Globalization with Human Faces: Managed Mutual Recognition and the Free Movement of Professionals

While short-term capital flows and foreign direct investment have never moved across borders so freely, neither has the international movement of people been so ‘managed’. This is one of the apparent paradoxes at the heart of today’s pattern of globalization. In an era of much-proclaimed liberalism, rules at the national level governing conditions for the granting of visas, work or residence permits, and ultimately permanent residence and naturalization, constitute perhaps the strongest remaining expression of state power. These rules are hardly subject to any international oversight, or even coordination, save in the restricted realm of asylum, where the national norms relating to the movement of people become subject to international human-rights norms. The paradox, of course, is only apparent. The weight of forces driving the liberalization of capital movement dwarfs those driving the free movement of people. More fundamentally, policies addressing migration, bound up as they are with the ‘who is “us”’, the definition of political as well as economic boundaries, and, ultimately, the flexibility or lack thereof of group identities, escape the sole constraint of economic rationality.