SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Though a global phenomenon, guest-worker programs have not yet been analyzed in broad regional comparison. Examining the temporary labor migration schemes in the areas where they have taken strongest hold – Southern Africa, North America, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia – this paper sets out a set of propositions about guest-worker patterns within the global flows of migrant labor since the late nineteenth century. It isolates the characteristics distinctive to this mode of temporary labor migration, identifies its inherent contradictions, and develops a typology of the forms guestworker programs can take based on the ways foreign labor is integrated into a national economy (core-industrial, regional-supplemental, national-supplemental, near total, marginal) and on the type of state-society relationship in which this occurs (colonial, settler, autochthonous, rentier, and isolate).