女性移住労働者をつくる

英国における能力別受け入れ制度をめぐる政治

抄録

This article focuses upon the point-based system which the UK government introduced in 2008 as a part of its attempts to modernise and streamline the British immigration system. By examining how female overseas care workers are treated under the point-based system, this article indentifies the immigration system as consisting of a three-step series of (i) sorting, (ii) positioning and (iii) (dis) favouring migrants accordingly. In this process, those women who work in the female-dominated sectors such as caring and domestic work are sorted in accordance with their assumed “skills and talents” and, on that, are then positioned within the labour market hierarchy. Their low status within it, the government argues, accounts for their disfavoured (or subjugated) treatments in their daily lives. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that, in the current era of “managed migration”, the concrete sufferings of those female overseas care workers are a priori legitimatised, if not created, through this new point-based system. Alleged to operate in an efficient and objective manner, the system categorises those women as low skilled and replaceable workers per se, thereby implying that harsh treatment as such is deserved or at least legitimate.
This article consists of three parts. First, it presents a general overview of international migration today, and the treatment of female overseas workers in immigration laws and policies in particular. It also explains how systems of entry control are established. The second part explores immigration policy in Britain and, in so doing, highlights how the point-based system was prepared as the foundational system of the current phase of “managed migration”. Once in office, the Labour government officially acknowledged the economic benefits which immigration had brought to Britain, and subsequently tailored its immigration system to the needs of the economy. The third section focuses on the practice of sorting and positioning of female overseas care workers through the newly introduced system.
In conclusion, the author argues that the female overseas care workers in Britain actually face two layers of sorting; horizontal sorting based on place of origin, i.e. inside or outside the EU, and vertical one in relation to the alleged skills and the defined needs of the domestic labour market. Under the new point-based system, nonetheless, it becomes justifiable to treat women from outside the EU in a tough manner on the basis of their alleged talent and ability. It is debatable, however, on what grounds the point-based system could claim that its judgement of their skills is fair and objective. It, as a result, leads us to question the overall validity of the system.