Live-In Domestics, Seasonal Workers, Foreign Students and Others Hard to Locate on the Map of Democracy

Joseph H. Carens
jcarens@chass.utoronto.ca

The Question
	Should liberal democracies be able to admit people to live and work in their societies without putting them on a path to citizenship and, in the meantime, granting them most of the rights that citizens enjoy? Most contemporary theorists who have addressed this question  have focussed on long-term residents and have answered in the negative. (Walzer 1983; Carens 1989 and 2002; Baubock 1994; Rubio-Morin 2000) Both the inner logic of democracy and a commitment to liberal principles require the full inclusion of the entire settled population. My own version of the argument emphasizes the moral importance of the passage of time: the longer the stay, the stronger the claim to full membership in society and to the enjoyment of the same rights as citizens, including, eventually, citizenship itself.

	Political practice in democratic states reflects this view. The most famous case perhaps is the transformation of those admitted to Germany as “guestworkers” during the 1950s and 1960s into permanent residents with most of the rights of citizens apart from the right to vote or hold public office. Other European states had similar policy developments.  People who had originally been admitted under terms which explicitly limited their rights and foresaw their eventual departure nonetheless acquired the status of permanent residents, most of the rights of citizenship, and often access to citizenship itself. As time passed, European states acknowledged that the original terms of admission were simply no longer relevant and could not be enforced. More recently, the European Union has issued a directive that explicitly codifies the significance of the passage of time. It recommends that third country nationals (i.e., people from outside the EU) be granted a right of permanent residence if they have been legally residing in a single EU state for five years. In North America, too, where access to citizenship itself has traditionally been easier, the rights that settled immigrants enjoy grew enormously in the second half of the twentieth century. (Schuck 1984)
	The focus on long-term residents in discussions of immigration and citizenship is illuminating in some respects but leaves other categories of entrants in the dark. In practice democratic states contain all kinds of people who are neither citizens nor long-term residents. What are the claims of non-citizens who are present on the territory of a state but who are not permanent residents? Does the normative map of democracy have room for them? Is it even acceptable any longer to admit people to democratic states without access to long-term residence and without granting them most of the rights of citizens?
	The answer to the last question is clearly “yes,” if by “admit” we mean “permit to enter.” Every liberal democratic state admits tourists and other short-term visitors. Such visitors enjoy most of the civil rights that citizens enjoy, and this fact alone challenges the view that stable and secure rights always rest upon and are derived from citizenship.1 Nevertheless, no one who thinks that it is acceptable for the state to control admissions in the first place challenges the moral right of the state to exclude tourists and short-term visitors from the labour market, to deny them access to most social programs, and to require them to leave within a specified period.2 These policies draw distinctions between visitors and citizens/residents, but almost no one would describe these distinctions as discriminatory.3 So, it seems relatively easy to add such people to the map of democracy. Their presence under restrictive conditions is not normatively problematic.
	What is more puzzling is where people who are neither visitors nor part of the settled population fit on the map -- people admitted for work or other purposes (such as study) but with restrictions on how long they can remain and what they can do while they are present. Unlike visitors, these are people who have permission to set up residence in the territory, but unlike permanent residents, they do not enjoy a right to stay on indefinitely and they are often subject to more restrictive conditions than residents.
	From an empirical perspective, it is clear that there are lots of such people present within  democratic states in Europe and North America, people who do not fit neatly into either the category of citizen/permanent resident or the category of tourist/temporary visitor. Despite the demise of the original European guestworker programs, many democratic states still admit  people for work purposes on a temporary basis and impose limits on them that are not imposed on other immigrants to the same state. The United States, for example, has dozens of lawful immigration statuses besides that of resident or tourist. Most of these statuses provide an authorization to work, but one that is limited in various ways. Ireland has a program (in which my own son participated) that permits people (from certain countries) to come and work for a year, with the clear expectation that they will leave at the end of that period. Many other states have similar arrangements. Many democratic states admit seasonal workers for the agricultural harvest but require them to work only at that task and to leave at the end of the season. Canada has a program that admits people as live-in caregivers and requires them to stay in that occupation for two years before they gain access to permanent residence and the rights that go with it (e.g., family reunification, access to the general labour market). Every democratic state admits some foreign students to its universities as undergraduates and postgraduates, but most states limit students’ access to the labour market – some quite severely –  and require them to leave soon after the completion of their study.
	What can be said for and against such arrangements? Where should we locate them on our normative map of democracy? Are some or all of such practices to be criticized and eliminated if possible, or should some (or all) be accepted and even applauded? What principles can guide our judgments on these questions?
	In exploring these questions, I will argue that democratic states may legitimately admit people to work while limiting the duration of their stay, but that other sorts of restrictions are morally problematic because they violate the state’s own understanding of morally acceptable conditions of employment. I will then consider objections to this position from those who would defend policies that admit greater numbers of temporary migrants while restricting their rights more sharply.
Two Presuppositions
	In what follows, I implicitly presuppose the legitimacy of liberal democratic principles, but not any particular interpretation of them.  Providing such an interpretation is one of the tasks of the paper. In pursuing this interpretive task, I will often start with intuitive responses to actual policies(or hypothetical variations on these policies). If we can articulate why some arrangements seem intuitively acceptable while others do not, we may succeed in identifying the underlying principles more fully and adequately.
	Second, as may already be apparent, I will bracket normative questions about the general right of states to make admission decisions. Some (and I among them) have challenged the conventional view that democratic states enjoy a largely unfettered moral discretion with regard to admissions. (Carens 1987, 1992, 1999) I will not explore those issues here, however, because I think it is more fruitful to explore questions about temporary workers within the framework of the conventional view. As Michael Walzer’s famous discussion in Spheres of Justice (1983) illustrates, one can be a strong defender of the conventional view of the right of states to control initial admissions, while being a strong critic of guestworker programs. So, I will simply assume that democratic states are not obliged to admit migrants to work or study for a temporary period. The question is whether it is morally permissible for states to do so, and if so under what conditions or with what sorts of restrictions. I should emphasize that I am primarily interested in the question of whether or not admitting temporary workers is compatible with liberal democratic justice, and if so under what conditions, not with the question of whether it is prudent for any particular state to adopt such a policy. There are many policies that are morally permissible but foolish, just as there are others that might be advantageous economically but are unjust. On this democratic map, I am trying only to sketch in the contours of justice, not those of wisdom.
Temporary Admissions of Workers
	Is it legitimate for a democratic state to admit people to work for a limited period of time and to require them to leave at the end of that period? If we accept the principle that the longer one stays in a society, the stronger one’s claim to remain, it follows that the shorter one’s stay, the weaker one’s claim to remain (other things being equal). So, if people admitted to work on a temporary visa have no other moral claim to residence than their presence in the state, it is normally reasonable to expect people who have only been present for a year or two to leave when their visa expires.4 On the other hand, if a temporary visa of this sort is renewed, it ought at some point to be converted into a right of permanent residence. That is also the implication of the principle that the longer the stay, the stronger the claim to remain. 
	When do workers admitted on a temporary basis acquire a moral right to remain permanently? Philosophical reflection can provide no clear general answer to that. Identifying a specific moment after which the right to remain is indefeasible inevitably involves both a contestable interpretation of the rate at which the claim to remain grows over time and an element of arbitrariness in setting a particular demarcation point for recognizing the growing moral claim as a legal right. For example, the EU has recently issued a directive saying that non-EU citizens who are legally present for five years in an EU state should be given permanent residence status. This is clearly an attempt to implement the more indeterminate moral principle that the moral claim to remain grows over time, along with a recognition that some threshold must be established beyond which the right to stay is indefeasible. Why five years rather than four or six? No one can pretend that the answer to this question entails any fundamental principle. It is more a matter of the social psychology of coordination, given the need to settle on one point within a range. But if one asks why five years rather than one or ten, it is easier to make the case that one is too short and ten too long, given common European understandings of the ways in which people settle into the societies where they live.
	Setting a particular time threshold for the acquisition of the right to remain, as the EU directive does, creates two related difficulties. First, it generates cases that jar our moral sensibilities because those just beyond the five year border will have a very strong legal right to remain and those not quite up to the five year border will have a much weaker legal claim, while, from a philosophical perspective the moral claim of someone who has been a resident for 4 years and 11 months is virtually indistinguishable from the moral claim of someone who has been present for 5 years and one month. Second, to the extent that states see their interests as constrained by, or in conflict with, the moral principles underlying the five year rule, they will have incentives to adopt policies that generate cases that jar our moral sensibilities.5 Suppose a state thinks that it has an interest in recruiting workers but also in preventing them from becoming permanent members of society.6 Assume also that the state wishes to adopt policies that are morally permissible from a democratic perspective and that it takes the EU directive as an articulation of what is and is not morally permissible from a democratic perspective. Then such a state would have an incentive to adopt a temporary migrants’ policy that requires workers to leave at the end of, say, four and a half years. But if we accept the principle that a person’s right to remain grows stronger over time and should be absolute after five years, making people leave at the end of four and a half is likely to feel troubling from a moral perspective.

	I mention these two difficulties only to bring them to consciousness. They do not change my view that an immigrant’s moral right to remain normally grows stronger over time and that the EU’s five year rule is a good way of implementing that principle. The difficulties I have identified are by no means limited to the area of immigration. On the contrary, they are a common feature of the process of translating moral principles into public policies.
	Moral principles often permit a range of indeterminacy in their implementation and incorporate elements of subjective variation from one individual to another. But it is often unwise and inappropriate for public policies to incorporate such indeterminacy and subjectivity. Trying to do so may be too expensive and it risks treating people unfairly due to bias and abuse of power. So, public policies usually require specific demarcation points and objective criteria. For example, everyone recognizes that children should not have all of the rights and responsibilities of adults because the exercise of some rights and responsibilities depends upon the development of capacities during the maturation process. We also recognize, as a social fact, that individual children mature at different rates and so acquire these capacities at different ages. When it comes to assigning legal rights and responsibilities, however, a state does not normally inquire into the subjective capacities of each individual person. Rather it establishes rules that tie the possession of rights and responsibilities to an objective measure of the passage of time. We set an age at which a person acquires the right to vote or to marry or to enter into economic contracts or at which a person can be held responsible for a crime.7 As with the five year residence rule, so in these cases, people who are just on either side of the age line will often be quite similar in terms of their capacities and hence their moral claims to rights and responsibilities, but they will be situated quite differently in terms of their legal rights. In more general terms, this tension between moral claims and legal entitlements will emerge whenever we implement a moral principle that identifies a continuum of moral claims with a legal arrangement that establishes discrete categories of legal rights. Such legal arrangements are often either unavoidable for practical reasons or preferable to efforts to construct fluid legal arrangements more closely linked to the continuous character of the moral principle.
	The second difficulty is less widespread but common nevertheless. It emerges whenever the state (or some agent acting in the name of the state) sees its interests as constrained by a moral principle.8 Think of the recent public discussions of what constitutes torture, how to distinguish between torture and aggressive interrogations, and so on. Even those agents of the state who want to stay within the bounds of the morally permissible may nevertheless see it as in the state’s interests to push as close to those bounds as possible. This inevitably leads to a jarring of moral sensibilities as the underlying principle articulates a moral continuum, and a practice that is barely inside the legal limit will inevitably seem morally quite close to a practice that is barely prohibited.
The Rights of Temporary Migrants
	Suppose people are admitted to work for only a limited period. What rights should they enjoy while they are present? As I noted above, even visitors and tourists enjoy most civil rights (such as security of person and property, freedom of opinion and of religion, and so on), so I will just assume that temporary migrant workers are entitled to those rights as well.

	Family reunification  One of the most important questions to ask about temporary migrant workers is whether they have a right to have their immediate family with them, as citizens and permanent residents normally do. States that want temporary workers but also want to make sure that the temporary workers go home worry about granting migrant workers rights of family (re)unification because the presence of family members is one of the major factors in turning temporary migrants into permanent ones, as the experience with European guestworkers shows. Families tend to generate social contacts, especially when the families include children, and this leads people to sink roots into the community where they are living. By contrast,  temporary workers who have left their family at home have stronger incentives to go back themselves. In addition, families often have greater needs for social programs than single individuals. So, states have an interest in preventing family (re)unification in their territory. On the other hand, the right of immediate family members to live together is recognized as a fundamental human right in many international documents. Liberal democratic states find it difficult to justify overriding this right merely for the sake of narrow economic advantages. Here, too, time matters. It is one thing to ask people to be away from their family for weeks or even months, quite another to ask them to be away for years. So, it would not be justifiable to create a temporary migrant workers program that required people to live apart from their family for an extended period.
	How long is too long? As with the earlier question about when a temporary resident must be granted a permanent right to stay, a philosophical analysis cannot supply a determinate answer. I would suggest that denying people the right to have their families with them for more than three months would be harsh and for more than a year would be unconscionable. I recognize that these markers are contestable, but, as with the earlier question, the parameters for this are not infinitely expandable.
	Let me pursue this issue just a bit further by considering a possible objection. The work that some citizens and residents do may require them to be away from their families for extended periods. This is true of highly paid professionals (including academics) and ordinary people like soldiers or commercial sailors or long-distance truckers or travelling salespeople. Indeed sometimes people accept  jobs that will keep them away from their families even when they have reasonable economic alternatives that would not. The state does not try to regulate these choices by its own citizens and residents. 
	Why not think of a temporary workers program that requires migrants to come without their families (while perhaps permitting them to return home for visits) as something comparable? No one forces anyone to join such a program. If some people choose to do so, knowing the implications for their family life, why is not that choice just as morally acceptable as the choices that some citizens and residents make to live apart from their families?
	This way of posing the question neglects the role of the state in setting constraints on the capacity of people to live with their families. Having a right to family life (as the European Convention puts it) does not require people to undertake any particular pattern of family and work life. It simply enables them to make choices about how they want to live. Citizens and residents may choose to take up occupations the nature of which precludes them from being with their family for extended periods (e.g., doing research in the Antarctic, working on a commercial ship) or they may choose to live apart for other reasons. But the state does not tell them that they are not permitted to live with their families. That is precisely what the state does in the hypothetical migrant program we are considering. It is not permissible for a state to require people to forego a fundamental human right as a condition of entry and residence, even temporary residence.9
	Economic and social rights   Now what about economic and social rights? Visitors and tourists often do not enjoy many of those rights. Where do temporary migrant workers fit in this picture? On the one hand, they clearly differ from tourists and visitors in being entitled to participate in the workforce. Does that mean that they should have the same bundle of economic and social rights as citizens and permanent residents? On the other hand, they are only permitted to be present for a limited period, and, in that respect, they resemble visitors more than residents. Does that mean that it is morally acceptable to give them a more limited package of economic and social rights? 
	In thinking about this question, it is helpful to distinguish among three general areas: working conditions (which include things like health and safety regulations and laws regarding minimum wages, overtime pay, and paid holidays and vacations), social programs directly tied to workforce participation, (which include things like unemployment compensation and compulsory pension plans), and other social programs (which include income support programs, health care, education, recreation, and anything else the state spends money on for the benefit of the domestic population). I will argue that temporary migrants should enjoy the same rights with respect to working conditions as citizens and permanent residents, that they are entitled to either the same rights as other workers or to a refund of their contributions with respect to social programs directly tied to workforce participation, and that their claims with regard to other social programs depend on the nature and purpose of the program.
	Working Conditions	Consider first the conditions of work. Every contemporary democratic state sets limits to the operations of the market within its jurisdiction. While the development of the global economy has made it more difficult for individual states to regulate economic activity, every democratic state sets some public policy constraints to employment contracts, limiting the terms to which  workers can agree. These constraints reflect a political community’s understanding of the minimum standards of acceptable working conditions within its jurisdiction. Therefore, the policies should apply to temporary migrants as well as to citizens and permanent residents.
	I deliberately say nothing here about how any particular state should regulate working conditions, despite the fact that this is an important question for democratic theory and economic justice. In practice, the content of the minimum standards varies greatly from one liberal democratic state to another. For example, the United States places fewer and weaker restrictions on the conditions of work than Scandinavian countries. Other democratic states fall somewhere in between. 
	People disagree sharply about the merits of these policies, both within any given state and across different states. I want to prescind from these debates, however, because in this project I want to keep the focus on immigration related issues. For the purposes of this paper, the question is not whether particular safety standards are appropriately or inappropriately designed, whether health requirements are too stringent or too lax, whether the minimum wage is set too high or too low, or even whether it is acceptable to have different standards in any of these areas for different categories of workers (e.g., excluding workers in family businesses or young workers from rules that apply to others). The question is whether such policies may set different standards for some workers rather than others, simply in virtue of their immigration status.10 
	The answer seems clear. The purpose of the rules and regulations is to set the minimum acceptable working conditions within a particular democratic community based on the understanding of what is acceptable that is generated by the community’s internal democratic processes.11 However the state regulates working conditions for citizens and residents, it should regulate them in the same way for temporary migrants. 
	By and large, the practice of democratic states follows this principle. There are some programs in which temporary migrants are restricted to particular jobs and in which they are subject to conditions not imposed upon other workers, and I will discuss these below. Apart from such programs, temporary workers generally are subject to the same legal standards regarding working conditions as citizens and residents.
	Work related social programs   Now consider social programs directly tied to workforce participation. These programs are  intended to provide a form of insurance protection, often against hardships that will predictably fall upon some subset of workers. Typical examples are programs to provide income if workers become unemployed, programs to provide compensation for industrial accidents, and compulsory pension plans. Often these programs are based directly on the principle of reciprocity, and designed as contributory programs in which the state imposes a tax on workers and/or their employers for a specific purpose. . You pay in and you receive a benefit if you need it.12 Even citizens are normally not entitled to the benefits of such programs unless they have participated in the workforce, paid the appropriate tax (where that is required) and, sometimes, passed a certain waiting period. 
	Temporary migrant workers should either be included in such programs or compensated for their exclusion. In many cases, simple inclusion is the better solution, but as I will show below, there is sometimes an acceptable alternative.
	When programs are designed as contributory schemes, the injustice of excluding temporary migrant workers from them is especially obvious. It is blatantly unfair to require people to pay into an insurance scheme if they are not eligible for the benefits. This violates an elementary principle of reciprocity. But the basic principle of including temporary migrant workers in the programs or compensating them for their exclusion does not rest solely on the method by which the program is financed. So long as the rationale of the program is intimately linked to workforce participation, it should include all workers, temporary migrants or not.
	In this area, practice varies from one state to another, but in some it diverges much more sharply from the principle of equal treatment that I have outlined than in the area of working conditions. Temporary migrant workers are often required to pay into pension plans with no reasonable expectation of actually collecting a pension. They may be required to pay 	 unemployment insurance but not eligible to collect benefits. Those practices are clearly unfair, but sometimes there are alternative arrangements that are more defensible. States may have legitimate reasons for wanting to exclude temporary migrants from some of these contributory programs, and, if they are not expected to make the relevant contributions, it might be acceptable to exclude them from the programs.
	Take the question of pensions. Historically, most state pension programs have included an element of redistribution from those of working age to the elderly. In that sense, state pension plans are not pure insurance schemes and not exclusively based on the principle of reciprocity (although this practice has become less viable with demographic changes and the aging of the populations in Europe and North America). For reasons I will explore below, temporary migrants do not have the same claims on redistributive social programs as on others. It might be justifiable therefore for a state to exclude temporary migrants from the benefits of the normal pension plan, but only if the state does not collect money from the worker and the employer for the state pension plan. On the other hand, simply failing to collect this money at all would mean that temporary migrants would be getting a higher net pay at a lower cost to the employer than citizens and residents doing the same work. This is politically unattractive and does nothing to address the need temporary migrants will eventually have for pensions in their home states. So, it would clearly be preferable to collect the same level of taxes from all workers and employers and to put the taxes collected from migrant workers in a separate fund to be disbursed to them either upon their return home or upon their retirement. The migrants would then receive less pension income than they would have if they had been participants in the general pension plan with its redistributive component, but they would not have been deprived of the benefits of the monies collected for their pensions. This presupposes, however, that the pension plan is funded from a specific tax rather than from general revenues. If funded from general revenues, the migrants should simply be included in the plan, and the conditions of eligibility should not require such an extended period of workforce participation that most temporary migrants would be excluded.
	Now consider unemployment compensation. These programs are designed in different ways in different states, but the underlying principle of all of them is to provide working  members of society with some income security in the face of the changes generated by the market. Temporary migrants are workers but not yet full members of society. If they lose their jobs, should they be entitled to the same level of income support as citizens and residents would receive under similar conditions? I have already established the principle that it is unreasonable to expect them to pay into a program for which they are not eligible. So, the question is whether there is any compelling normative reason to choose one of the following two options: (1) making them pay the tax and including them in the normal program, subject to normal constraints on eligibility; (2) excluding them from eligibility for the program, while either not collecting the tax at all or collecting it (so that the cost of hiring a temporary migrant worker would be the same as hiring a domestic one) and putting it in a special fund to be paid out upon the migrants’ return. 
	In addressing this question, I confess to more ambivalence than I feel with respect to the preceding one and the one that follows. On the one hand, if a temporary migrant loses her job, she needs some alternative source of support for the same reasons that citizen and resident workers do. That argues for allowing temporary migrants to be eligible for the normal unemployment compensation programs. On the other hand, temporary migrants are only permitted to be present for a limited time anyway. Presumably they will not be eligible for unemployment compensation once they have left the country. (Otherwise, it would be economically advantageous for the migrants to become unemployed shortly before they return home.) So, if they were simply included in the normal program, as their exit date approached they would be paying into a program for which they were no longer fully eligible. Moreover, from the state’s perspective, the whole point of admitting migrants on temporary work visas is to gain the advantage of their contribution to the economy.  Migrants who have lost their jobs and cannot readily find new ones will have stronger incentives to return home early if they are not receiving unemployment compensation. It is arguable that they are not being unfairly treated, even though they are treated differently from citizen and resident workers, so long as they have not had to pay taxes to support an unemployment compensation program for which they are not eligible and so long as they are permitted to stay and try to find a new job while living on their savings.13
	Pensions and unemployment compensation provide examples of cases where it would be justifiable to exclude temporary migrants from social programs linked to workforce participation so long as the migrants were not bearing the costs of the programs. Not all contributory social programs fit this model, however. Some compulsory contributory social programs are more akin to health and safety regulations in the sense that they simply establish minimum standards for morally acceptable working conditions in a particular democratic state. 
	Take workers’ compensation programs. The structure of such programs is often quite similar to that of pensions and unemployment compensation programs. Workers and/or employers pay a tax, the monies go into a common fund,  and workers who suffer a work-related accident or illness receive benefits from the fund. These programs are designed to address some of the inevitable risks that economic activities pose to workers. Even with good health and safety regulations in place, work often entail risks of injury or illness for the workers. Sometimes this harm is due to negligence on the part of the employer or the worker or both, sometimes it is an unavoidable accident. Democratic states have typically found it advantageous to limit litigation over responsibility for workplace accidents and illnesses and to establish instead programs to provide compensation for workers who suffer work-related injury or illness, often using standard formulas for establishing appropriate levels of compensation. The rationale for these sorts of program are closely linked to the rationales for the health and safety regulations that they closely complement. Just as it would be wrong to permit temporary workers (but not citizens and residents) to labour under sub-standard working conditions with respect to health and safety, even if they were compensated financially for doing so, it would also be wrong to permit them to opt out of workers’ compensation programs.
	Other social programs   In this section I will argue that temporary migrants should be included in most other social programs but that it is permissible (not required, and not necessarily desirable) to exclude them from programs whose primary goal is redistribution from better off to worse off members of the community. Every state provides a wide range of services to those within its territory. Some of these (police protection, emergency medical care) are, in principle, available to any person who needs it. For some others, one must be a resident but any resident status will do, including temporary residence as a migrant worker. For example, to borrow books from the local library, one must normally show that one lives in the local area, not establish one’s citizenship or one’s immigration status. Similarly, one must sometimes prove that one is a resident to use local recreational facilities, but it would be hard to imagine the justification for excluding even temporary residents from such facilities. At a more serious level, any state that treats health care as a basic right – which is to say, every state in Europe and North America except the United States – is obliged to provide health care to temporary workers, and their families, too, if they are present. Every democratic state has a system of free and compulsory public education, and again, temporary workers have a right to this education for their children if their children are present.
	So far I have been arguing that temporary workers should have access to the same social programs as citizens and permanent residents. Are there any exceptions to this principle?
	In practice, the programs from which temporary workers are most likely to be excluded and the ones where the normative justification of the exclusion seems to me most plausible are programs that are financed by some general tax and that have as their primary goal the transfer of resources from better off members of the community to worse off ones. I have in mind things like income support programs (often called welfare in the United States) and perhaps other programs aimed at poorer members of society such as social housing. I am not suggesting that it would be wrong to include temporary workers in such programs. On the contrary, I think it would be admirable to do so, and some states do, especially with regard to social housing. I am simply suggesting that it is morally permissible to exclude temporary workers from programs that have redistribution as their primary goal. If such programs are not based directly on a contributory principle, excluding recent arrivals from them does not violate the principle of reciprocity. Since the goal of the programs is to support needy members of the community and since the claim to full membership is something that is only gradually acquired, exclusion of recent arrivals does not seem unjust (although it may be ungenerous). Of course, these programs are funded out of general tax revenues and temporary workers also pay taxes, but their claim to participate in a program based on redistributive taxation – taking from better off members of the community to benefit the less well off – is not as powerful as their claim to participate in a program whose benefits are directly tied to one’s own contributions. Of course, the claims of temporary workers to a right to participate in redistributive programs grows over time, but, as we have seen, so does their claim to permanent, full membership.
	Even if one accepts my argument about the permissibility of excluding temporary workers from redistributive programs, the overall picture remains unchanged. For the most part, temporary workers should receive most of the economic and social rights that citizens and residents enjoy. This claim creates something of a paradox. States normally want to create temporary migrant worker programs because they see such programs as economically advantageous. As the costs of the temporary workers rise, the economic advantages of bringing them in decline. The workers themselves would often settle for less, much less, than I have argued is required as a matter of justice. So, if states respect the requirements of justice but otherwise act in their own interests, they will sometimes not create temporary worker programs, even though they would create such programs if they did not have to provide such an extensive bundle of rights to the temporary workers and the foreign workers who would be admitted under such more restrictive programs would much prefer to have admission with a more limited bundle of rights than no admission at all.
	We can soften this paradox somewhat if we consider the parallels between this situation and the one created for employers by domestic economic and social policies. Within the state potential employers have no obligation to offer anyone a job, but if they do offer someone a job, they must provide that person with a minimum package of rights and benefits (minimum wage, pension, etc. ). So, there is nothing intrinsically puzzling about the idea that the state has no obligation to admit immigrants in the first place but that it must provide them with certain rights and benefits if it does admit them. I discuss this paradox further in the final section of the paper, but now I turn to a consideration of the justifiability of programs that depart in limited ways from the general picture I have just outlined. 
Restrictive Programs
	So far, I have been discussing temporary worker programs in which the primary restriction placed on participants was the length of time they could stay in the country. What if we add further restrictions to this picture? How does that affect our evaluation? The most common sort of restriction is one that limits the temporary workers to a particular sector of the economy or a particular occupation or even a particular employer. The last sort of restriction is the most severe because it renders temporary workers highly vulnerable to abuses of power by their employers. Normally in a labour market, the possibility of leaving one’s employer and finding another job (often, but not always, one in the same field) limits the power that any given employer can exercise over employees.14 One justification for this restriction in the case of migrants, however, is that temporary workers should be admitted only if they have an actual job offer. Since the employer has to invest a certain amount of resources in arranging for the entry of a particular worker, the argument goes, the employer should be able to count on not losing the prospective employee immediately upon arrival, even or especially to another employer in the same field. There are things to be said for and against this argument, but even if we accept it at face value, it would only justify a limited period during which the migrant could legitimately be tied to a particular employer. With all the usual caveats about philosophical analysis and specific time limits, I would suggest that something like three months would be a maximum, perhaps less, depending on how much the employer actually has to invest in the recruitment process (which can vary from one program to another). Even then, there ought to be an escape clause for abusive behaviour by the employer. 
	What about the common practice of limiting temporary workers to a particular occupation or sector? Here it is worth distinguishing between temporary worker programs for highly skilled workers and ones for unskilled or low skilled workers. The former (which are becoming more and more common in rich countries) involve the recruitment of highly trained professionals (e.g., computer programmers, engineers, doctors, even academics). Highly skilled people have little incentive to look for work outside their field of expertise. So, there is not much point in restricting them to a given field. In addition, as Ruhs and Martin (2006) observe, there is such competition for these migrants that states have to offer them bundles of rights comparable to the ones enjoyed by citizens and residents in order to have much hope of inducing them to come.
	The real issue is with temporary worker programs for the unskilled. In my view, restricting migrant workers to a particular sector or occupation is always morally problematic. The usual justification for temporary worker programs for unskilled migrants is that employers cannot find enough workers within the domestic labour market because citizens and permanent residents are unwilling to do the work that potential employers want them to do at the wages that the employers are offering. In a market economy, however, the normal response to labour shortages is to allow supply and demand to adjust to one another. As the wage offered for a given sort of work rises, more workers will be willing to undertake it and fewer employers will find it worth their while to hire. In that sense, shortages should always be temporary, a matter of normal market adjustment, especially for unskilled jobs which, by definition, do not require long periods of training before a person can do the work. 
	People sometimes say that in affluent states with strong welfare provisions, citizens and residents will simply not take up jobs that are dirty, dangerous, demeaning, and demanding. That is misleading, however. There are no jobs for which workers cannot be found if the pay is high enough, even in rich states. What is really meant is that citizens and residents will not take up such jobs for the minimum wage or for a relatively low rate of pay, especially when the state ensures that they will not starve or be homeless if they decline the work. But this is a perfectly normal function of a regulated market in a democratic society. The point of many social welfare provisions is precisely to create background conditions that shift the relative bargaining power of workers and employers. Even in conventional economic analysis, it is perfectly appropriate for workers to take into account the non-pecuniary costs and benefits of a job in deciding whether or not to take it. Other things being equal, jobs that are unpleasant in one way or another should pay more than jobs that are pleasant. So, when people speak of a persistent shortage of unskilled labour, what they really mean is that some employers would like to have unskilled work done at a price that is below the market price for unskilled labour (or for a particular kind of unskilled labour) in a given state (accepting social welfare provisions simply as background conditions affecting labour supply, rather than seeing them as intrusions into the working of the market). 
	The whole point of a temporary workers program that restricts people to a given sector or occupation is to find workers who will do the job at below the market rate, (i.e., the price that would be required to attract people from the domestic workforce into this sort of activity), because the conditions under which these temporary workers are admitted leave them with no effective alternative within the receiving state to taking these jobs at the pay that is offered. So, one might say that the state’s use of restrictions on the economic activities a temporary worker can undertake involves a deliberate element of exploitation or a deliberate element of unfairness, because it forces foreign temporary  workers to perform tasks for wages that are lower than they could command if they were free to compete on the entire labour market.15 
	Let me illustrate these abstract points with a concrete example: the Canadian Live-in Caregivers program.  Canada has an extensive immigration program under which people who meet certain standards (age, education, work experience, knowledge of French or English) are able to come to Canada, gain permanent residence upon arrival, and have immediate access to virtually the entire domestic labour market.16 In addition, however, it has a special program under which about 1500 to 2000 foreigners per year who do not qualify under the normal requirements (or are far back in the queue) can come to Canada if they agree to work for 2 years as domestic caregivers. Those working under this program are overwhelmingly female and come primarily from the Philippines. They usually work as  nannies, caring for children, but sometimes they provide help to the elderly or the sick. They are required to live in the homes of the people for whom they work. As currently constructed, the program requires the foreign workers to have a job offer before they are admitted and to continue to work as live-in caregivers for two years after admission. They have the right to change employers after arrival, but they must continue to work as live-in caregivers. During this period, they do not have the right of family reunification. They are protected by most of the normal labour legislation regarding minimum wages, overtime, holidays, vacations, and other working conditions, with regulations limiting what they can be charged for room and board and what they must be provided in terms of living space and amenities. At the end of the two years, they are entitled to transfer their status to that of a normal permanent resident with rights of access to the general labour market and rights of family reunification.
	The living-in requirement is the crucial element of the program. There is no “shortage” of nannies and other domestic caregivers who live in their own homes and come to work on a daily basis. Domestic caregivers who live in their own homes do receive higher gross wages than those who live in, but, of course, they have to pay for their own room and board. The net cost to the employer does not seem significantly different between having a live-in caregiver and one who lives out, if the cost of providing room and board is taken into account (although it does affect cash flow, and people tend to discount the cost of providing a room if they already have a house with sufficient space, seeing that as a fixed cost). 
	The program exists primarily because middle class and upper middle class families want live-in caregivers, either because they see this as a less expensive way of getting child care than hiring someone who lives out (discounting the costs of room and board for the reasons just mentioned) or because they want the advantages that come from having the caregiver in the house (e.g., in terms of flexibility of coverage) but do not want to pay the very high premiums required to get people from the domestic labour force to live in the homes of the people for whom they work. The premiums are needed because there is a general reluctance on the part of those engaged in domestic caregiving to “live-in.” The reluctance is understandable, given modern social norms regarding personal independence and given the ways in which living in one’s employer’s home opens the door to various forms of abuse.
	No one can really pretend that this program is essential to the economy. If it were abolished tomorrow, supply and demand would adjust. Some families who hire people under this program would spend more money and hire live-in caregivers from the domestic labour force. Others would settle for caregivers who come in on a daily basis or would make other arrangements. The program exists primarily because it serves the interests of a politically influential group for whom this issue matters greatly. Still its defenders say that it serves the interests both of the Canadians who hire people under it and of the workers who enter Canada.
	The program illustrates perfectly the exploitative or unfair element in restrictive conditions that I identified above. Relatively few of those admitted under the program continue to work as live-in caregivers after the required two years are up, although many continue to work as domestic caregivers. (This illustrates, by the way, that the reluctance to live-in is not just a product of North American or European culture.) Once they have other options, they make other choices. They live-in, at those wages, only because that is the only labour market option in Canada open to them.
	Does that mean that Canada should abolish the program? I must say that I feel conflicted about my answer to this question. On the one hand, I do not think the program meets the standards of justice. On the other hand, its restrictions are limited and it provides an opportunity for a couple of thousand disadvantaged people a year to gain entry to Canada who would otherwise have no chance of admittance. In that sense, its defenders are right that it serves the interests of the workers who are employed within it.
	Over the years various Canadian NGOs have become involved with this program and through public criticism and political mobilisation they have introduced a number of reforms that have improved the lives of the women working in the program. For example, they have managed to shorten the time in the program from three years to two; they have eliminated prior requirements that those in the program take courses and save money before gaining permanent residence; they have improved the financial terms of the program for the workers; they have strengthened the protections against abuse by employers and made it easier to change employers.
	Now, however, there seem to be few further feasible reforms. The problems that emerge now are almost always tied to the fact that these workers live in the homes of their employers and that this condition renders them vulnerable in various ways (e.g., overwork, lack of autonomy, sexual assault). But the living-in requirement is clearly the one non-negotiable element of the program since it is the fundamental rationale. Some of those in the NGO community would prefer to see the program abolished, while others prefer to keep it for the reasons I mentioned above. They are divided among themselves on this issue for the same reasons that I find myself ambivalent about it. Is it worth sacrificing a bit of what justice requires for the sake of the improved well-being of those suffering the injustice?
	I see no point in trying to resolve that ambivalence in this paper. If I can draw a general lesson from the case, however, it is this: Any departures from the norm of equal treatment for temporary workers beyond those discussed above are morally problematic. Significant departures should not be permitted.
Seasonal workers
	I had planned to include a discussion of seasonal agricultural workers who raise slightly different problems because they are only part-time residents and because the physical and temporal conditions of their work make the idea of family reunification in the state where they work less feasible and attractive. I’m happy to talk about this issue in the seminar.
Foreign Students
	I had also planned to have a discussion of foreign students here, noting the similarities and differences between foreign students and temporary workers. Again, I’d be happy to talk about this issue in the seminar.
Democratic Justice for Whom?
	So far, I have been arguing that temporary workers are entitled to most of the rights of membership, apart from the right to stay on permanently, and that they acquire that right, too, if they are present long enough. Programs that limit the rights of temporary workers beyond this,  such as Canada’s live-in caregiver program, build in an element of exploitation that is morally problematic although such programs may be tolerable if their departures from the norm of equal treatment are very limited. Now let me consider a fundamental challenge to this whole way of thinking about temporary workers.
	Some would argue that insisting on such an extensive package of rights for temporary foreign workers will lead to many fewer being legally admitted than would be the case if their rights were more circumscribed. There is a fundamental tradeoff  between rights and numbers. (Ruhs and Martin 2006) The larger the package of rights that we establish as due to temporary workers, the more costly bringing these workers in will be to employers and to the state, and so, the weaker will be the incentives to recruit and admit them. The net effect of insisting on granting temporary workers most of the same rights as citizens and residents is that many potential temporary workers will never be able to gain legal admission at all. Many will be stuck at home, facing conditions of work that are far worse in every respect than those they would face in a rich country even if their rights were much more restricted than the rights of members. They may well be producing goods that we ourselves will consume, and thus they will still be working for us, just indirectly. Many others will enter the rich countries without authorization and without any effective protections at all. If we insist on standards of pay and working conditions for visiting Mexican agricultural workers in the US that make American agricultural products much less competitive than Mexican ones, for example, we will simply condemn these Mexican workers either to labour in Mexican fields or to cross the border without authorization and work without effective legal protections in the US. Either way, they will be worse off than they would be under an American temporary worker program that gave them limited but real rights. 
	This raises a question about the underlying moral rationale of the whole approach I have taken in this paper. Perhaps this high-sounding talk about democratic justice simply masks our complicity with global structures that perpetrate elsewhere forms of oppression that we say we will not permit in our society and conceals the reality of unofficial but extremely exploitative practices in our own territory. Does this way of thinking about temporary workers articulate a self-indulgent form of morality, one more concerned with abstract principles than with the agency and well-being of the migrants themselves? 
	The normative critique that I have just sketched has been most fully developed in a paper by Daniel Bell and Nicola Piper (2005) that defends the policies towards foreign domestic workers adopted by Hong Kong and Singapore and compare them favourably with the policies of states in Europe and North America. Bell and Piper point out that Hong Kong has 150,000 foreign domestic workers and Singapore 140,000 in contrast to the few thousand admitted each year under Canada’s live-in caregiver program. The workers in Hong Kong and Singapore are almost all women and come mainly from the Philippines, though increasingly from Indonesia and other countries of Southeast and South Asia. They have no opportunity to gain a right of permanent residence, much less citizenship, no matter how long they stay, and Bell and Piper say that it is not unusual to find workers who have been present for fifteen years or more. In Hong Kong, workers must exit the territory within two weeks if they leave their employers and do not find another job, and in Singapore they have to return home if they quit or are fired. They are not allowed to bring their families to live with them. In Singapore, they are prohibited from marrying or cohabiting with a Singaporean citizen or resident and are expelled if they do so or if they become pregnant. Workers in Hong Kong have better legal protections than those in Singapore, but even in Hong Kong, the protections appear to be much more limited than the normal protections extended to Hong Kong workers who are residents.17 The normal working hours for foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong are 18 hours a day, 6 days a week. They are worse in Singapore. In short, foreign domestic workers in both places face very difficult working conditions.
	Bell and Piper defend the policies, despite the conditions faced by the workers. Indeed, while there are significant differences between Hong Kong and Singapore in their treatment of domestic workers, Bell and Piper do not emphasize these differences in their evaluative analysis or argue that Hong Kong’s policies meet standards of justice while Singapore’s do not. Instead, they focus on the contrast between the East Asian approach to migrant workers and the approach in Western states. They see a deep conflict between liberal democratic demands for equal treatment of migrants and citizens and the actual needs and interests of migrant workers. Although they do not explicitly say this, it would be reasonable to infer from the logic of their analysis that it would be morally preferable, and is perhaps even morally required, for Western states to leave aside their worries about abstract principles and to move in the East Asian direction. 
	As I read them, Bell andPiper offer three broad and interrelated arguments for their view: (1) consent; (2) consequences; (3) inevitability. In this paper I only have time to discuss the first of these: consent.
Consent
	Take consent first. Bell and Piper argue that we should give great moral weight to the fact that the workers agree to come to work in Hong Kong and Singapore, knowing the conditions that they will be facing. No one forces them to leave their home countries. They are not trafficked. They judge that working in Hong Kong and even Singapore under the terms they have been offered will make them and their families better off than staying home. If we were to abolish programs like the ones in Hong Kong and Singapore on the grounds that they violated democratic norms about equal rights, we would be denying migrants the chance to make these sorts of choices. Or, to put it in a way that Bell and Piper do not, in not establishing such programs, Western states deny migrants the opportunity to make these choices. Why should we deny them migrants the opportunity to exercise their own agency in this way?
	This is an important challenge. To address it, we must reflect upon the reasons we have for limiting the choices that citizens and residents in democratic states may make with respect to work and then we must consider which of those reasons, if any, would warrant limiting the choices of migrant workers with respect to the conditions under which they would be willing to enter and work. In considering these reasons for restricting choice, I will follow the constraint I adopted at the outset regarding the ways in which different democratic states regulate working conditions. In collective legislation about health, safety, minimum wages, and so on, states limit the choices that individual workers may make about their conditions of work. As I noted before, some people are in favour doing away with most of these constraints and others would like to impose more of them, but I want to leave the merits of these general debates to one side in order to focus on the distinctions between temporary workers and citizens/residents. That is, I am not seeking to articulate an ideal of how much or how little democratic states should constrain the choices of individual workers. My goal is rather to explore the rationale behind actually existing restrictions and to see whether the same sort of rationale applies to actual and potential migrant workers.
	Broadly speaking, I can think of five related and overlapping reasons why democratic states restrict workers’ choices though regulations and legislation: to solve collective action problems, to promote workers’ well-being from a parentalistic perspective, to protect inalienable rights, to prevent coercion, to compensate for externalities. The relevance of these reasons to migrant workers’ choices varies somewhat, but there is one crucial difference that applies to all, namely that the migrant workers themselves normally have little say in establishing the legislation and its limits. In a democratic state in which most workers are citizens, workers’ organizations frequently press for regulatory legislation that they see as in the collective interest of workers, taken as a whole. Temporary foreign workers are not citizens and are not even on a road to citizenship. So, they cannot vote and are unlikely to exercise effective political power. Thus whatever legislation is passed that affects them may not have their well-being in view. Nevertheless, we can still ask whether the reasons that lead those concerned with the interests of workers who are citizens would be comparably powerful for anyone who was concerned with the interests of migrants.
	Collective action It is a familiar point that much of the legislation regarding minimum wages and working conditions is designed to solve collective action problems for the least skilled workers. The rationale is that the outcome for such workers taken as a group will be better if certain minimum thresholds are mandated than if workers are free to take whatever wage is offered, no matter how low. Often these provisions benefit some unskilled workers by raising their wages or improving their conditions of work but harm others who are not able to find jobs because the cost of employing them is raised by the legislation. Nobody denies that this sort of legislation can raise the cost of production, but people disagree about the costs and benefits in particular circumstances. Some economists think that all such legislation is counterproductive, while others argue that properly designed programs generate benefits that greatly outweigh the costs, especially if those bearing the costs (as job opportunities that do not materialize) are compensated by other means (e.g., income support programs, job training). In any event, every democratic state has some sort of legislation regulating minimum wages and working conditions, and I am simply taking existing practice as a given here. 
	The collective action rationale for such legislation applies to unskilled temporary migrant workers as well. The legislation will improve their wages beyond what they would be if the migrants were free to accept whatever wages and working conditions they were offered no matter how bad. There is one important difference, however. Foreign migrants who have not yet entered a state’s labour force will not be eligible for any programs designed to compensate for the job opportunities that fail to appear as a result of having such regulations in place. 
	If foreign migrants are competing for jobs with domestic workers, the same minimum standards will have to apply to foreign workers or the standards will be completely ineffective for  domestic ones. If foreign migrants are working in a highly segmented sector, however, as is often the case, this consideration is less decisive. If we take the migrant workers in a given segmented sector as a group, the costs and benefits to them of such regulations will depend upon the relative sensitivity of demand to changes in these standards. Under some circumstances, the group as a whole would clearly gain much more income than would be lost from the potential job opportunities that did not materialize. (In other circumstances, the costs of the lost job opportunities would be larger than the benefits to the ones who found work and thus would make the group as a whole worse off than they would be with lower standards.) So, just as in the domestic case, the rationale of solving collective action problems can justify minimum standards legislation. The absence of compensatory programs for the migrants who do not find jobs that they would get in an unregulated system suggests, however, that taking the well-being of the group as a whole (and including potential workers in the group) would lead to setting the minimum standards at a lower level for migrants than for domestic workers, in the absence of other considerations.
	Parentalism A second reason for limiting workers’ choices is parentalism, the desire to protect people from the consequences of their own short-sighted or unwise choices. Laws requiring people to wear seat belts are a familiar form of parentalism in contemporary social life, and in the workplace much health and safety legislation can be seen as having an element of parentalism. In other words, such legislation is designed to prevent workers both from yielding to personal impulse in ignoring health and safety considerations at work and also to prevent them from bargaining away health and safety constraints in return for higher wages, on the grounds that such bargains, even if voluntarily undertaken, are short-sighted and unwise. (Remember that I am not debating the fundamental merits of this sort of rationale, just identifying it and seeing if it applies to migrant workers in the same way.) Again, this sort of parentalistic rationale clearly applies to migrant workers who may be as inclined as domestic workers to yield to impulse and to make unwise tradeoffs between financial compensation on the one hand and health and safety concerns on the other. One could perhaps argue that the objective differences between the life circumstances of people coming from and returning to poor countries and those living in rich countries would justify a greater willingness to trade health and safety concerns for cash, even from a parentalistic perspective. On the other hand, people from rich countries may be too ready to discount the health and safety of people from poor countries and more ready to do so than the poor people themselves.
	Human dignity A third reason for limiting individual choices of workers within democratic states is that we may have conceptions of human dignity that preclude some sorts of individual choices such as selling one’s organs. The classic example of this with respect to work is the choice to give up one’s power to make choices, by selling oneself into slavery or indentured servitude, even when such a choice might be fully informed and beneficial to the individual making it, given her conception of her own interests. A very poor person, even though a citizen, might think that she could benefit herself and/or her family by selling herself into some sort of servitude. Every democratic state prohibits such a choice, however. It is sadly far from fanciful to think that some migrant workers would be willing to undertake this sort of bargain. The reasons for prohibiting it are just as strong for migrants as for citizens, however. 
	Bell and Piper argue that the conditions faced by migrant workers in Hong Kong and Singapore are not (normally) equivalent to indentured servitude, since the workers are free to leave and go home at any time. (They do not say what happens if a worker wants to leave but cannot afford the fare home.) . I would argue, however, that Singapore’s rule expelling migrant workers who become pregnant or who marry Singaporean nationals violates a fundamental aspect of human dignity. For the same reason, not practicing one’s religion could not be made a condition of work although their article indicates that some Singaporean practices verge on this. In such cases, the fact that individuals might be willing to submit to these conditions in order to get or keep a job is not a sufficient justification for imposing the conditions. In any event, to the extent that the goal of some legislation or regulation in a democratic state is to protect fundamental human dignity, it must apply just as much to temporary migrants as to citizens. This is one rationale with respect to which the differences between migrants and citizens should play no role and individual choice should be given no countervailing weight.
	Ignorance and Duress Bell and Piper’s argument asks us to respect the moral agency of migrants by allowing them to choose whether or not to participate in temporary worker programs. Sometimes we deny that people are really exercising their moral agency if we think that they are choosing under conditions of ignorance or duress. We will not enforce contracts to work unless certain background conditions are satisfied that enable us to conclude that the people who signed the contract had a reasonable idea of what they were agreeing to and that they were not subjected to coercion. (You may yield your wallet to the robber who says, “Your money or your life,” but most would not see this choice as an exercise in moral agency.) In other words, we may restrict choices when we have reasons to doubt the genuineness of the consent that lies behind the choice.
	Do the circumstances within which domestic foreign workers decide to come to Hong Kong and Singapore undermine the claim that their choices should be seen (and respected) as an exercise of their moral agency? Bell and Piper argue that domestic workers from the Philippines are relatively well informed about the conditions of work they are facing, though they concede that this is less true of workers from Indonesia and other countries. The more difficult question is whether the terrible poverty they face in their home countries disqualifies their decision to leave in order to become domestic workers in Hong Kong or Singapore as an exercise of moral agency. To put it another way, should democratic states refuse to create such opportunities for foreign domestic workers in their own societies on the grounds that the people who would come are not really in a position to make free choices? 
	On this issue, I am more in sympathy with Bell and Piper’s view. There is something perverse about refusing to offer the opportunity for domestic work to foreign migrants on the grounds that their constrained circumstances do not leave them free to choose, if we then do nothing to improve those constrained circumstances. There may be other reasons why democratic states should refuse to establish such programs – and I think there are – but it is not plausible to argue that we are doing so because we want to respect the freedom and moral agency of those excluded, and it would be insulting and incorrect to claim that people in these circumstances are incapable of moral agency.
	Externalities A fifth reason to restrict choices is that choices sometimes have negative effects on others (to which they have not consented). It is a familiar principle of economic theory that market prices allocate resources efficiently only if the prices include all of the positive and negative value of the good or resource that is being exchanged. We sometimes limit the rights of people to do what they want in economic activities when those activities harm others. Pollution is a familiar example.
	Domestic worker programs like those in Hong Kong and Singapore have externalities. The individual choices of the workers who come (and of the employers who hire them) may be well informed and (mutually) advantageous in relation to their situations prior to any such contract. But such contracts require us to institutionalise a legally differentiated and subordinate status for the workers who come. That affects not only the worker (who may well accept this subordinate status as a preferable alternative to poverty with full legal status at home) but also the wider society. To institutionalise these sorts of formal differences among people living and working in a democratic state would be to undermine its democratic character – and all the more so, the more widespread the practice. As Michael Walzer argued many years ago, contemporary understandings of democracy are incompatible with the idea of the state as a family with live-in servants. (Walzer 1983) Of course, Hong Kong and Singapore are not democracies, so this part of the argument does not apply to them unless they aspire to become democracies (or unless we argue that they should do so). But it does apply to the states of Europe and North America.
	This five part analysis of reasons for restricting choice shows that the first three of the rationales for restricting the choices of citizens and residents (collective action, parentalism, human dignity) apply also to foreign domestic workers. So, to be consistent in their own policies, democratic states are obliged to regulate the working conditions of temporary migrants in the same ways that they regulate the working conditions of citizens and residents, if perhaps not always quite as extensively, and to do this out of a concern for the interests of the migrants themselves. But the final point shows that the interests of the migrants are not the only, and perhaps not the most important, reason why democratic states should not adopt foreign domestic worker programs like those in Hong Kong and Singapore and should regulate the working conditions of the migrants in the same ways as the working conditions of other citizens and residents for the most part. It is not only that the failure to do so would be bad for them. It is also that it would be bad for us.

References
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Bell, Daniel and Nicola Piper (2005) “Justice for Migrant Workers? The Case of Foreign Domestic Workers in Hong Kong and Singapore” in Will Kymlicka and H. Baogang, eds. Multiculturalism in Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

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Rubio-Marin, Ruth (2000) Immigration as a Democratic Challenge: Citizenship and Inclusion in Germany and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

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