When is Migration Voluntary?

1
Valeria Ottonelli
Universit

a di Genova

Tiziana Torresi
University of Adelaide

In this paper we critically evaluate the role that the notion of volun-
tariness plays in the normative theory of migration. We argue that the
notion is currently underdefined and works to undermine migrants’
claims to see their migratory projects properly recognized. We argue
that it is nevertheless important to be able to define when migration
can be said to be voluntary if we are to theorize appropriate norma-
tive and policy responses to migrants’ claims. We propose therefore a
series of sufficient and necessary conditions to the definition of volun-
tary migration. We use the case of temporary migration to illustrate
our argument.

INTRODUCTION

The notion of voluntariness is central to the study of migration, being

implicitly or explicitly assumed by the definition of what counts as
“forced” migration, a contested, but important category in both the nor-
mative and empirical literature in the field.2 Roughly, the same distinction
between forced and voluntary migration also has significant weight in
public discussions of migration, as we see, for example, in debates about
the relative weight of the claims of “proper” refugees on the one hand,
who alone are assumed to have moved non-voluntarily, and economic

1
We would like to thank Enrico Biale, Paul Bou-Habib, Elisabetta Galeotti, Serena Olsaretti,
Christian Schemmel, Chiara Testino, as well as three anonymous referees for their insightful
written comments on earlier versions of this paper. We also benefitted from comments and
discussions with Ian Carter, Emanuela Ceva, Elijah Millgram, and Pamela Pansardi.
2
The relevance of such notion is evident also when the distinction between voluntary and
“forced migration” becomes blurred or is challenged by the multiplicity of the causes and
institutional factors at play, like in recent discussions on “environmental refugees” (on this,
see Castles, 2002 and Hugo, 1996).

© 2013 by the Center for Migration Studies of New York. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/imre.12048

IMR Volume 47 Number 4 (Winter 2013):783–813 783

784 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

migrants on the other. Political theorists have also often employed the
notion of voluntariness in discussing the phenomenon of migration and,
specifically, as contributing to defining what duties states may have toward
migrants, and, correspondingly, the extent of migrants’ justified claims
against receiving and sending states.
In this paper, we argue that the way the notion of voluntariness
operates in the normative theory of migration is problematic at two lev-
els. First, the notion of voluntariness is often under-defined, especially
when one considers the significant normative work it is meant to per-
form. Second, the use of the notion of voluntariness is often vitiated
and burdened by the normative conclusions that it is put to serve.
Those who want to downplay the duties toward migrants tend to pic-
ture voluntary migration as matter of mere preference, which, as such,
does not deserve any special concern by institutions. On the opposite
side, those who want to press the case for migrants’ rights tend to clas-
sify all current migration as forced or non-voluntary and therefore call-
ing for remedial measures. Thus, the normative stakes involved in the
debate on migration tend to bend the notion of voluntariness toward
directions it would never take in more familiar cases, with the ironical
upshot that in these exchanges, centered on voluntariness as they are, no
conceptual room seems to be left where migration can even be con-
ceived as what normally counts as a central and genuine instance of
agency, that is, a voluntary choice that concerns, nevertheless, important
goals in people’s lives.
We argue that it is important to redefine and rethink the notion
of voluntariness to create such conceptual space and to recognize
migrants’ agency in choosing migration as part of their life plans. In
this paper, we will not attempt to build a full-blown normative theory
of what is due to migrants in response to the recognition of their
agency and of the worthiness of their life projects. In fact, although we
will insist that any liberal theory of migration needs to take into
account migrants’ agency as a main dimension of the normative assess-
ment of migration policies, this does not imply in any way that volun-
tariness should be made to do all the normative work in establishing
which policies are appropriate. One of our tasks, indeed, will be pre-
cisely to unburden the notion of voluntariness from the normative load
that it is often made to carry, to devise a definition that is more in line
with the standards that we usually apply in the ordinary life of our
political institutions.
 WHEN IS M IGRATION V OLUNTARY? 785

Our argument proceeds as follows. In the section “The Notion of

Voluntariness in the Normative Theory of Migration,” we offer a paradig-
matic example of the ambiguous and problematic role played by voluntar-
iness in the normative theory of migration. In the section “Voluntariness
and Agency,” we argue that, nevertheless, assessing when migration can be
said to be voluntary is an essential element of a liberal theory of migra-
tion. In the section “On Methodology,” we propose a number of method-
ological points that arise when defining voluntariness and, in light of
them, we suggest in the section “What Counts as Voluntary Migration?”
a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for defining a given migratory
choice as voluntary. In the section “Voluntariness and Temporary Migra-
tion,” as an illustration of our argument, we use the framework set out in
the first parts of the paper to analyze the role the notion of voluntariness
plays in the discussion of a specific type of migratory experience: tempo-
rary migration. The last section concludes the paper.

THE NOTION OF VOLUNTARINESS IN THE NORMATIVE

THEORY OF MIGRATION

In the current normative debate on migration, voluntariness plays a role

at two distinct levels: first, in contributing to define who, if anybody, may
be entitled to come and join a given polity; second, in relation to the
question of what the rights and obligations of migrants should be once
they have joined the political community, which, as we will see, may be
considered to be different depending on whether a migrant has chosen to
come or not.
However, despite the important normative work it is often meant
to perform, the notion of voluntariness is under-defined in the normative
literature on migration and the range of its meanings is surprisingly
wide. Such notion, indeed, tends to work at two extremes of a spectrum,
both of which raise significant difficulties. First, some political theorists
are happy to define as voluntary any choice to migrate that is not obvi-
ously coerced and as long as migrants are choosing from a condition of
“sufficiency” – that is, situations where their basic rights, variously
understood, are protected. However, we argue, this definition is too thin
and simplistic for the uses it is put to and tends, as a result, to make
the category of non-voluntary choices under-inclusive. On the opposite
side of the spectrum, other political theorists tend to see migration
almost always as non-voluntary because undertaken under non-ideal
786 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

conditions determined by global injustices. However, this requirement of

full justice now seems too demanding a condition to define voluntariness
and tends to make the category of non-voluntary choices over-inclusive.
Moreover, the precise reasons explaining why and to what extent volun-
tariness should be thought to have a weight in defining migrants’ entitle-
ments are poorly addressed. Theorists of migration often move directly
from their definition of voluntariness to suggesting a series of normative
consequences of voluntary migration without an explicit argument link-
ing the two. This is striking, especially when compared with sophisti-
cated discussions of the normative significance of voluntary choices in
other areas of political theorizing.3
This sense of unease with the use of the notion of voluntariness in
current normative debates on migration gets all the more intense once
one realizes that such notion, as currently employed by some political the-
orists, works to characterize migratory experiences as two distinct types: In
the first case, migration is considered as non-voluntary and therefore
responding to needs equally or even better addressed by other “solutions,”
for example, global redistributive measures or humanitarian intervention.
Otherwise, migration is considered voluntary, but this very fact works to
undermine migrants’ claims, especially to admission, reducing migration
to a mere preference with no, or minimal, duty-generating capacity.4 This
is puzzling in at least two respects. First, that these should be the norma-
tive consequences of voluntary and non-voluntary migration is assumed to
follow by the notion of voluntariness and is not independently argued for
on normative grounds. Moreover, note how neither of these two cases
seem to leave any room for recognizing migrants’ claims qua migrants,
that is, as agents engaged in a migration project. This dichotomy leaves,
therefore, no space where migration may be recognized as a voluntary
choice within an overall plan of life and also worthy of being taken into
account, in devising policy responses, precisely on these grounds. But this
third normative possibility, that is, that migrants’ choices may have to be
taken into account even if, and maybe precisely because, they are volun-
tary, is squeezed out of the scope of discussion not because this follows

3
Think, for example, of the literature on voluntariness and consent in fields like medical
ethics, sexual rights and sexual offenses, market transactions, or political obligation.
4
Once admitted, migrants are thought to be entitled to many rights, but this is because of
their being effectively members of the community; however, also in defining what is due
to migrants once admitted voluntariness is significant, as we show in this paper.
 WHEN IS M IGRATION V OLUNTARY? 787

necessarily from the notion of voluntariness itself, but rather because of

the normative consequences that are assumed to follow from voluntariness
as used in the current normative theory.
The role played by voluntariness in the actual work of a prominent
political theorist may help illustrate what we mean. Will Kymlicka, in his
theory of multicultural citizenship, argues for a right of individuals to
their culture, which he considers as fundamental for their autonomy. This
first right then entails a whole set of multicultural rights articulated in an
ideal of differentiated citizenship. However, the rights that migrants are
entitled to are very different from those that national minorities may
claim. One of the reasons for this is precisely that national minorities have
usually been forcibly incorporated within the political community and
migrants have not; choosing to migrate therefore means forfeiting some
rights (Kymlicka, 1995:96).5
Kymlicka is of course aware that there are some difficulties in defin-
ing voluntary migration. He first discusses the case of refugees and recog-
nizes that, as they have not, by definition, given up their culture
voluntarily, denying them access to their culture – that is, refusing to give
them the same rights granted to national minorities, is an injustice; this
injustice, however, is perpetrated by the government of their country of
origin, and therefore, receiving countries have no duty to redress this
injustice by providing refugees with the means to recreate their societal
culture.
The discussion becomes more interesting, for present purposes, when
Kymlicka notes how drawing the line between non-voluntary refugees and
voluntary migrants is in its turn difficult, especially when one considers
the extent of global inequalities and of human rights violations in the
world today. When an Ethiopian peasant, Kymlicka notes, moves to the
U.S., even if she is not a refugee in the strictest, Convention sense, she
may be migrating as a means of ensuring a minimally decent life, and
therefore, her choice is “voluntary in a very limited sense” (Kymlicka,
1995:99). Thus, the non-voluntariness of the choice, or its limited volun-
tariness – together with the fact, Kymlicka argues, that Western liberal

5
This does not mean that migrants have no right to express their culture – Kymlicka is clear
on this point – but the rights are different from those of national minorities because of the
fact of voluntariness. For a thorough, critical discussion of the idea that by voluntarily choos-
ing to migrate, one can give up cultural rights see Baub€ock, 1996. See also, for objections to
Kymlicka’s use of voluntariness, Kukathas (1997), Choudhry (2002) and Quong (2006).
788 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

democracies are partially responsible for the plight of poor migrants –

may lead us to believe that needy migrants ought to have the same rights
as national minorities. This is not, however, the conclusion that Kymlicka
reaches. He argues instead – after having proposed that his argument
maybe ought to apply only to “ideal theory” – that “[A]s with the case of
refugees, it is not clear that treating economic refugees to a new country
as a national minority provides an appropriate way to redress injustices
that must ultimately be solved in the original homeland” (Kymlicka,
1995:100).6
Kymlicka’s arguments exhibit the shortcomings of the current uses
of the notion of voluntariness in analyzing the claims of migrants that
we have highlighted above. First, the notion of voluntariness is under-
defined. At times, the conditions for voluntariness seem to refer to a
minimally decent life, as for refugees and migrants from poorer coun-
tries, but references elsewhere to equality of resources and “ideal theory”
seem instead to refer to more demanding conditions, closer to full-
blown demands of global distributive justice. Second, Kymlicka’s argu-
ment presents precisely the kind of dichotomous structure we discussed
above: Either migration is non-voluntary and therefore admits of solu-
tions other than rights for migrants qua migrants, or migration is volun-
tary and, by that very characteristic, entails the forfeiting of certain
rights. But it is not clear why, just on the basis of voluntariness, there
should not be space for a third possibility, that is, recognizing migrants’
claims qua migrants.

VOLUNTARINESS AND AGENCY

The obvious reaction to the difficulties we have highlighted could be to

abandon altogether the idea that voluntariness is normatively significant in
theories of migration and focus instead on other criteria to define what is
owed to migrants, regardless of whether they come voluntarily or not. In
relation to claims to admittance, for example, we might refer simply to
comparative conditions of need, or, more in general, refer to standards of

6
Kymlicka has not substantially altered his argument in his more recent work. See, for example,
Kymlicka (2001:55). We would also like to note here that we do not necessarily disagree with
Kymlicka’s conclusions about the appropriateness of differential treatment of migrants and
national minorities; we just take issue with the use of voluntariness to reach those conclusions.
 WHEN IS M IGRATION V OLUNTARY? 789

global distributive justice, or standards relative to non-exploitative condi-

tions of immigration.7 We believe, however, that this would be a hasty
conclusion; assessing the voluntary nature of migration is important for
two principal reasons.
First, the focus on voluntariness is important because it looks at
migration from the point of view of the migrants themselves and takes
them into account as agents, rather than passive recipients of benefits or
of distributions of resources and opportunities. The recognition of human
agency is a crucial element of liberal justice, which lies at the heart of lib-
eral rights and institutions8 and of the equal concern and respect that they
give to people. Recognizing people’s agency means seeing people as mak-
ers of their own life and treating them accordingly, not only in the sense
that they should be given room for choosing their own ends and life
plans, but also that they should be allowed to pursue their happiness by
their own wits and through their personal struggle and endeavor. The
whole scheme of basic freedoms and normative powers that are granted to
the citizens of liberal states, among other things, is meant to protect and

7
David Miller, for example, argues that individuals do not possess a right to free move-
ment across borders if they have, in their home country, an “adequate range of options to
choose from.” Given this adequate range – which is to be understood in terms of generic
basic human needs – the absence of other, specific options in the home country, even if
they are central to an individual’s life plan, does not give rise to a right to migrate. These
options, above the threshold of the “adequate range,” are more like an interest in “having
an Aston Martin” (Miller, 2008a:208). Miller frames his discussion in terms of needs and
interests of migrants, without explicitly addressing what role, if any, the voluntariness of
the migratory experience may play in his argument and therefore also failing to adequately
address migrants’ agency. Elsewhere, Miller (2008b) further suggests that in assessing what
is due to migrants, we should adopt a quasi-contractual point of view, by looking at the
fairness of the conditions imposed on migrants, rather than at whether they actually con-
sented to them. However, interestingly for our discussion, elsewhere Miller suggests that
the reason why we are entitled to disregard migrants’ needs above the threshold of basic
needs does have to do with responsibility for choices freely made. In his theory of global
justice, Miller argues that while all human beings are entitled to a basic minimum as a
matter of justice, they also should be considered responsible for the outcome of choices
they have freely made. When this wider framework is considered, duties to migrants in
Miller’s work are defined according to a similar dichotomous structure as the one we have
been discussing.
8
This is not to say that it plays a foundational role in all liberal theories. Individual agency,
for example, may play an instrumental role in bringing about preference satisfaction. Still,
the central importance of individual agency is among the defining traits of liberal theories
of justice.
790 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

enhance the area of their agency and their power to steer the course of
their lives.
The notion of voluntariness is important, in this respect, because it
plays a fundamental role in the recognition of people’s agency: It is volun-
tary choices that need to be respected and taken into consideration by lib-
eral institutions; otherwise, we might end up honoring as instances of self-
determination and agency choices made by people who are simply pushed
or forced to act by overpowering circumstances, or, worse, by threats and
coercion by other agents.9 Identifying criteria for voluntariness is necessary
to insure that people are actually choosers of their own fate.
Establishing standards of voluntariness is important also in the case
of migrants, and failing to do so, or disregarding the issue of when migra-
tion can be said to be voluntary, implies that migrants should not be
taken into account by liberal institutions as purposeful agents, but only as
passive recipients of policies that do not factor in their agency. It should
be noted that the same happens also when the standards of voluntariness
applied to their case are so demanding that by the same standards any-
body’s actions and choices would count as non-voluntary. In this case, all
choices of migrants, unlike those of other people, are unjustly discounted
as by-products of circumstances that should not even be there in the first
place.
Second, and relatedly, failing to consider whether migrants’ choices
are voluntary or non-voluntary may lead to inadequate institutional
responses. This obviously holds in the most patent cases of forced migra-
tion, for example, when people are abducted or escape from their coun-
try of origin because they are being persecuted or otherwise in danger.
In these cases, the institutional responses should take into account the
fact that the people affected never intended migration as part of their life
plan, and their permanence in a foreign country is considered by
migrants themselves only remedial and as far as possible temporary. Of
course, also someone who is forced to move to a foreign country can
eventually develop a desire to settle permanently. However, in devising
9
Given our interest in the recognition of migrants’ agency, it might be asked why we do
not simply insist that all migration, banned extreme cases of physical coercion, is volun-
tary. Otherwise, are we not denying the agency of those who are compelled to migrate?
Our reply to this concern is that, although it is true that agency is possible and needs to
be recognized even in circumstances in which people are acting under coercion or duress,
this is not the notion of agency and voluntariness that is relevant for assessing when people
are choosing freely and voluntarily the course of their life.
 WHEN IS M IGRATION V OLUNTARY? 791

the institutional setting and policy responses to migration, there should

be room for programs addressed to those who are displaced against their
will and who therefore may have a legitimate desire to eventually go
back to their home country. Conversely, if some migrants choose migra-
tion, either permanent or temporary, as an integral part of their life
plan, and this is a voluntary choice, it would be wrong and myopic, at
the policy level, to discount the significance of this kind of decisions and
treat the permanence of all migrants in the host country as purely reme-
dial, or the simple result of conditions that should be properly addressed
otherwise. Even when there are reasons to reject migrants’ claims to
admittance and residence, this cannot be on the grounds that in the end
this is not really what they want because their choice to migrate is not
voluntary. This might lead to suboptimal policy choices and to devising
programs that could be unsatisfactory, or completely inadequate, in view
of the needs and plans of the receiving countries, the sending countries,
and the migrants themselves.
In this respect, it is important to specify again that establishing in
which cases – if ever – migrants voluntarily choose to migrate does not
settle the issue of what is due to them or what the most adequate immi-
gration policies should be. To answer these questions, it is necessary to
explicitly argue for a specific understanding of which consequences and
costs can be legitimately imposed on people as a result of their voluntary
choices. There is no obvious answer to this question, and the issue has
given rise to considerable debate, as is exemplified by the flourishing liter-
ature around precisely such a theory of the normative consequences of
voluntary choice, luck egalitarianism (Cohen, 1989; Wolff, 1998; Ander-
son, 1999; Arneson, 2006; Dworkin, 2003; Olsaretti 2009).
Moreover, in devising optimal and just migration policies other
principles and facts, besides voluntariness, may also need to be considered.
For example, as far as the right to admittance is concerned, reasons of
national self-determination or the protection of the internal job market
may play in favor of a restrictive admission policy. Moreover, depending
on the normative framework adopted – notably, whether it bends more or
less toward cosmopolitanism – the recognition of the voluntary life
choices of migrants as a normatively significant fact can be given more or
less weight and be anyway weighted differently than in the case of citi-
zens.
Still, the fact that the agency of migrants and the voluntary nature
of their choices – together with arguments about the costs and
792 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

consequences that should follow from them – need to be balanced against

other considerations is not a reason for overlooking their importance;
quite to the contrary, we cannot have a clear picture of the normative
issues at stake unless we take this dimension into account. No matter
what the other principles at play may be, clarifying when migration can
be said to be voluntary, and when non-voluntary, should be a fundamen-
tal task for a liberal theory of migration.

ON METHODOLOGY

How should voluntary migration be defined, then, if we want to give due

recognition to migrants’ agency? In the next section, we will propose four
conditions that define when migration is voluntary. Our discussion will
be based on three main methodological assumptions, which are in line
with our previous discussion of the role of agency in a liberal theory of
migration.
First of all, we will propose political standards for ascertaining the vol-
untariness of a choice to migrate. Of course, there are deep and familiar cri-
tiques to the idea that human action can ever be “voluntary,” for in fact,
whenever human beings act, their actions can be, at least potentially, always
explained by factors external to the person’s agency. But there are good rea-
sons to leave aside these deeper concerns. We in fact do make judgments of
voluntariness every day in our legal and political reasoning, without relying
on metaphysical standards or theories of free will. Political standards are
needed to assess the constrained or voluntary nature of choice for the pur-
poses of policy-making and normative evaluations of political institutions.
Their political – rather than metaphysical – character implies that they must
establish public methods of inquiry and rely on empirical assumptions
about common patterns of behavior, rather than on psychological introspec-
tion or soul searching targeted at specific individuals.10 Also, they are meant
to be employed not to pass judgment on single decisions or choices, but to
devise policies and legal arrangements that can be assumed to respond to
general patterns of behavior, as, for example, it is the case, in a liberal
regime, with the regulations of banking and trade, or family law. These do
not require ad hoc decisions by administrative or judicial bodies, barring a
minority of cases in which a legal dispute arises; rather, they set up institu-
tions, procedures, and legal devices that make it possible to carry out those

10
For a discussion of this requirement, see Dworkin (2010:248ff).
 WHEN IS M IGRATION V OLUNTARY? 793

plans of action, within these general fields, which are deemed in general to
be voluntarily undertaken.11
The second methodological point is precisely that we should indeed
apply our “usual” standards in judging the voluntariness of actions in the
political realm to the choice to migrate and thus avoid applying double
standards when judging respectively of the voluntariness of the choices of
our fellow citizens and those of migrants. The list of criteria for voluntary
migration that will be presented in the next section should then be seen
as the application to this specific field of more general criteria that are
usually employed in other spheres of human action. In this respect, there
is nothing specific in migration that sets it apart from other kinds of
choices people can make.
As we explained, in fact, all too often theorists apply impossibly
demanding standards to the choices of migrants, defining as non-
voluntary choices taken in circumstances – for example, conditions of
background injustice – that would not be deemed as invalidating volun-
tariness in other contexts. This demandingness might be inspired by a
well-meant desire to strengthen the urgency of migrants’ claims, by broad-
ening the category of what counts as a forced or needed move. However,
as we have seen, this strategy fails to account for the claims of migrants
qua migrants, and it suggests that they should be best addressed by
removing the causes that lead them to migrate. Moreover, it tends to con-
fine the notion of voluntary migration to those choices that are left open
to people once they have received all that is due to them under ideal con-
ditions of justice; such choices, therefore, come to be identified with mere
whimsical preferences. There is no reason, however, why in the case of
migrants we should work within this dichotomy, by which migrants’
choice to migrate is either non-voluntary and therefore worthy of consid-
eration but best addressed other than by granting migrants admission into
other states, or voluntary and therefore not so normatively relevant. What
gets completely overlooked, in this picture, is a third and common cate-
gory of choices, that is, those choices that are voluntary but nevertheless
concern important and meaningful goals and goods.

11
The political character of these standards also means that they will need to work by con-
sidering choices either as voluntary or as non-voluntary, although from a metaphysical
point of view or for explanatory purposes it might be more useful or sensible to talk of
degrees of voluntariness (see, e.g., Richmond, 1994:61; Van Hear, 1998:42).
794 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

In the domestic realm, there are plenty of examples of this kind of

choices. Think for instance of some women’s decision to get on a part-
time schedule or to quit their job to take care of their children, with
the purpose of returning to a full-time job after a few years. This can
be a voluntary choice – despite being made under conditions that fall
short of full justice – prompted by the desire to take care of one’s chil-
dren while they are very young. But being voluntarily undertaken does
not mean it is a mere whimsical preference, nor would we feel com-
pelled to describe it as non-voluntary if we wished to argue in favor of
its accommodation.12
The first implication of our veto on double standards to the
migrants’ choices and those of our fellow citizens, then, is that we
should devise and use, in the case of migrants, a conceptual map that,
at least in principle, makes room for voluntary choices that nevertheless
are neither frivolous nor whimsical, but concern important and worth-
while ends. Our veto on double standards requires that if this conceptual
and normative room exists for the choices of our fellow citizens, it must
exist for migrants too. It might be objected that in this respect an
important asymmetry exists between the case of migrants and that of cit-
izens, because what is at stake with migrants is exactly their right to
have their claims recognized as normatively relevant, while this is not
the case with citizens. But the argument offered here is not meant to
establish that migrants’ claims must be recognized unconditionally or on
the same footing as those of citizens. Rather, it is meant to make clear
that if they are to be given lesser weight than those of citizens, or no
weight at all, this cannot be because we are adopting a skewed notion
of voluntariness, which applies only to them. We believe this to be
problematic and want to propose here a definition of voluntariness that
is independent of, and prior to, the definition of the normative weight
of migrants’ claims.13
The veto on double standards should also apply to the very criteria
by which we assess the voluntariness of people’s choices. In a liberal

12
We do not mean to claim here that the analogy between temporary migration and
maternity is a perfect one; they are clearly different issues where different factors have an
impact in deciding the appropriate policy outcome. We use the analogy to underline how
the consequences of a voluntary choices are not defined by voluntariness alone.
13
Which is not to say that voluntariness has no normative weight, but rather that a defini-
tion of voluntariness should not be burdened by assumed normative consequences.
 WHEN IS M IGRATION V OLUNTARY? 795

polity, the basic assumptions regulating states’ intervention in relation to

people’s (legitimate) actions and choices ought to be that usually people
are themselves the best judges of their own situation and motivations; the
basic assumption in a liberal polity must be one of non-paternalism.14
There is, however, a danger that we may evaluate differently people’s life
circumstances and therefore also question the voluntariness of their
choices, when the people themselves, their situation, and background are
unfamiliar to us. This is precisely, we argue, what sometimes happens in
judging the choice to migrate, but this is also an unjustifiable and
discriminatory double standard (Galeotti, 2007).15
This does not mean, and this is our third point, that the voluntari-
ness of the choice to migrate should be judged according to exactly the
same parameters that we apply to the choices made within life plans that
do not involve such choices. Rather, attention should be given to the
specificity of migration as a life project, with distinctive characteristics and
rationales. More specifically, we should not assume that all that counts, in
assessing the nature and purpose of the choice to migrate, is the weight
and importance of the ends it serves, as defined by the migrants’ final
achievements in terms of wealth, social success, or quality of life. This
might make us mistakenly believe that the only point of migrating is to
fulfill needs or rights that could not be secured at home. On the contrary,
the distinctive value and point of some migration choices might lie, in the
eyes of migrants themselves, in the fact that they achieve these goals by
taking their fate in their own hands, rather than by accepting their lot
(however tolerable, or even agreeable) as given. In other words, the very
choice to migrate and the kind of life plan that comprises such a choice
can be valued by the migrants themselves as an exercise of their agency,
and if we look at migration only from the end-state perspective of what
migrants lack or have at home, we overlook what might be the point of
migration in many instances and therefore a central fact for assessing
when migration is voluntary or non-voluntary.

14
This is not to say that paternalistic policies are never enacted by liberal governments,
but these refer normally to cases aimed at reducing collective costs – for example cam-
paigns against smoking – or for cases involving extreme individual harm – for example the
prohibition to consent to assault.
15
Galeotti (2007) applies her insightful analysis of double standards to discussions on
autonomy, but the same considerations can be extended to the treatment of voluntariness.
796 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

WHAT COUNTS AS VOLUNTARY MIGRATION?

What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for migration to be vol-
untary? We list here four of them. Before considering these conditions in
detail, it might be useful to recall what their nature and purpose is in the
context of our discussion.
First of all, most of these conditions will sound quite obvious and
familiar. This is a consequence of our compliance with the methodological
veto on double standards; these conditions are simply extrapolated from our
assessments about what makes a choice non-voluntary in usual domestic
contexts. Second, it should be clear that the purpose of listing these condi-
tions is not to provide fixed and ready-made criteria for policy-making. The
immediate relevance of this list is theoretical: It is meant to dispel the ambi-
guities of the current use of the notion by specifying the conditions under
which migration can be said to be voluntary. As we will see, on the definition
offered here, it will appear that some migration plans are voluntary. This is
a preliminary and necessary step to treating them as true expressions of
migrants’ agency, rather than mere symptoms of injustices or problems that
would be best removed in other ways than by allowing migration.

Non-coercion

The first, obvious, condition that must be met for migration to be volun-
tary is that it must not be caused by physical or psychological coercion. A
good definition of what counts as coercion in this context is contained in
the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons
adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2000. Here, trafficking is
defined as “recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of
persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion,
of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a posi-
tion of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits
to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for
the purpose of exploitation.” Although the language of the Protocol is lia-
ble to interpretations and qualifications (Fredette, 2009), the list of activi-
ties encompassed is quite clear and is broad enough to comprise not only
the use of physical violence, but also the use of threats, intimidations, or
deception (Logan, Walker and Hunt, 2009). No matter what the condi-
tions in the receiving countries will be, migration occurring under these
circumstances cannot be considered voluntary.
 WHEN IS M IGRATION V OLUNTARY? 797

It is important to stress that international trafficking must be distin-

guished from the smuggling of people across borders, defined as “the pro-
curement, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other
material benefit, of the illegal entry of a person into a state party of
which the person is not a national” (Protocol against the Smuggling of
Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, art. 3). This distinction has been chal-
lenged on the ground that it serves to criminalize migrants, where in fact
people who are smuggled are often subject to forms of abuse and coer-
cion identical to those involved in trafficking (Gallagher, 2002; Musto,
2009). Still, there is an important truth behind this distinction; the mere
fact that people resort to dangerous or afflictive means to migrate, such
as when they hand themselves to smugglers, does not imply that their
choice to move to a foreign country is not voluntary, as in the case of
trafficking; it only counts as evidence that the migrants involved had lim-
ited choice about the means by which they could carry out their migra-
tion plans. A familiar example may help clarify what we mean here.
Prior to the legalization of abortion in Western liberal democracies, many
women resorted to the services of procurers of illegal abortions, with
often fatal consequences. This did not lead us however to consider their
choice to terminate the pregnancy as necessarily non-voluntary, although,
of course, there were cases of coercion and undue pressure both familial
and social, or economic. Often, in fact, these were fully voluntary – if
painful – decisions.
In line with the rationale of the UN Protocol on trafficking, it is
reasonable to assume that the non-coercion requirement also applies to
cases in which migration is caused by coercion by the members of the
migrant’s family or community, through social pressure, threats, or
forms of psychological control (Skeldon, 2000/1). But we should be
careful in applying this standard. The mere fact that the primary benefi-
ciaries of many migration projects are not the migrants themselves (but,
very often, their children, their spouses, their siblings, their families, or
their community) should not count as evidence that the decision to
migrate is coerced, not even when the migrants themselves describe their
choices as a “sacrifice.” The rationale of this strict and careful interpreta-
tion of the non-coercion requirement comes from the veto on double
standards we are assuming as a guideline for this inquiry. We usually do
not take people’s willingness to sacrifice part of their well-being for the
sake of their loved ones as evidence of the non-voluntary character of
their choices.
798 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

Sufficiency

A second condition that needs to be met for migration to be voluntary is

relative to the structure and quality of the opportunities and options
enjoyed by the migrant at the time the decision to migrate is made.
Drawing on an important strand in the philosophical discussion on volun-
tariness in market transactions (Cohen, 1988; Olsaretti, 1998), we pro-
pose to state this condition as follows: A migration project is voluntarily
undertaken only if the available alternatives at home are good enough for
the migrant. In the literature on migration, as we saw, this condition is
sometimes presented as the requirement that the migrant comes from a
position of “sufficiency” (Mayer, 2005). The idea here is intuitive enough.
People whose only alternatives to migration involve starvation, destitution,
bodily injury, or incapacitating poverty cannot be said to migrate volun-
tarily.16 On the other hand, if the choice to migrate is made from a posi-
tion in which the living conditions and opportunities are good enough,
there might still be substantial advantages in the choice to migrate, which
make it very attractive, but such choice is not compelled. The mere fact
that the chosen option is better than the alternatives cannot be counted as
evidence that the choice is non-voluntary. It is worth noting that our cri-
terion of sufficiency defines voluntary migration on the basis of the overall
scheme of a migrant’s choices and opportunities, and therefore, it pre-
scinds from discussions on which particular causes of migration are rele-
vant to the specification of voluntariness, as otherwise the case in much of
the literature, for example on climate refugees and asylum seekers (Castles,
2002; Hugo 1996; Hugo 2011; Price 2006).
The sufficiency condition needs to be clearly distinguished from
the requirement that the structure of the alternatives in which the
migration choice is made must conform to full justice, that is, to a
world that fully complies with the tenets of political justice at the

16
In principle, this statement is not completely accurate. The rationale of the sufficiency
requirement is to disqualify as non-voluntary those choices that are caused by the lack of
acceptable alternatives (Olsaretti, 1998:71–2). Accordingly, a choice that is made because
the chosen option is very much liked, even when no acceptable alternatives are available,
should count as voluntary. However, we are not considering this important qualification
here, because, in this context, it is unworkable as a public and verifiable criterion for vol-
untariness. This presumption of non-voluntariness whenever there are no acceptable alter-
natives holds in many familiar cases and is therefore in line with our veto on double
standards.
 WHEN IS M IGRATION V OLUNTARY? 799

domestic and international level.17 If the corresponding ideal theory is

demanding enough, for example, by mandating the equalization of indi-
vidual opportunities for welfare at the global level (Caney, 2001), the
full justice requirement would make non-voluntary all the migration
choices made under present conditions;18 on the contrary, under the suf-
ficiency requirement, we may recognize many actual migration move-
ments as voluntarily chosen.
Why should we assess the voluntariness of migration through the
sufficiency requirement, rather than the full justice requirement? Is it not
true that migration is caused by a history of past injustices and economic
and social imbalances that are still affecting the international order? And
if that is the case, how can we define migration as voluntary? The answer
is that – at least within liberal theory – we would never apply such a
standard of voluntariness to the choices of our fellow citizens. Within
our domestic contexts, there are countless examples of choices made
under circumstances of injustice. For instance, we may see the equal dis-
tribution of opportunities (for welfare or resources) among citizens as a
necessary requirement of justice and accordingly believe that all the
choices women make in our societies are made under conditions of less-
than-full justice, or plain injustice; furthermore, the present conditions of
injustice, and the structure of the options currently available to women,
are causally connected with a past of injustices and oppression. But this
does not lead to us classify all women’s choices as non-voluntary; as far
as the structure and quality of the available opportunities is concerned,
we only deem non-voluntary those choices that are made under

17
It is important to point out that clearly distinguishing the conditions for voluntari-
ness from the requirement of full justice in no way detracts from the importance or
urgency of the latter. Keeping them separate, indeed, also serves to avoid the conclu-
sion that whenever people voluntarily choose what they have, the demands of full jus-
tice become less stringent or urgent. It is also important to stress that this discussion
of what makes a choice voluntary must be distinguished from the discussion on what
forms of voluntary choice legitimize the underlying social structure (Peter, 2004; Fried,
2003).
18
This assumption may or may not come with the further assumption that under full jus-
tice conditions, no migration would take place (barring a few cases due to exceptional and
idiosyncratic reasons), because migration is necessarily caused by injustice. Such an assump-
tion is highly implausible, although it is arguably endorsed by Rawls and others. On this,
see Benhabib (2004:85–92).
800 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

conditions in which no acceptable alternatives are open to the subjects

involved.19
The sufficiency condition should also be distinguished from the con-
dition that the life migrants are going to live in the receiving country
must be a “good enough life.” Migrating to a foreign country often
implies worsening one’s living conditions, at least in the short run. Set-
tling in an unknown environment, adjusting to a foreign culture and cus-
toms, saving money to send remittances back home or to accumulate the
capital necessary to further the goals for which the project to migrate was
undertaken may imply accepting worse living conditions than those for-
merly experienced at home. This does not make the choice to migrate any
less voluntary according to the sufficiency condition. Acceptance of the
latter only justifies the judgment that someone is not forced or compelled
to migrate if she has acceptable alternatives.
All this still leaves open the issue of what counts as “sufficiency” in
the context of migration. Here, the main problem is that what we see as a
“good enough” life may vary across different societies and cultures, and
we should allow for some latitude in the interpretation of this standard.
But it might be objected that if what counts as an acceptable option is to
be judged contextually, then it might well happen that the more destitute
migrants are, the more their choice to migrate will count as voluntary. To
avoid these dangers, which would make the notion of sufficiency unreli-
able as a political standard for voluntariness, we submit that we should
rely on a trans-contextual minimal condition for the alternatives to migra-
tion to be “good enough.” Such a condition could be found in the fulfill-
ment of fundamental human needs. These include basic necessities like
food, shelter, and personal safety, but also social dimensions of human
existence, like the enjoyment of sentimental and familial ties, or the shar-
ing of a common culture.20 They are trans-contextual and set objective

19
We are aware that the language of “choice” and voluntariness has often been considered
suspect in some feminist circles. The contention is that it has been used to conceal the real
– societal – constraints imposed on women in their decision-making and to revert the
responsibility of any resulting disadvantage on the supposedly free choice made by individ-
ual women. However, this would be an unfair objection to level at the argument we are
advancing here, which aims precisely at scrutinizing and challenging the use of voluntari-
ness to justify conditions of disadvantage.
20
For an account based on the capability approach, see Widerquist (2010). David Miller
points out that talking of “basic needs,” rather than capabilities, is more appropriate when
we are focusing on minimal conditions for a decent life (Miller, 2008a:180).
 WHEN IS M IGRATION V OLUNTARY? 801

standards; however, they can require different instantiations and realiza-

tions in different cultural contexts.21
The important thing to notice, for present purposes, is that although
what counts as “sufficiency” in a given context is debatable; in many cases,
there is clear evidence that staying at home – the alternative to migration
– does not imply leading an unbearable or unacceptable life. This means
that, although there may still be many controversial cases – where it is
unclear whether the sufficiency standard is met – once we have clearly
separated the sufficiency condition from the full justice condition, we are
able to see that under this standard much current migration is voluntary,
no matter how unjust the present international order is.

Exit Options

The sufficiency requirement does not exhaust the conditions relative to

the structure of the available options. Another important requirement –
often neglected in the literature on this topic – is the availability of exit
options, that is, actual options to change one’s immigrant status. The
rationale for this condition appears evident once we consider our intu-
itions about forms of migration that are often equated to “voluntary slav-
ery,” like the infamous contracts of indentured servitude that replaced
slave labor in America and the Colonies after the abolition of chattel
slavery (Look Lai, 2002).
In these cases, it is possible that the sufficiency requirement is met,
because the fact that a worker accepts coercive and harsh work conditions,
per se, is no conclusive evidence of his or her being compelled to accept
them. Still, what makes a condition voluntary is not just the structure of
the available options at the moment in which the choice to enter that
condition is made, but also the permanence of viable alternatives to
remaining in that condition. Of course, making a choice and committing
to a life plan or a contractual agreement often imposes costs when one
changes one’s mind. But we are coerced into sticking to a plan or contract
if the cost of the exit option is unbearable, as it was for the Coolies who

21
This condition does not amount to saying that for migration to be voluntary, no viola-
tions of rights protecting basic human needs can occur in the country of origin. This
would not be in line with the fundamental assumption of this discussion, which is that
whether migration is voluntary depends on the structure of the options actually available
to the migrants themselves.
802 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

were imprisoned or subject to physical punishment if they refused to carry

out their contractual agreements.22
It is important to notice that the conditions for the existence of a via-
ble exit option may not be the same as those needed for sufficiency at the
moment when the decision to migrate was made, and it should not be
assumed that an exit option is obviously guaranteed by the mere possibility
to return to one’s original country, especially after years of residence abroad.
The economic and social circumstances that were good enough for fulfilling
the sufficiency condition at home may lose their value and use, so that
returning becomes too costly; this typically happens, for example, because
while they are away, migrants have been uprooted from their culture, lost
connection with the sending society, or have lost the capacity to procure for
themselves the means for a decent life once back home. This implies that in
the case of migration, the existence of an “exit option” is to be understood
not as the mere physical possibility to exit the host country. Even when this
is actually available,23 it may still imply unbearable costs for the migrant.

Information

In order for people to choose voluntarily, they must possess adequate

knowledge of what they are choosing. In the case of migration, this condition
is violated not only when migrants are purposely deceived by someone who
is interested in exploiting their lack of knowledge, like in the case of traffick-
ing, but also when they receive distorted accounts from disinterested third
parties. This happens, for example, when returning migrants tell wonders
about their life abroad, to make their families and friends back home believe
that they are leading a successful life, thus deceiving potential immigrants
about what they can expect from immigration (Sayad, 2004; Mahler,
1995:83ff). Another much discussed example is offered by the role played in
the 1990s by Italian television in making the Albanian youth falsely believe
that Italy enjoyed high levels of affluence, thus inducing massive migration
flows to the country (Mai, 2001).
The spreading of information and communication technology is
now making information about destination countries more widely avail-

22
For an insightful discussion of the exit condition in the context of indentured servitude,
see Steinfeld (2009).
23
It can be made impossible, for example, by imprisonment, the theft of the migrant’s
passport or the mere unaffordability of travel expenses.
 WHEN IS M IGRATION V OLUNTARY? 803

able to potential immigrants. Still, more information does not necessarily

mean adequate information. To ground voluntary choices, the informa-
tion must be reliable, actually trusted, comprehensible, relevant, and up to
date (Gonzalez, 2008).
Among the factors distorting the information available to migrants, it
is often argued, there are mechanisms of self-deception to which migrants
are especially exposed (Sayad, 2004; Parre~ nas, 2001). In particular, in the
relevant literature, two typical mechanisms of this sort are reported. First,
especially when migrants’ actual living conditions are miserable, they can
deceive themselves by internalizing the idealized image of their status and
condition in the host country they offer to their families and friends back
home, and, conversely, of their status and condition back in their home
country which they offer to locals in the receiving country (Sayad, 2004).
The internalization of these false images can lead them to distort their assess-
ment of what they are gaining and losing in both places, thus making them
incapable of calculating the benefits and costs of their migratory experience.
A second mechanism of self-deception that may be involved in migra-
tion is the misrepresentation of the actual opportunities for gain and success
in the receiving country. When they relate to an unfamiliar environment –
as they do for the new migrants – even when numbers and facts are avail-
able, they are more difficult to internalize and translate into a subjective
awareness of the actual chances of success. The choice to migrate may thus
be prompted by mechanisms of wishful thinking that would be impossible
to activate at home. When this happens, it may be argued that the choice to
migrate is not voluntary, as it is grounded on self-deception.
However, although in principle we may admit of self-deception as a
condition of non-voluntariness, in applying it to migrants, we should be
careful about avoiding double standards. Although there are cases in
which the overestimation of one’s actual chances of success is dangerously
delusional, in many cases it plays a positive role and it is a familiar feature
of our everyday experience; for example, prospective parents may not
dwell on the information about the risks and odds of pregnancy and par-
enting, because this would undermine their enthusiasm and make it diffi-
cult to make such a momentous decision. In the same way, the decision
to move to a different society may be taken exactly because – thanks to
the mechanisms just described – it serves to mobilize psychological and
emotional resources that would be unavailable if one chose to stay in the
country of origin, where the internalization of the knowledge about low
prospects of success can be paralyzing.
804 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

The same holds for the case in which the migrant projects a false
image of himself both in the host society and at home. Here too, we can
imagine circumstances in which these mechanisms get out of control and
become dangerously delusional. But in many other instances – including
some of the most cited examples in the sociological literature – migrants are
perfectly aware of what is happening and of the deception involved; they
purposely take advantage of the chance to escape the social control by their
peers. Being in a situation in which one can count on a relative social ano-
nymity is among the reasons why migrating may open up more possibilities
of action than those available at home, where self-consciousness and social
control may limit the range of the possible work and life options.

VOLUNTARINESS AND TEMPORARY MIGRATION

To exemplify the kind of difficulties with the way the notion of voluntari-
ness is often currently employed by political theorists, and how this may
lead to poor normative analyses and policy-making, we want to consider
the case of temporary migration.
Voluntariness has been employed in the normative debate surround-
ing “temporary migration programs,” that is, admission policies by which
migrants are bound to return to their country of origin after a fixed time
and are, typically, subject to restrictions on the kind of employment they
can seek in the receiving country (Ruhs and Martin, 2008; Castles, 2006).
It has been argued that in so far as migrants are choosing from a condi-
tion of sufficiency, they are not coerced into migrating, and therefore,
those programs cannot be seen as an undue imposition on them. Indeed,
some argue, it would be a form of paternalism to insist that such pro-
grams should not be made available or that they should be profoundly
reformed granting greater rights to migrants – thereby making them less
attractive to receiving countries.24
From the perspective of the framework on voluntariness we are argu-
ing for here, there are two main points to be made about such arguments.
The first is a more obvious definitional one. It seems in fact, as we have
tried to show in this paper, that merely choosing from a condition of suf-
ficiency, while necessary, is not a sufficient standard for defining voluntari-
ness. The second point is to note that these arguments unduly assume

24
See, for example, Bell (2001) and Chang (2008). For a critical discussion, see also Lenard
and Straehle (2012).
 WHEN IS M IGRATION V OLUNTARY? 805

that once a choice is made voluntarily, then any conditions imposed on

that choice, or any consequence that follows from it, are thereby justified;
as we showed, this assumption is unwarranted in the case of our fellow
citizens, and there is no reason why it should be taken as uncontroversial
in the case of migrants.
Other theorists, worried by the normative consequences drawn from
seeing temporary migration as a voluntary choice, challenge the assump-
tion that choosing from a condition of sufficiency makes temporary
migration voluntary. On the contrary, they take the general conditions of
injustice in our world today as causing temporary migration, and thus,
conversely, they assume that were these background conditions absent,
temporary migration would not take place, if not in some residual idio-
syncratic form – for example, young people wanting to have a work expe-
rience overseas. Moreover, these arguments assume that once people are
forced to migrate, they are ready to accept any conditions, including the
second-class status imposed on temporary migrants. This means effectively
that the condition of temporary migrants is non-voluntary in two ways:
They do not voluntarily choose to migrate, and they do not voluntarily
accept their condition of temporariness. Arguments with this kind of
structure would see the redress of global injustices as the first and preferred
solution to the migrants’ suboptimal situation, but short of this, propose
permanent migration and full inclusion as the only legitimate migration
option.
Our concern with this latter type of argument about the role played
by voluntariness in assessing temporary migration regimes is that it works
to reduce the space within which migrants can voluntarily choose tempo-
rary migration as part of their life plans. Denying that migrants may
choose temporary migration with its specific characteristics and the
options it provides works not only to deny migrants’ agency but also
results in suboptimal political proposals.
Indeed, a careful analysis of the sociological literature on temporary
migration shows that, although in many cases temporary migration actu-
ally is not voluntary, in many other cases it is part of a life plan that is
voluntarily undertaken (Hugo, 2005; Dustmann and Weiss, 2007;
OECD, 2008). An exemplary case, in this respect, is one of the many
women from Eastern European countries who migrate within Europe to
be temporarily employed as domestic workers (Morokvasic, 2004; Black
et al., 2010). For those who come from new EU member states, this is a
clear case in which temporary migration cannot be seen as an option
806 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

chosen because of the lack of alternatives, and notably permanent migra-

tion, as these women, as European citizens, could opt for more permanent
forms of migration if they wanted to.
Therefore, these women’s choice of temporary migration over per-
manent migration does not seem forced. Moreover – according to the list
of conditions we presented in the previous section – their very decision to
migrate cannot be said to be non-voluntary. They often accept burden-
some work and life conditions, which are arguably very far from what
they would find acceptable on a permanent basis. But this does not mean
in any way that the life they were leading at home was even worse or that
they are compelled to accept them by the lack of acceptable alternatives.
In many cases, indeed, they come from positions of sufficiency; they are
not induced to migrate by the need to escape unacceptable life conditions
or to fulfill fundamental needs through immigration which they would be
denied at home. Among the reasons often listed for this kind of migra-
tion, for example, there is the goal to buy a house, to pay for their chil-
dren’s higher education, to start a private business, or to save money to
secure a comfortable life after retiring (Castagnone et al., 2007; Lutz,
2004). These goals do not respond to basic needs, but to a hope of social
advancement and comfort that cannot be achieved within the domestic
economy.
They accept life conditions they would arguably never accept at
home, not only because the economic rewards are much higher, but also
because the relative anonymity and temporariness of their status in the
receiving society does not translate into a loss of dignity and self-respect
where their life is really based, that is, back home.25 This is not the result
of a lack of information or self-deception about one’s status and condi-
tion, but is instead part of a conscious plan, which sometimes the
migrants themselves describe as an “apnea” strategy (Castagnone et al.,
2007): They are willing to temporarily sacrifice comfort, well-being, and
important aspects of their sentimental and social life in order to be
rewarded later, after they return home, by a radical improvement of their
life standards and social status.
The worries of those who are pointing to the exploitative and bur-
densome conditions often suffered by temporary migrants should not be
addressed by raising the standards of sufficiency or assuming that the

25
We discuss the role of the social bases of self-respect in relation to these migration pro-
jects in our Ottonelli and Torresi (2012).
 WHEN IS M IGRATION V OLUNTARY? 807

choice to migrate of these people is perforce non-voluntary. Rather, the

perception that temporary migration can be a non-voluntary condition, in
many cases, is best accounted for by referring to the third requirement of
voluntariness we listed in our discussion: Temporary migrants may lack a
substantive possibility of exit. By this, as we already pointed out, we do
not mean simply the possibility to leave the country of temporary resi-
dence. Rather, what we mean is that migrants often get trapped in their
condition by the unbearable costs of the available alternatives and do not
have the possibility to return to a condition of full membership and
decent living standards. This is obvious, for example, under temporary
migration regimes by which migrants are forced to leave the host country
if they quit their original employer or lose the job they were contracted
for; in this case, they may have no choice but to stick to their contract
even when they are subject to afflictive work conditions, because the costs
of returning home ahead of time, after the investments made in order to
migrate, are unbearable (Carens, 2008).26 The absence of an adequate exit
option, by which migrants can get “trapped” in a marginal condition
within the host society, does not make their original migration plans any
less voluntary; conversely, the fact that they voluntarily chose to migrate
does not imply that their subsequent choices will be voluntary, no matter
how afflictive their condition may become.
Even more importantly, the fact that migrants move voluntarily
should not imply that any contractual terms can be legitimately imposed
on them. Neither such implication should derive from the unwarranted
assumption that whenever migration is fully voluntary then it is a matter
of “mere preference,” and no important needs or goals are at stake. The
example of domestic workers from Eastern Europe, indeed, shows that
temporary migration often serves important personal and familial goals,
even when it does not respond to the fulfillment of basic rights or needs.
Furthermore, the specific ways in which these goals are achieved, through
temporary migration, constitute an essential element of these plans of life.
Migration, in these cases, is often valued not only instrumentally, but also
because it expresses and makes possible important forms of agency and
the sense of playing a relevant role in the shaping of one’s fate.

26
It is important to point out that in some cases naturalization constitutes the only accept-
able exit option from the condition of relative deprivation in which temporary migrants
have put themselves, even when their original intention was to return home.
808 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

Once we look at these migratory plans through the lenses of the

right notion of voluntariness, we realize that many of them can be
reduced neither to merely whimsical preferences, nor can they be dis-
counted as the outcome of a double series of coercive circumstances – that
is, first those that prompted the migrants to migrate, and then those that
made them accept the condition of temporary migrants. Instead, they
count as central cases of agency: They are voluntary choices that concern
important values and goals in people’s lives.
This change of perspective in assessing the predicament of temporary
migrants does not simply allow us to acknowledge migrants’ agency, but it
also allows us a more enlightened approach to policy-making. Whenever
temporary migration is interpreted as a condition that can only be passively
suffered by migrants, rather than (sometimes) voluntarily chosen for reasons
that are inscribed in their broader life plans, we run the risk of not being
able to devise or correctly assess the policies and institutional solutions that
would fit those plans and make them successful, sometimes at no higher
costs – for example, compared with naturalization in the host country – for
the receiving society or the other agencies responsible for the regulation and
management of migration. More specifically, it may lead us to overlook
those policies oriented to return that could be more responsive to migrants’
actual intentions, such as, for example, allowing migrants to divert part of
their income taxes and social security payments to private health insurance,
granting migrants pension and social security benefit portability; creating
special funds for voluntary repatriation; and – when visas are needed – devis-
ing the visa regime so as to make possible frequent visits to home countries
to keep ties to the sending society alive (see Agunias and Newland, 2007).
Once again, we should remember that the recognition of migrants’
agency and of their choices as voluntary or non-voluntary, although essen-
tial to a liberal theory of migration, should not be made to do all the nor-
mative work in devising the appropriate policy responses to migration,
nor should the normative consequences and costs that follow from such
choices be assumed to implicitly and uncontroversially be grounded in
voluntariness alone. Accordingly, whether the receiving states should put
in place special policies to accommodate temporary migration projects
cannot be decided by simply establishing that these plans are voluntarily
undertaken and serve important goals in migrants’ lives. At the very least,
to conclude that these special measures are due to temporary migrants,
considerations of fairness should also come into play. It might be argued,
indeed, that the temporary character of the migration projects of these
 WHEN IS M IGRATION V OLUNTARY? 809

migrants relieves the host society from the duty to provide for their well-
being and life plans, even if we granted that such a duty exists toward
those who intend to establish themselves permanently and eventually
become citizens. These concerns would need to be addressed by appealing
to principles of reciprocity and fair treatment of all the interests involved,
for example by pointing out that although temporary migrants are not
committed to permanent residence, they positively contribute to the local
economy and are bound to comply with the laws and regulations of the
host country during their permanence, which calls for reciprocity and fair-
ness in setting up institutions and programs that advance both the interest
of the host society and their interests and plans (Ottonelli and Torresi,
2013).
Still, even though the fact that some temporary migration projects
are voluntarily undertaken cannot constitute the sole ground for establishing
what is due to the migrants involved, it constitutes a highly relevant consid-
eration in devising how to address their claims. In many cases, there are rea-
sons to believe that treating temporary migration as a second-best as
compared to naturalization may not only presuppose a misrecognition of
migrants’ agency, but can also lead to inadequate policy responses.

CONCLUSION

The distinction between voluntary and non-voluntary migrants is essen-

tial to any liberal theory of migration and indeed to any normative the-
ory that aims at taking into account the agency of migrants. The notion
of voluntariness plays in fact a crucial role in many current debates on
migrants’ rights and duties. However, in these contexts, it also appears
to be gravely under-defined and, what is even more worrying, often
skewed by the normative agenda it is meant to serve. Those who tend
to minimize the duties we have toward migrants seek a notion that
makes forced migration a relatively circumscribed phenomenon, limited
to those who suffer from extreme deprivation in their country of origin
and, at the same time, tend to represent voluntary migration as
prompted by merely whimsical preferences. Those who advocate more
liberal immigration policies, to make the duties toward migrants more
pressing, tend to insist that all migration taking place in a context of
global injustice is forced.
The notion of voluntariness emerging from these debates does not
seem to leave room for conceiving of choices that are voluntary but never-
810 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW

theless concern important ends and goals in human lives; in this respect,
then, it departs significantly from the notion we employ in other contexts
of policy-making in liberal polities and of our everyday experience.
In this paper, we have tried to remedy to these shortcomings by
offering a definition of voluntary (and non-voluntary) migration that is
modeled on familiar cases and therefore avoids double standards. As illus-
trated by the case of temporary migration, such a definition can open the
conceptual space for recognizing many migration plans as belonging to
the range of those choices that are voluntary but concern important goals
and ends in people’s lives.
Dispelling the ambiguities and mistakes involved in the use of vol-
untariness in current debates on migration, per se, does not provide any
definite answer about what is due to migrants; however, it is an important
preliminary step toward a complete normative theory of migration. More-
over, it is essential if we want to bring to light what does the normative
work in assessing what is due to migrants: If other principles than the rec-
ognition of migrants’ agency must come into play, they need to do it
openly, rather than under the guise of an unorthodox and inconsistent
notion of voluntariness.

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