Martin Ruhs’ The Price of Rights: Achievements and Next Steps for Migration Scholars David McKenzie, The World Bank Most of the time when I read an academic book, my feeling is that it would be much better suited as a 30-page academic article. Martin Ruhs’ The Price of Rights is a rare exception to my general rule. This is a carefully researched and compelling book, bringing together a good mix of historical background, new empirical work, theoretical insight, and case study evidence to examine this important topic. In my commentary I wish to focus on what I see as some of the key achievements of the book, and then what I see as the main avenues for future work in migration studies that can build on the work here. The idea that there is potentially a trade-off between the rights given to migrants and opportunity for them to migrate in the first place is, of course, not a new one. However, it has been difficult to examine empirically, with debate in the literature over whether such a trade-off exists in practice (e.g. Ruhs and Martin, 2008; Cummins and Rodriguez, 2010; Ruhs, 2010). Ruhs’ book makes several contributions towards better assessing whether such a trade-off exists. A first contribution is setting out clearly just what is encompassed by the term “migrant rights”, and in particular, how broad the set of rights are that are included in the ninety-three articles of the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (CMW). This includes not only very basic rights such as the rights to be free of forced labor and to not have identity documents confiscated, but a wide ranging set of rights to equal treatment with nationals of the country they are migrating to in terms of access to public benefits, to the courts, and to terms of employment (including wages). Ruhs shows that many countries have been reluctant to sign such a treaty, resulting in much lower ratification rates than any other major human rights treaty. The result is that migrant rights are not unidimensional, with different types of rights having different implications for host societies and for the development benefits of international migration. Different rights are likely to involve different trade-offs, with these trade-offs also depending on the skill mix of migrant workers. For example, granting migrants the same access to public unemployment benefits as native workers is a benefit for migrant workers, but can be a fiscal drain if it attracts migrants who withdraw more from the system than they contribute. The result is likely to be political pressure for fewer migrants, or at least fewer low-skilled migrants. Giving migrant workers the rights to the same wages as native workers earn can boost the salaries of those who get to migrate, and reduce concerns about competition with native workers, but also reduce employer demand for migrants and hence give fewer individuals the opportunity to migrate. In contrast, allowing migrant workers to keep their identity documents and leave the country without their employer’s permission is likely to better protect the welfare of the migrant, while involving relatively little in the way of costs for most employers or host societies. A second major contribution of the book is original work that attempts to comprehensively measure migrant rights embedded in 104 labor immigration programs in 46 countries, using the rules of these programs in 2009. Ruhs considers 23 different rights, mapped from the CMW, and aggregates them into indices of civil and political rights, economic rights, social rights, residency rights, and rights to family

reunion. This represents a major improvement in both comprehensiveness and of coverage compared to existing indices used in the literature. Moreover, since he also assesses the targeted skill levels of different migration programs, he is able to examine how the rights offered vary with the skill level of the program as well as with host country characteristics. Using this new data, Chapter 4 offers rich description of the associations present in this data, providing empirical support for a number of ideas and theories. We see that there is large variation in the extent to which different rights are restricted by immigration programs – most programs restrict the social rights of migrants (e.g. access to the welfare state), whereas economic rights are much less restricted. Temporary workers receive less rights on average than workers admitted under permanent migration programs; labor immigration programs in the Gulf countries and Southeast Asia place significantly more restrictions on migrant rights than programs in Europe and North America; and programs targeting higher-skilled migrants offer more rights, especially in terms of residence and family reunification rights. He then shows that there is no significant association between openness and aggregate migrant rights in the full sample of programs, but that associations emerge between particular types of rights and openness to migration when looking at programs in upper high-income countries targeting certain skill levels. This empirical analysis is complemented by detailed case study discussion of the decision processes and politics behind a number of migration programs to understand how these trade-offs operate in practice. For example, Ruhs discusses the case of Sweden, which allowed the A-8 E.U. accession countries free access to the Swedish labor market, but required that workers be paid the same as Swedish workers and have the rights to all other collectively bargained benefits. The result was strong rights, but low levels of labor immigration as migrant workers were just as expensive as Swedish ones. So where to from here? I see two key and interrelated areas for migration scholars to build on the impressive work started in the book. The first is further work to improve the measurement of migrant rights. This should follow the approach of this book in disaggregating rights beyond an overall index to carefully capture different types of rights. I see three dimensions for improvement here: 1) extending the approach to cover more countries, including more of the developing world; 2) collecting time series data to enable study of how provision of migrant rights has changed in different places over time; and 3), thinking more about how to capture both de jure and de facto rights: much of the discussion of migrant abuse concerns rights not being enforced, rather than their absence on paper. The second, and larger, challenge for migration researchers is to move beyond descriptive associations to understanding the causal impacts of different migrant rights. The word “endogeneity” does not appear in the book at all, but Ruhs makes clear that immigration policy often jointly determines the number of migrants, the selection of who these migrants are, and the rights offered to these migrants. This joint determination makes assessing causal impacts difficult. Two complementary approaches may be pursued. At a more aggregate level, time series panel data on migrant rights will at least allow researchers to see whether changes in migrant rights are associated with changes in the number of individuals migrating or their skill mix. This needs to be complemented by rigorous microeconomic studies that look at the impact of particular reforms in rights relative to well-defined counterfactuals. Two recent examples that attempt to do this are McKenzie et al. (2014), who look at the impact of the Philippines implementing the right to a higher minimum wage for its domestic workers and find that this

law change resulted in higher wages for Filipina domestic workers, but also a large drop in the number who were able to migrate; and Naidu et al. (2014) who examine a reform in the United Arab Emirates which gave migrants the right to move from one employer to another at the end of their contract without requiring permission from their first employer, finding that this increased wages and employment for incumbent migrants, but led to firms hiring fewer new migrants. Further such work is needed to help better understand the extent to which changes in other types of migrant rights have causal impacts on migrant numbers and the migrant skill mix. References Cummins, Matthew and Francisco Rodriguez (2010) “Is there a numbers versus rights trade-off in immigration policy? What the data say”, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 11(2): 281-303. McKenzie, David, Caroline Theoharides, and Dean Yang (2014) “Distortions in the International Migrant Labor Market: Evidence from Filipino Migration and Wage Responses to Destination Country Economic Shocks”, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 6(2): 49-75 Naidu, Suresh, Yaw Nyarko and Shing-Yi Wang (2014) “Worker Mobility in a Global Labor Market: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates”, Mimeo. Wharton. Ruhs, Martin (2010) “Numbers vs Rights in Low-Skilled Labour Immigration Policy? A Comment on Cummins and Rodriquez”, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 11(2): 305-9. Ruhs, Martin and Philip Martin (2008) “Numbers vs Rights: Trade-offs and Guest Worker Programs”, International Migration Review 42(1): 249-65.