ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that administrative immigration status (hereafter called legal status) constitutes a major factor in determining migrants’ social and economic vulnerability. In a global context where social inequality uproots increasingly large numbers of individuals and where legal international migration and mobility options remain limited, two major trends are observed: the rise of precarious legal migration statuses – such as temporary foreign worker programmes – and the steady increase of undocumented migration. In both cases, the precariousness in which these migrant workers find themselves is legally, socially and economically constructed. In many countries, large sectors of the economy – often agriculture, construction, hospitality, domestic work, caregiving, fisheries or extraction – are effectively ‘subsidised’ through the reduction in labour costs and the limitation of the migrant workers’ social and economic rights engineered through precarious statuses. Migrants are at heightened risk of discrimination, abuse, exploitation and violence and, for fear of being detected, detained and deported, are deterred from denouncing such abuse and from seeking protection and cooperating with the authorities. The fragile status of temporary or undocumented migrant workers therefore impedes their effective protection under the law and results in considerable human and economic costs. The deskilling experienced by the majority of migrant workers is also linked to their precariousness of status. Deskilling not only prevents migrants from working at a skill level resulting from their education, training and work experience, it also hampers both the migrant worker’s integration into the local labour force and their reintegration into the labour market in the country of origin. To remedy such issues, the chapter suggests that effective oversight and accountability mechanisms are needed, together with substantive and procedural standards within national and international human rights and labour law systems, to empower migrant workers to fight for their rights.
