The problem of exclusion and its implications for democrary have special salience in the case of temporary migration. In an early treatment of guest worker programmes, Walzer (1983) warned us against the perils of creating a permanent class of resident aliens. More recently, inclusivist egalitarians have contended that temporary migrant workers should have an extensive package of rights in order to prevent their exploitation, subordination, and discrimination in the host country (Lenard and Straehle, 2010). It has been argued that this leads them to a dilemma between freedom and equality (Ottonelli and Torresi, 2010) or between rights and numbers (Ruhs and Martin, 2008). The solution, they suggest, lies in the creation of a special status with ad hoc rights for these workers (Ottonelli and Torresi, 2022). But surely workers are not the only temporary migrants vulnerable to exploitation, let alone subordination and discrimination, so what (if anything) can explain their special status?
This article raises a second dilemma for inclusivist egalitarians: if what matters for the acquisition of rights is subjection to authority (Blake, 2001), contribution (Sullivan, 2019; Gerver, 2022), social membership (Carens, 2013), relational equality (Sharp, 2022), and/or legitimate expectations (Carnes, 2020), then tourists and international students should have the same rights as temporary migrant workers, since they too are subject to the coercive authority of the state, may (or may not) contribute to and become members of the society, want to relate as equals, and may have developed legitimate expectations to stay in the country. I argue that the underlying problem of inclusivist egalitarians is not that they are overinclusive (that is, they wrongly include tourists and international students in the category of temporary migrants), but rather that they are way too egalitarian (in particular, they wrongly believe that temporary migrants should have virtually the same rights as permanent migrants). Absent the same duties, temporary migrants should not have the same rights as citizens.