UC San Diego Guestworker Talk, Feb. 8

RESEARCH SEMINAR SERIES
Winter Quarter 2006

LIVE-IN DOMESTICS, SEASONAL WORKERS, FOREIGN STUDENTS AND OTHERS HARD TO LOCATE ON THE MAP OF DEMOCRACY

Wednesday, February 8, 3:00-5:00 p.m.
Meridian Room, University of California, San Diego
Eleanor Roosevelt College dining complex

Abstract

Legal guestworker programs are under consideration in both North America and Europe, while unauthorized migration continues to grow.  The fact that most guestworkers in the 1950s and 1960s in Europe were eventually granted extensive civil and social rights, including rights of residence, is often cited as proof that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary worker.  Yet, even now, states in Europe and North America admit foreign students and seasonal workers under highly restrictive conditions and require most of them to go home.  Moreover, Daniel Bell has recently claimed that the policies of Hong Kong and Singapore, where hundreds of thousands of foreign domestic workers live under highly restrictive conditions and with no hope of permanent residence, are at least morally permissible and perhaps morally superior to the policies of states in Europe and North American that legally admit few such workers.  Carens’s presentation rejects Bell’s view and explores the ways in which the internal logic of liberal democracy precludes the admission of long-term foreign residents excluded from the rights of citizenship, while permitting some forms of restricted temporary residence.

About the Presenter

Joseph H. Carens received his Ph.D. from Yale University and taught at North Carolina State University, Lake Forest College, and Princeton University before going to the University of Toronto in 1985.  He is the author of Culture, Citizenship, and Community (Oxford University Press, 2000), which won the 2002 C.B. Macpherson prize of the Canadian Political Science Association for the best book published in political theory in the previous two years.  He has also written or edited three other books and over fifty journal articles or book chapters.  He is currently writing a book on immigration, democracy, and citizenship.

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