International | The abuse of migrants

And still they come

Balancing the interests of migrant workers and the countries they live in

WHAT government would tolerate its citizens’ passports being confiscated, their earnings being withheld and their deaths being covered up? Nepal’s, it seems. In September reports of the abuse of Nepalese migrants working on stadiums for the 2022 football World Cup in Qatar, and the deaths of at least 44 of them, appeared in the Guardian, a British newspaper. The Nepalese government’s first response was to recall its ambassador to Qatar: the Guardian had quoted her describing the Gulf state as an “open jail”. Shortly afterwards, Nepalese and Qatari officials held a joint press conference in Doha at which they insisted Nepalese workers were “safe and fully respected”. Reports to the contrary were false and driven by “inappropriate targets and agendas”.

According to Martin Ruhs of Oxford University, the Nepalese government’s apparent lack of concern can be explained by looking at the interests of those involved. For all the mistreatment, Nepalese workers earn far more in Qatar than they could at home. Remittances make up a quarter of Nepalese GDP. If the Nepalese government were to insist that rules protecting migrant workers in Qatar should be enforced, Qatari employers might look for workers elsewhere.

Chart titled 'All work, no rights'

Mr Ruhs has drawn up an index of migrant rights (see chart): he finds that countries with more rights for migrant workers tend to be less keen on admitting new ones. In the Gulf states and Singapore, where migrants have few rights on paper, the foreign workforce is huge: 94% of workers in Qatar were born abroad. Sweden and Norway, where migrants can use public services, claim welfare benefits and bring in dependents, admit relatively few purely economic migrants.

This trade-off is visible even within the European Union, where the recent accession of 12 relatively poor eastern European countries has sparked a debate about migrants’ rights to welfare. In January David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, clashed with his Oxford contemporary, Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister. Mr Cameron wants to be able to exclude recently arrived European immigrants from welfare and public housing. “If Britain gets our taxpayers, shouldn’t it also pay their benefits?” Mr Sikorski responded.

In Europe the debate is multilateral; Mr Cameron intends to promote his point of view as part of a package to reform the EU’s single labour market. Elsewhere the movement of people is increasingly regulated by bilateral agreements and diplomacy. Since a diaspora can help poor countries develop, sending states must try to protect the rights of migrant workers without making them such a burden as to be unwelcome, points out David McKenzie of the World Bank. Receiving countries weigh their national interests, real or perceived, against international obligations.

The calculations vary from country to country. Some sending countries, such as the Philippines, come down on the side of stronger rights: Filipinos must be offered a high wage to be allowed to leave for a job, and their government sends envoys and inspectors to the main receiving countries. Others, like Nepal, are lax. Amnesty International, an NGO, is almost as critical of its government’s tolerance of dodgy recruitment agencies and exploitative brokers as it is of Qatari employers.

A UN convention on migrant workers’ rights which came into force in 2003 has been ratified by only 47 countries, most of which are net senders of migrants. It is largely unenforced. A weaker treaty covering just the basics might do more good, argues Mr Ruhs, since the rich countries most migrants move to might sign it, and help to crack down on the worst abuses in places such as Qatar.

This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline "And still they come"

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From the April 19th 2014 edition

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