Abstract
There is a recent interest in the ethics of high-skilled worker emigration through which the limitations of the right to exit are discussed. Insightful arguments have been made in favour of (or against) the emigration restrictions on skilled workers in order to tackle the deprivations in developing countries. However, there is still a need for clarification on how we can understand, discuss and implement limitations of a right from a normative perspective. Significantly, how we understand the limitation of a right might determine how we approach such limitations – both in terms of the process of assessing the limitations and in terms of their implications. In this paper, I identify two distinct ways to understand limitations of the right to exit with respect to losses associated with health worker emigration, while also pointing to their implications for restrictive policies: (i) as a matter of scope, and (ii) as a matter of weight or emergency, which requires a compensatory scheme for the individual right holders. While the emergency restrictions seem to be a point of convergence in the literature, what defines an emergency and the nature of the compensation still warrant exploration. To that end, I also discuss from a normative perspective what might constitute a public emergency that would give states a prima facie prerogative to regulate temporary limitations on the exercise of the right to exit. In addition, I briefly introduce the implications of emergency restrictions, with a particular focus on compensatory schemes for individual right holders.
Highlights
It has been almost a decade since the skilled worker migration from developing contexts has attracted the interest of scholars in normative and political ethics (Hooper 2008; Brock 2009)
After briefly introducing the background of the issue, I identify two distinct ways to understand limitations of the right to exit with respect to losses associated with health worker migration, while pointing to their implications for restrictive policies: (i) as a matter of scope, and (ii) as a matter of weight or emergency which requires a compensatory scheme for the individual right holders
I highlighted two distinct ways to understand and treat the limitations of the right to exit: as a matter of scope, and as a matter of weight or emergency which requires a compensatory scheme for the individual right holders
Summary
It has been almost a decade since the skilled worker migration from developing contexts has attracted the interest of scholars in normative and political ethics (Hooper 2008; Brock 2009). Despite the insightful arguments in favour of or against the emigration restrictions on skilled workers (and health workers in particular) in order to tackle the deprivations in developing countries, there is still a need to specify how to understand, discuss and implement limitations of a right from a normative perspective. This paper aims to clarify the ways in which we can understand and discuss limitations of the right to exit, using health worker emigration as a case in point, and their implications for restrictive policies. After briefly introducing the background of the issue, I identify two distinct ways to understand limitations of the right to exit with respect to losses associated with health worker migration, while pointing to their implications for restrictive policies: (i) as a matter of scope, and (ii) as a matter of weight or emergency which requires a compensatory scheme for the individual right holders. This paper rather aims to clarify the ways in which we can understand limitations of the right as well as their implications
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More From: Etikk i praksis - Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics
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