Numbers versus Rights in Low-Skilled Labour Immigration Policy? A Comment on Cummins and Rodriguez (2010)

My paper for this special issue (Ruhs, 2010), which builds on analysis in a previous paper with Phil Martin (Ruhs and Martin, 2008), suggests the hypothesis of a trade-off (i.e. an inverse relationship) between the number and some of the socio-economic rights of low-skilled migrant workers admitted to high-income countries. Ruhs (2010) discusses the economic factors and mechanisms that may give rise to such a trade-off and presents several brief case studies that, I argue, provide some illustrative empirical support for the existence of a trade-off. As I make clear in the conclusion, there is 'clearly a need for more systematic empirical research that includes a larger number of countries and that investigates alternative explanations of the relationship between the number and rights of low-skilled migrant workers admitted to high-income countries' (Ruhs, 2010, p. 276) The paper by Cummins and Rodriguez (C&R, 2010) aims to provide this systematic empirical analysis. C&R conclude that their statistical tests 'do not on the whole support the existence of a numbers versus rights trade-off in immigration policy' (2010, p. 283). The authors emphasize that the measurement of migrant rights and immigration policies is still at a nascent stage and that future assessments and better data 'could, in turn, lead us to re-evaluate the conclusions presented in this paper' (p. 298). I consider the analysis by C&R unconvincing as a systematic empirical test of the numbers versus rights hypothesis for two reasons, namely: their conceptualization and measurement of the number of migrant workers in the context of this debate, and the indices used to measure the rights of migrant workers. I conclude with an outline of the systematic empirical analysis needed to advance the debate.