Hand on the spigot

The global spread of temporary migrant labor programs and the rise of a national-interventionalist model of migration management

Bibliographic Data

ID24217776
AuthorsNatasha Iskander (New York University—Wagner School of Public Service , New York, NY)
Year2026
Volume14
Issue4
Publication date2026-09-17
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMigration Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2049-5838 • E-ISSN: 2049-5846
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/migration/mnag054
LanguageEN
References cited28

Against a backdrop of anti-immigrant sentiment and a political wave pushing for the implementation of stricter, even draconian, immigration controls, governments around the world are initiating and even expanding programs to bring in migrant workers on a temporary basis. The proliferation of temporary migrant labor programs (TMLPs) suggests the emergence of new regime of global migration governance: a regime organized around the principle of instrumental temporariness, where people allowed to enter only as workers, to fulfill a specific economic function on a contingent basis. To get the measure of this trend and its policy implications, I conducted a global review of temporary migrant worker programs, compiling a database of 567 existing programs around the world and completing a content analysis of the policy design. I find that TMLPs share core features that equip governments to use migration policy as part of more muscular state intervention in the economy. This article argues that contemporary TMLPs constitute a policy architecture through which states can reassert interventionist control over production. TMLPs provide the state with policy tools to shape how firms and industries incorporate labor into their production systems and how they build in and value worker contributions. This essay concludes with an examination of how the growing use of TMLPs may reshape the status of labor in the economy, with particular attention to the role of skill in production and its relationship to economic justice.

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