In this paper, we aim to address two overarching and interconnected questions: first, why does the human rights-based approach to global migration governance need decolonising? And second, in what way can this be decolonized? Using the case of the Nepali migrant workers’ precarities and migrant rights activism in Nepal, this paper critiques the western-centric rights- based approach to migration governance, arguing for the need of decolonizing such a governance approach, and put forward a decolonized approach that is grounded in the leadership of local and regional migrant rights activists and organisations in shaping the migrant worker rights agenda.

Although, as a welcome development, efforts are being made at the global level for integrating the right-based and developmentalist approaches to migration governance by recognizing the multi-level, multi-sectoral and multi-actor complexities entailing migration, in reality no fundamental change has occurred towards addressing the temporary migrant workers’ lived precarities within the intraregional migratory corridors in Asia. We explore two main reasons behind the failure of the right-based global migration governance. First, the rights-based migration governance approach is firmly built on a neoliberal market ideology that looks at labour migration through a depoliticized lens considering migration as a benevolent outcome of international labour markets that create a triple ‘win-win-win’ situation for the source and destination countries, as well as the migrant workers themselves. Such a governance approach fails to pay heed to the systemic economic and political structures that create conducive conditions for people to migrate in the first place, let alone redressing them. Consequently, the human-rights discourse which essentially goes against colonization ends up being subjected to neocolonization (both domestic and global), particularly serving the neocolonial political ends.

Secondly, at the cost of labour rights of migrant workers, the rights-based approach to migration governance places the political rights at the centre of governance that are more geared towards the rights of refugees and asylees. Prepondering the political rights of migrants has thus severed the right-based migration governance discourse from the economic and social rights to which migrant workers should be entitled on the basis of international human and/or labour rights instruments. The rights-based migration governance discourse has ended up being confined to aspirational goals and failed to address the lived precarities of the migrant workers in Asia. In global migration governance, there is thus a need for an epistemological shift – fusing human and labour rights of migrant workers – that reclaims and reconnects the rights-based approach to migration governance with migrant rights activism and organizing in the Global South within the broader context of neoliberalism. We argue for the need of such a decolonised rights-based approach to migration governance that emanates from the political organizing and activism within the local, subregional, regional and global networks, channelled through collective organisations and social movements.