Patterns of Exploitation: Understanding Migrant Worker Rights in Advanced Democracies.

Boucher’s latest book covers migrant workers’ rights violations in four jurisdictions: Australia, Canada (Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario), England and the State of California over a 20-year period (1996-2016). Her and her team of lawyers and social scientists coded close to 1000 court cases brought by migrant workers to trace the nature, extent and attributes of alleged workplace violations experienced by migrant workers in these four locations. It covers criminal, wage, safety and leave violations and discriminatory actions against employees. It then takes a “deep dive” into seven of the cases, interviewing legal counsel on both the employee and employer sides (and often also trade union, non-government bodies and government) to understand the key issues that emerged in those cases for migrants alleging violations and employers defending against them. The core argument is that industrial relations systems more than immigration systems or migrant attributes inform the types of rights abuses migrants experience: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/patterns-of-exploitation-9780197599112?cc=au&lang=en&

Reviews and commentary

“Academic work can change the world. A work of this kind will inform our legislatures, politicians, government agencies and the public, notably about acute problems that are occurring within our legal systems but also posit by comparative international analysis and experience the ways our system can be better.”

Honourable Justice Elizabeth Raper, Federal Court (book launch presenter for Patterns of Exploitation, May 2023).

“I have your book and have read. It is excellent.”

Allan Fels, Co-Chair of the Australian Migrant Workers Taskforce, Former Chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

"Boucher has written an immensely useful treatise on how a precarious, temporary, immigration status, or the lack of a valid immigration status, impacts the workplace rights that workers in four key high-income jurisdictions are able to exercise and enforce in practice. The Migrant Worker Rights Database, created by Boucher, provides a new source of data that will inform scholars and advocates alike about how different legal frameworks may facilitate or hinder the ability of migrants to enforce their rights. Boucher's findings will ultimately be invaluable for efforts to push for structural changes that better protect migrant workers around the world through regulation, legislation, and enforcement." -

Daniel Costa, Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research, Economic Policy Institute

"Beginning each chapter with an engaging account of an individual migrant's encounter with the legal system, Anna Boucher vividly depicts the key themes that emerge from a database comprised of litigation brought by migrant workers in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States to enforce their labor rights. Patterns of Exploitationsprovides a compelling comparative analysis of violations of migrant workers' labour rights in four key migrant-receiving countries by weaving a quantitative analysis of the innovative database with insights from key legal actors. This excellent book should be read by anyone interested in how migrant workers are exploited and how to stop it." - Judy Fudge, Professor in Global Labour Issues, McMaster University

"Patterns of Exploitation is an ambitious book that explores one component of the migrant rights puzzle. Migrants are workers and human beings, yet their workplace rights are not protected to the same extent as citizen workers. To discover why these differences exist, Boucher systematically surveys legal cases filed by migrant workers across four national jurisdictions and generates an overview of the types of exploitation that migrants experience. In contrast to the prevailing notion that courts in liberal democracies tend to protect migrants, she finds that courts safeguard migration worker rights only in so far as workers are protected by the law and the law recognizes migrant vulnerabilities. This book provides a major corrective to our understanding of the role of the courts in liberal democracies in protecting migrant rights and it will be widely cited." - Jeannette Money, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis

Gender, Migration and the Global Race for Talent.

Gender, Migration and the Global Race for Talent, was published in 2016 with Manchester University Press https://www.amazon.com.au/Gender-Migration-Global-Race-Talent/dp/1526133741/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

This book represents the first book-length account of the global race for skilled talent from a gender perspective. It analyses the gendered terrain of skilled immigration policies across twelve countries and thirty-seven visas. It also provides detail accounts of policy changes that shaped skilled immigration policies – Australia and Canada – over a twenty-year period.