Suspended Legal Subjects: Structural Liminality of Migrant Workers and the Normative Response of Common Good Constitutionalism

Migrant workers occupy a structurally liminal position within contemporary legal orders: neither full citizens nor residents entitled to equal protection, they are suspended at the margins of formal institutional frameworks and rendered persistently vulnerable to what Pettit (1997) terms “domination.” This article argues that such liminality is not an incidental policy failure but a structural product of the classificatory politics embedded in prevailing constitutional orders. Drawing on Common Good Constitutionalism (CGC) as its central theoretical framework, this article examines Taiwan’s Employment Service Act (1992) and related administrative regulations to analyse how migrant workers are systematically excluded from effective protection of fundamental labour rights through iterative legal reproduction. The resulting condition of legal suspension is not a transitory stage en route to integration, but a durable and self-reinforcing structural norm. The article further argues that CGC’s theory of affirmative legislative obligation (Vermeule, 2022) offers a normative basis for disrupting this structure: legislators cannot evade protective responsibilities through passive inaction, and constitutional orders must actively incorporate migrant workers as beneficiaries of the common good. Through a Taiwan–India comparative framework, the article reveals how cross-border labour mobility produces analogous liminal subjectivities across distinct legal regimes, and advances a methodological reflection on integrating liminality theory into constitutional jurisprudence.