The Case for Permanent Residency for Frontline Workers

Abstract

This article presents the case for granting permanent residency to those experiencing significant risks throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to increase citizens’ safety. Increasing safety comes in many forms: directly, as when doctors, paramedics, and nurses assist patients, and indirectly, as when farmworkers produce life-sustaining food, garbage collectors protect sanitation, and social workers respond to emergency calls. A range of such workers are owed gratitude-derived duties from citizens that are best fulfilled via permanent residency. I defend this claim first for authorized migrants and then for unauthorized migrants, whose presence citizens would consent to if they were aware of the benefits they provide. Finally, I defend the claim that many frontline workers not owed gratitude are owed duties of justice, acquiring rights similar to those of permanent residency.

Occupational Essentialness During COVID-19 and Attitudes Towards Labor Migration

“…The essentialness dimension of occupations will be particularly salient in times of acutely-felt emergencies where questions about how to preserve the basic functioning of society compete with nativist or purely economic concerns. In this regard, our contribution complements normative arguments about how governments ought to treat immigrant workers during crises which are likely to recur (Gerver, 2022).…”

“…In this regard, this study contributes some of the first empirical evidence to ethical and normative debates underpinning policy choices about who ought to gain access to rights including citizenship, and on what grounds (B. Anderson et al, 2021;Gerver, 2022;Ruhs, 2013).…”

Communicating Economic Evidence About Immigration Changes Attitudes and Policy Preferences

“…Immigration public opinion studies regularly observe that attitudes and preferences vary depending on migrants’ characteristics (Bansak et al 2016; Hainmueller and Hopkins 2015). These include features such as ethnicity (Ford 2011), religious identity (Fernández-Reino et al 2022), skill level (Naumann et al 2018), and—in a world that continues to be affected by COVID-19 (Xiang et al 2022)—essentialness to national economies and frontline services (Fernández-Reino et al 2020; Gerver 2022). Generally, what motivates these variations is the extent to which host societies perceive these groups to pose threats to material welfare or symbolic identities (Dinesen and Hjorth 2020; Dražanová 2022).…”