Introduction

The transnational labor market is characterized by the illegality and temporariness that is assigned by states to mobile and would-be mobile human providers of labor. The globalized transnational economy demands and stimulates the movement of labor from one domestic economy to another. However, individual nation-states’ immigration laws that seek to barricade domestic markets from the entry of transborder labor suppliers and the near silence of multilateral trade law create obstacles to such movement. The disjuncture and disequilibrium between international trade law and domestic immigration law foster illegal movement across borders and result in the vulnerability of human would-be mobile labor providers to trafficking and other forms of exploitation.

The failure of states to liberalize labor as part of the multilateral trade liberalization project stands in stark contradiction to the liberalization of other fundamental economic inputs, thus undermining the vision for a globalized world. The contemporary model of globalization is facilitated and, in large part, stimulated by multilateral trade liberalization. The trade liberalization begun at Bretton Woods—enhanced by successive rounds of negotiations, and to which much of the world is now committed—is focused on lowering barriers to the movement of goods, capital, services, and ideas. That liberalization of the movement of inputs and products, according to trade theorists and supporters of free trade, stimulates efficient, competitive, and productive economic activity that will, ultimately, accrue to the benefit of all participants. However, the liberalization of labor (and the consequent movement of human beings) is a neglected and often feared aspect of multilateral and regional trade liberalization policies and agreements. Individual human labor providers seeking to exchange their labor for value confront state barriers to their movement.

Domestic social contracts, to the extent that they exist, are subject to the pressures of transnational economic forces that have altered, fundamentally, the existing contracts between, for example, labor and capital. Concepts of distributive justice require democratization of access to the benefits of trade liberalization. To the extent that individual nation-states’ domestic laws demand that labor be rendered immobile or that mobile human labor providers be punished for transgressing the laws created to ensure their immobility, labor is denied full access to the benefits of trade liberalization.