Labor, Migration, And The Common Good: A Comparative Constitutional Analysis Of Migrant Worker Protection In Taiwan And India
- IJLLR Journal
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
Chiou, Tzu-Yu, Assistant Professor, Department of Law, Hsuan Chuang University
I. Introduction: The Constitutional Problem of Migrant Labor
The governance of migrant labor presents one of the most instructive test cases for constitutional theory in the contemporary era. In both Taiwan and India, hundreds of thousands of workers perform essential economic and social functions operating factory production lines, caring for aging populations, and sustaining construction projects while remaining excluded from the full compass of constitutional protection ordinarily afforded to those who reside and labor within a political community's territory. Liberal constitutionalism has largely theorized this exclusion in terms of citizenship status and individual rights, treating the limited protections afforded to migrant workers as a calibrated departure from the general norm of rights-equality rather than as a structural constitutional deficit. This paper argues that such a framing is inadequate, and that the resources for a more compelling account are available within the classical natural law tradition as recovered by Common Good Constitutionalism.
Common Good Constitutionalism (CGC), as systematically elaborated by Adrian Vermeule, holds that law is fundamentally "a reasoned ordering to the common good" a formulation drawn directly from Thomas Aquinas's definition in the Summa Theologica, where law is characterized as "nothing else than an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated." On this view, the constitutional validity of governance arrangements cannot be assessed by reference to procedural compliance alone, but must be measured against the substantive requirement that public authority be directed toward the genuine flourishing of the political community. Where administrative structures systematically produce conditions of exploitation, dependency, and social exclusion for those whose labor sustains the community's material reproduction, the constitutional deficit is not merely political or ethical in character it is legal, in the deepest Thomistic sense.
