Guest Workers

This chapter considers the debate over a state's conditional duty to admit guest workers as full citizens. It begins by citing Michael Walzer's moral analysis of European countries' practice of importing employees from states such as Turkey. These states have since revised their policies, but at the time of Walzer's study, a country like West Germany would invite Turks in to perform a variety of undesirable but socially necessary jobs in construction and trash collection, for example. But these Turks were denied the rights and privileges of German citizenship. This chapter examines what is distinctively problematic about the combination of the work and lack of German citizenship. It also tackles the concern that Walzer's analysis is objectionably paternalistic and concludes by arguing that no one can plausibly claim that the subordination of guest workers was necessary in order to secure the important benefits of the employment contracts, because these benefits could have equally been realized without any oppression if only the Germans had been willing to extend the requisite political rights to all those workers who had remained in Germany for the necessary duration.