EUTOPIA COLECO POSITION PAPER: The Legal History of Labour Migration (2022-2023)

Connected Learning Community
Legal History 2022-2023

 

The EUTopia Connected Learning Community Legal History is working around the theme labour migration during the academic year 2022-2023.

Labour migration

The legal framework governing transnational, intra- or inter-imperial flows of human migration is an ideally suitable topic for our student driven community, which connects the campuses of the VUB (Brussels, Prof. Frederik Dhondt), CY Paris (Cergy, Prof. Caroula Argyriadis-Kervégan), Warwick (dr. Jane Bryan/dr. Rosie Doyle), Lisbon (Nova University, Prof. Christiana Nogueira da Silva) and Ljubljana (Prof. Katja Skrubej). Migration is very present and visible in our contemporary European cities and universities alike. It is linked with  memory and intercultural exchange but also with relations of colonial/imperial exploitation[1] and the question of race, gender[2] and social hierarchy. Economic motives can act as push as well as pull-factors,[3] alongside persecution and political strife or natural disasters.

Historically, those migrating to another country in a subordinate economic position could not rely on the law for stability and security. Before the development of labour law to protect the weaker party in a labour contract, the classical civil codes of Europe clung to a formal liberalism that portrayed employer and labourer as equal contracting parties. The infamous article 1781 of the Napoleonic Code Civil went even further:

« Le maître est cru sur son affirmation, pour la quotité des gages ; pour le payement du salaire de l’année échue, et pour les à-compte donnés pour l’année courante. »

Bourgeois prejudice on the inferior status of house personnel (to whom this article applied) could be found openly in doctrine, as here (with the socially progressive but paternalist Liberal François Laurent):

« L’ignorance des classes inférieures dans lesquelles se recrutent les domestiques est la réponse à notre question. Si l’on exigeait une preuve écrite, il faudrait avoir recours à un notaire ; ce qui est impraticable quand on songe que, dans les grandes villes, la durée du service ne dépasse, le plus souvent, pas quelques mois […] On ne pouvait admettre la preuve testimoniale sans ouvrir la porte aux fraudes : admettrait-on les ouvriers et domestiques à se servir de témoins entre eux ? […] On voulait donc prévenir une espèce de coalition, et de la pire espèce, celle du mensonge et de la fraude. »[4]

The conquest and assertion of rights lead to the integration of migrating employees within domestic society, but also to opposition to other social groups. One example was paradoxically enough the labour movement, which tried to protect the domestic labour market from increased competition and thus lower wages. Migration has become the subject of a considerable social, economic and cultural historiography after World War II, partly as a consequence of the millions of displaced persons, the failures of the restrictive asylum policies of the 1930s[5] and the attention for demographic questions within the United Nations. Within the European Union, migration for economic motives is linked to the fundamental freedom of movement as a pillar of the internal market. The extent of this freedom in an union of unequal social protection is a bone of contention, even among the actors traditionally defending the rights of labourers.[6]

In the current debate on migration from non EU- (or EEA-)nationals, economic motives are seen as undesirable, save for those professional categories where labour shortages are real (e.g. personal care, IT…).[7] The twin objectives of protecting aliens in a different political community ànd workers in a hierarchical relationship with their employer resulted in attempts to devise international and supranational norms advocating equality.[8] Conversely, the precarious social situation of undocumented individuals eases their exploitation.

Yet, the social phenomenon of (non-forced) migration is much older than the last seven decades.[9] The same is true for the legal definition of a migrant or a foreigner (aubain)[10]. The latter can be seen in opposition to members of the body politic, whose size could range from a lordship or town to a whole empire.[11] Inclusion and exclusion were social standards, often linked to customary rules. Whereas the dynamics of enlightened human rights universalism tend to attribute equality before the law to all human beings (within the metropolis), this had been quite the opposite for centuries: the conquest of either unilateral privileges or -bilaterally- waivers by treaty as an exception to sovereign power was an objective.[12] Full citizenship, involving the ius suffragii, was often not required to rise to great social standing and acquire wealth.[13]

This, however, did not do away with a foreigner’s incapacity to be hired in supreme administrative and judicial functions,[14] or with the greater sovereign leeway to ‘make the foreigners pay’,[15] for instance by confiscating their goods at decease or levying an exit tax (‘droit d'issue’)[16], or to foresee extra fiscal thresholds for them.[17] The cautio iudicatum solvi (obligation to provide a security when engaging in litigation) can be seen as a relict of Old Regime anti-foreigner bias.[18]

The definition of the nation by constitution and law throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had stronger political consequences.[19] A national or a citizen was defined on the basis of allegiance to a territory and/or community.[20] In the Age of Revolution (1830-1917) and beyond, migrants were often seen as carriers of dangerous ideas such as anti-monarchical nationalism, socialism and anarchism.[21] Surveillance by the police and intelligence services could be explained by a similar aversion to potentially ‘dangerous’ foreigners. The Belgian Law of 12 February 1897 stated the following (art. 1) :

« L’étranger résidant en Belgique qui par sa conduite compromet la tranquillité publique, ou celui qui est poursuivi ou a été condamné à l’étranger pour des crimes et délits qui donnent lieu à l’extradition, peut être contraint par le gouvernement de s’éloigner d’un certain lieu, d’habiter dans un lieu déterminé, ou même de sortir du royaume.
L’arrêté royal enjoignant à un étranger de sortir du royaume parce qu’il compromet la tranquillité publique sera délibéré en conseil des ministres. »[22]

However, the mixed domestic and international nature of the legal relationship between the individual in question and the Belgian state resurfaced in a string of exceptions (art. 2) applicable in peacetime: those who had obtained authorisation to register in Belgium; those who had married a Belgian woman and had subsequently become parents or had resided permanently as a couple for at least five years; those born in Belgium from foreign parents and still eligible to obtain Belgian nationality.[23]

Connecting students, connecting cases

The aim of this year’s work is to connect our students’ stories. Their angle of approach depends on the imperial, national, regional or urban history of every institution and sometimes every person involved in the cases studied by our students. Depending on the spatial connection of the migratory movement, links can go up and down the hierarchy of empire, for instance from the British Isles to Asia, America or Africa; from Europe to the United States (e.g. from Ljubljana via Trieste); from Latin America to the British Isles; or circulate throughout Europe, for instance from the fifteen-century Low Countries to England.[24] Our students can accessorily dive into archives (foreigners’ police, litigation records), newspapers and parliamentary debates or the databases of migration history, such as immibel[25] or the Ellis Island records.[26]

What unites us is legal documents from the past (normative, regulatory, public and private, domestic and international) and the contextual legal history of migration movements (labour law, administrative law, criminal law, private law sensu stricto, private and public international law, commercial law, procedure and jurisdiction). As such, this approach transcends and combines the summa divisio of private and public law, focusing on the exercise of state and private power.[27] The legislator, the judge and the professor, to name the three classical actors of lawmaking[28], can be complemented with studies on intellectual background, public opinion and the economic underpinnings of labour migration.

At the end of their journey, the students will be able to connect with positive national, European and international norms applicable today.[29] Oral history as a method to map motives of asylum seekers in the UK and their lived experiences help to construct the contemporary historical framework.

Engaging with experts

The Launch Event of the Connected Learning Community took place on MS Teams on 21 October 2022. At the proposal of Prof. Christiana Nogueira da Silva, ERC Advanced Grantee Prof. Cristiana Bastos (University of Lisbon) presented her work on indentured labour in the aftermath of abolition. This session was recorded and shared with lecturers and students and provided conceptual handles as well as inspiration.

On 9 and 10 March 2023, the Peak Event will take place in Ljubljana, at the invitation of Prof. Katja Skrubej. Dr. Daniel Grafenauer (Institute of Ethnic Studies, Ljubljana) will intervene as external expert. The full program will be anounced on our blog.

Outcome: the second CoLeCo online exhibition

The Connected Learning Community Labour Migration aims at producing an online exhibition by late May/early June 2023. Building further on the pilot edition (2021-2022), students are encouraged and empowered to use digitized documents, images, campus and urban architecture, audiovisual material and sound to bring visitors into the law of the past, starting from their own experience. At present, both the Belgian State Archives[30] and the Parisian Musée de l’Immigration[31] have created online exhibitions related to the topic.

 

 

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[1] Gérard Noiriel, Etat, Nation et immigration. Vers une histoire du pouvoir (Paris : Belin, 2001) ; Le creuset français, Histoire de l’immigration (XIX^e-XX^e siècle) (Paris : Seuil, 2006) ; Une histoire populaire de la France : de la guerre de Cent Ans à nos jours (Marseille : Agone, 2018).

[2] Pamela Sharpe (ed.), Women, Gender and Labour Migration: Historical and Global Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2005).

[3] E.g. The decision by Sully to grant letters of naturalisation to Flemish tapestry weavers to leave for France, a measure repeated under Louis XIV and Colbert for the Manufacture des Gobelins (Jean-François Dubost, “Étrangers en France », in : Lucien Bély (dir.), Dictionnaire de l’Ancien Régime (Paris : PUF, 2000), 521). See on the “battle against emigration” in the Flemish tapestry production centre of Oudenaarde: Martine Vanwelden, Productie van wandtapijten in de regio Oudenaarde: een symbiose tussen stad en platteland (15^de tot 17^de eeuw) (Leuven: Universitaire Pers, 2006), 262-265.

[4] François Laurent, Principes de droit civil français (Bruxelles : Bruylant, 1876), vol. XXV, 551-552.

[5] Frank Caestecker, Alien policy in Belgium, 1840-1940: the creation of guest workers, refugees and illegal aliens (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000).

[6] Bastien Cabot, « Immigration », in : Razmig Keucheyan, Jean-Numa Ducange & Stéphanie Roza (eds.), Histoire globale des socialismes, XIX^e-XXI^e siècles (Paris : PUF, 2021), 15-21.

[7] Danièle Lochak, « Protéger ou refouler : le droit d’asile à l’épreuve des politiques migratoires », in : Patrick Boucheron (dir.), Migrations, réfugiés, exil (Paris : Odile Jacob, 2017), 289-316.

[8] Paul de Guchteneire, Antoine Pécoud, « Les obstacles à la ratification de la Convention des Nations Unies sur la protection des droits des travailleurs immigrants », Droit et Société n° 75 (2010/2), 431-451, DOI 10.3917/drs.075.0431.

[9] Jean-Jacques Hubin, “Deux millions d’année de migrations », in : Boucheron (dir.), Migrations, réfugiés, exil, 13-32.

[10] Dubost, « Étrangers en France », 519. The word aubain (cf. droit d’aubanité) would have originated in the Carolingian era (820).

[11] Wim Blockmans, Medezeggenschap. Politieke participatie in Europa voor 1800 (Amsterdam : Prometheus, 2020) ; Jean-Philippe Genet & François Foronda (dir.), Des chartes aux constitutions. Autour de l’idée constitutionnelle en Europe (XII^e-XVII^e siècle) (Paris : Editions de la Sorbonne, 2019).

[12] E.g. Treaty between Louis XV of France and Charles-Nicolas d’Oultremont, Prince-Bishop of Liège, Fontainebleau, 6 December 1768 on the abolition of the droit d’aubaine between their subjects; Commercial treaties often included provisions on jurisdiction (providing for consular jurisdiction of under one’s own nation, or the direct competence of the sovereigns’ central courts, rather than the local ones) or applicable law for the division of inheritances and taxation. The Peace treaties of Utrecht (11 April 1713) and Aix-la-Chapelle (18 October 1748) confirmed the abolition of the droit d’aubaine for movable property between subjects of France and the United Kingdom. Exceptions from the general rule could concern nationals of another sovereign, but also citizens of a town, or traders connected to a nation, or even specific groups of individuals. Treaty-based exceptions to the droit d’aubaine could be limited to inhabitants of a border principality or province: e.g. Catalans and inhabitants of the French Roussillon after 1659 (Treaty of the Pyrenees). Outside of the bordering province, they were subjected to taxes in the rest of the realms of the King of Spain or the King of France (Dubost, “Etrangers en France”, o.c.., 519-520).

[13] E.g. Goswin de Wynants, Mémoires contenant des notions générales de tout ce qui concerne le Gouvernement des Païs-Bas (Vienne, 1730 ; Bibliothèque patrimoniale de la Ville d’Anvers), f. 83r° « des lettres de naturalité […[ toutes simples » did not involve anything more than the promise to be treated « comme régicnoles ». The highest degree of assimilation was mirrored in the « lettres de Brabantisation », which allowed foreigners to exercise offices constitutionally reserved to citizens of the Duchy of Brabant (e.g. a seat on the Duke’s sovereign court of law). This distinction was taken over by the Belgian Constitution of 1831 and the Law of 27 September 1835, which reserved the « grande naturalisation » (successor to the « Brabantisation ») to the enjoyment of all civil and political rights. F.G.J. Thimus, Traité de droit public, ou exposition méthodique des principes du droit public de la Belgique (Liège : Dessain, 1844), vol. I, 100.

[14] Louis Gilliodts-Van Severen (dir.), La coutume du Bourg de Bruges (Bruxelles : Commission Royale pour la Publication des Anciennes Lois et Ordonnances, 1883), vol. II, 360 (quoting Cardin Le Bret cited by Merlin de Douai on the limitations on foreigners’ rights in the Kingdom of France).

[15] Jean-François Dubost & Peter Sahlins, Et si on faisait payer les étrangers ? Louis XIV, les immigrés et quelques autres (Paris : Flammarion, 1999).

[16] Gilliodts-Van Severen, o.c. : « La législation sur les étrangers restait empreinte de barbarie ». Where lordships were concerned, the local lords (and not the sovereign) often kept the possibility to simply confiscate the inheritance when a foreigner deceased. Only from the sixteenth century on did the légistes of the French monarchy state that the droit d’aubaine was a corollary of (central) sovereign power. Dubost, “Etrangers en France”, o.c., 519. This right did not include movable property of merchants who had not chosen to reside permanently in the Kingdom of France (ergo: it did apply to those of foreign origin who did not reside there in a more than ephemerous way). Ironically, by the leasing out of revenue from the royal domain to private contractors (les fermiers généraux)… the droit d’aubaine benefited the private tax collectors, from the sixteenth century on.  

[17] E.g. Charter of Emperor Charles VI for the craft of barrel-maker or hooper in the City of Namur, Bruxelles, 9 October 1724, art. 14: inhabitants of the County of Namur pay 18 florins to be admitted. Nationals of the Austrian Low Countries disburse 24 florins. Subjects of any other sovereign 36 (or double the tariff for dwellers of Namur itself). Art. 19: If any foreigner complains and is found to be wrong, he will pay “douze patards” as a fine. Art. 31: a penalty of ten florins for any master in the craft (or any other grade) when it has turned out that he produced a piece on account of a foreigner (Louis-Prosper Gachard (ed.), Recueil des ordonnances des Pays-Bas Autrichiens, Troisième série (1700-1994), t. III (Ordonnances du 2 janvier 1716 au 29 décembre 1725), (Bruxelles: Commission Royale pour la Publication des Anciennes Lois et Ordonnances, 1873), 439-440).

[18] E.g. Belgian Civil Procedure Code, Part I, Book II, Title IX, art. 166: « Tous étrangers, demandeurs principaux ou intervenants, seront tenus, si le défendeur le requiert, avant toute exception, de fournir caution de payer les frais et dommages-intérêts auxquelles ils pourraient être condamnés ». Belgian Civil Code, Book I, Title I, art. 16 : « En toutes matières, autres que celles de commerce, l’étranger qui sera demandeur sera tenu de donner caution pour le payement des frais et dommages-intérêts résultant du procès, à moins qu’il ne possède en France [Belgique] des immeubles d’une valeur suffisante pour assurer ce payement ». Treaties could provide for an exception, as they had already done in the Old Regime, e.g. Treaty between Belgium and Uruguay (1858, but denunciated by the Belgian State in 1909), Treaty with Nicaragua (1860), Hawaï (1864), Venezuela (1886), Paraguay (1894), Greece (1895), Mexico (1896), Japan (1896) and Serbia (1908). The 1905 Hague Convention on Civil Procedure further watered down the obligation (art. 17: « aucune caution ni dépôt […] aux nationaux d’un des Etats contractants »: signatory states being Belgium, the German Empire, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Denmark, Spain, France, Italy, Luxemburg, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Rumania, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland.

[19] In the nuanced world of primarily local identity of the Ancien Régime, “naturalisation” meant permanent -and retroactive- exception from the “droit d’aubaine”, or basically regularising a de facto situation. Dubost explains the origin of the droit d’aubaine in 1526, when Francis I of France had to recognise Charles of Habsburg’s full sovereignty and thus give up French overlordship on the County of Flanders and that of Artois (Dubost, “Étrangers en France”, 521).

[20] Paul Lagarde, “Nationalité”, in: Denis Alland & Stéphane Rials (dir.), Dictionnaire de la culture juridique (Paris : PUF, 2003), 1052. For France, the ius soli-principle did not constitute a rupture with the Old Regime. Napoleon had personally insisted on keeping it : otherwise, children born from immigrants, ‘who had established themselves massively in France’, would not have been submitted to conscription for his armies (Laurent, Principes, vol. I, 421). The factor of ‘the conscience of nationality’ was seen by proponents of the ‘nationality principle’, as Johann Kaspar Bluntschli (1808-1881), as the logical result of ‘les oeuvres de la langue, la literature, et surtout la presse périodique’, which shaped a common public opinion (Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, Theorie générale de l’État (transl. Armand de Riedmatten), (Paris: Guillaumin, 1881), 71).

[21] Anne Morelli (dir.), Le Bruxelles des révolutoinnaires : de 1830 à nos jours (Bruxelles : CFC Editions, 2016) ; Janet Polasky, Revolutions Without Borders : the Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven (Conn.) : Yale UP, 2015).  See also “La Belgique versus Marx” (Belgian State Archives, 18 January 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-HDrlH3JVI.

[22] Law of 12 February 1897 on Foreigners, M.B. 14 February 1897.

[23] Expulsion was prescribed in a quite detailed way: the Royal Decree deciding on expulsion had to mention (art. 4) the frontier to be used to leave the country, as well as a detailed “feuille de route” prescribing intermediary stops and time limits in every Belgian town or village on his way. Contraveners (art. 6) exposed themselves to a prison time of six months before being expulsed again.

[24] E.g. Bart Lambert, ““I, Edmund”: A Microhistory of an Immigrant Churchwarden in Fifteenth-Century Colchester”, In: G. Dodd, H. Lacey, & A. Musson (Eds.), People, Power and Identity in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of W. Mark Ormrod (London: Routledge, 2021), 92-114, open access.

[25] https://www.immibel.arch.be/.

[26] https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/ellis-island-ny-immigration-1892-1924.

[27] E.g. Martti Koskenniemi, “What should international legal history become?”, in: Stefan Kadelbach, Thomas Kleinlein & David Roth-Isigkeit (eds.), System, Order, and International Law. The Early History of International Legal Thought from Machiavelli to Hegel (Oxford: OUP, 2017), 381-397, DOI 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198768586.003.0019.

[28] Raoul C. Van Caenegem, Judges, legislators and professors : chapters in European legal history (Cambridge: CUP, 1987), DOI 10.1017/CBO9780511599361.

[29]  Vincent Chétail & Céline Bauloz (eds.), Research Handbook on International Law and Migration (Cheltenham: E. Elgar, 2014); Richard Plender (ed.), Basic Documents on International Migration Law (Leiden/Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, Brill, 2006), DOI 10.1163/ej.9789004152397.i-850.

[30] https://expo-migration.arch.be/.

[31] https://www.histoire-immigration.fr/ciao-italia.