of the kinds of movements that may be liable to recompense. An effort is made to make categories as homogeneous as possible and yet to make them mutually exclusively. Immigration countries should pay recompense to emigration countries whose citizens are admitted because they are needed for the purpose of employment. The philosophy of international distributive justice can be drawn upon to provide a secondary justification for recompense through an analysis of the differential gains from labor migation between immigration and emigration countries. Immigration countries have the undisputed right to close their borders to foreigners when it is in their interest to do so. Emigration countries are denied the right indefinitely to hold back citizens who are "bona fide" emigrants. Again, this provides a supplementary justification for recompense if viewed from the standpoint of international distributive justice. The economic and the legal inequities attaching to international labor migration lend strong moral support to the concept of recompense. A system of recompense needs to be solidly based to prevent a tug of war at the implementation stage.

Keywords:

International Migration
Socioeconomic Factors
Migration
Migration Policy
Migrant Workers
Illegal Migrants
Population Dynamics
Demographic Factors
Population
Economic Factors
Population Policy
Social Policy
Policy
Labor Force
Human Resources
Migrants