Which Projects Count?

The central contention of Valeria Ottonelli and Tiziana Torresi's book The Right Not to Stay is that some migrants, i.e. those who wish only to migrate on a temporary basis, require special rights in order to protect them and their capacity to achieve the goals that they have set for themselves.Such temporary movers can rightly be understood to have projects, that is to say life-shaping objectives, which can best or only be served by opportunities to migrate temporarily.It is the job of the liberal democratic state to offer such movers specific accommodations, to protect their capacity to be successful in these projects.The special accommodations that Ottonelli and Torresi defend are reasonable, I shall suggest, for migrants who are engaged in temporary labor migration projects as they describe them.However, I shall suggest, they are not as obviously appropriate for the projects of migrants whose temporary moves are not voluntary in the way Ottonelli and Torresi describe, nor for those who also migrate temporarily, but not for labor-related reasons, including international students, family caregivers, snowbirds and other retirees, and those who are protected by "Temporary Protected Status" or similar visas.In part, I argue, the mistake lies in a too narrow construal of what counts as a "project" in need of protection by the liberal state.I suggest that if the focus is on genuinely temporary movers, it is important to consider a wider range of them in order to best understand how a liberal democratic state ought to protect those who are temporarily in their midst either non-voluntarily, or for reasons other than tourism, in pursuit of a wider range of potential projects.