Mobilizing Migrant Workers’ Rights in “Non-immigration” Countries: The Politics of Resonance and Migrants’ Rights Activism in Israel and Singapore

Recent comparative studies on migrant workers' rights1 shed light on how national fields of power shape and are shaped by legal mobilizations (Bloemraad 2006; Bloemraad and Provine 2013; Kawar 2011a, 2012). Bridging the comparative migration studies' interest in national settings and sociolegal mobilization perspectives, this scholarship underscores the complex dynamics of rights making when activists engage in settings with varying institutional configurations and cultural repertoires. Despite its interest in legal pluralism, much of the cross-national scholarship still focuses on the mobilization of migrants' rights in the cultural contexts of North America and Western Europe, where liberal understandings of citizenship and institutional legacies of previous labor migrations prevail. Moreover, despite the recognition that legal mobilization might take place in a variety of sites, the comparative literature tends to privilege the analysis of the politics of rights of legal elites and institutions rather than the politics of rights where they take place (Kawar and Massoud 2012).However, the globalization of labor migration and the expansion of rights-based discourses mean that the mobilization of migrants' rights takes place in a variety of national contexts with less established institutional legacies for the advocacy for migrants, and where strong ethnic and racial definitions of the nation compromise the notion of migrants' rights. In this article, we present a comparative ethnography of the making of migrant workers' rights by NGOs in Israel and Singapore. Paying particular attention to the institutional relations and cultural constructions that inform the mobilization of rights "from below," we seek to expand the typological scope of comparative scholarship to include two countries that are explicitly committed to selecting migrants "by origin" (Joppke 2007) and preventing the settlement of nonethnics, but differ from each other in their political regimes.Looking at similarities and differences in how NGOs mobilize rights for migrants in the context of self-defined "nonimmigration ethnic regimes," we ask three sets of questions. First, what types of institutional relations, daily routines and strategic compromises inform the NGOs' legal claims and practices? Second, what are the ethical frames and cultural practices that Israeli and Singaporean NGOs draw upon throughout the mobilization of migrant workers' rights? Third, in what ways do overt differences in political regimes impact the mobilization of rights and the ability of activists to challenge official policies?Based on our fieldwork, we advance two related arguments. First, we maintain that differences in political regime influence the channels through which NGOs can advance their claims about migrants' rights but not the cultural strategies underlying their mobilization or the power relations between activists and state actors. We show that NGOs in both countries use a politics of resonance to deal with the tensions between restrictive ethnic policies and the expansion of labor migration. Paradoxically, success in advancing rights for migrants through resonance often results in reinforcing the non-immigration regime.Second, we argue that while restraints in authoritarian Singapore operate mainly outside the activists' circle, in the Israeli ethno-democracy they operate mainly from within through the activists' strategic choices that favor achieving public consensus and the outsourcing of politically edgy claims and positions. Thus, although activists in Israel have greater political space for waging public struggles over core issues of non-immigration policies, they utilize a set of self-disciplining processes that neutralize their potential challenge of hegemonic understandings of citizenship.The Mobilization of Migrants' Rights in Cross-National Analysis section of the article offers a theoretical overview of sociolegal research on rights mobilization and comparative cross-national analyses in the field of migration. …