International Migration Review

Most West European countries recruited guest-workers (temporary labor migrants) to fuel the postwar boom. The significance of this flexible and mobile labor source is examined for six countries. The dynamics of the migratory process led to family reunification and settlement, against the original intentions of the workers, employers and states concerned. The recruitment of guest-workers stopped after 1974, but many migrants stayed on, becoming permanent ethnic minorities, in a situation of economic and social crisis. It is argued that guest-worker systems inevitably lead to permanent migration in the long run, and that it is better to plan for orderly settlement through appropriate policies.

This article examines the history of Italian stonecutters from Valle Cervo, an alpine village in Piedmont, Italy. These migrants comprised a wave of temporary emigration to the United States between 1870 and 1915. The migration paths followed by these artisans demonstrates the close connection among their various migrations, settlements and opportunities for employment in the eastern United States. The reconstruction of the histories of individual emigrants, utilizing Italian and American sources, census records, trade-union press and private documents, provides some insight into the experiences of these stonecutters and their social networks.

This article explores the relationship between government expenditure and labor immigration in the Arab Gulf states. This relationship was close and positive during the rapid growth of the 1970s. Using Kuwait as a case study, trends in immigrant labor movements over the period 1981–85 are considered in detail. This analysis shows that the current economic downturn, reflecting the collapse of the world oil prices, has not resulted in the large scale re-export of foreign labor which was envisaged. The reasons for this foreign labor retention are considered and the authors speculate on future migration trends in the region.

Foreign nationals comprise 60 percent of the population and 78 percent of the labor force in Kuwait. The government there seeks to reduce the dependancy on foreign workers and is designing several policies to attain this goal. Structural analysis of the labor force indicates that 62 percent of Kuwaiti males are concentrated in administrative and service occupations while their percentage in sales and production work has declined during 1970–80. This demonstrates the need for reorienting educational/training programs and changing Kuwaiti attitudes towards manual work to ensure the realization of the “Kuwaitization” process, and balance the nationals with foreign nationals.

The empirical results for the causes of the migration flows from Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal and Turkey to the EC-destination countries show that determinants which are used to explain migration flows inside a given country can be applied to the migration flows within a Common Market, but not to international migration flows. International migration flows are demand-determined by the existence of restrictive immigration control systems. The demand for immigrants in the destination country is the decisive condition for the phenomenon of international labor migration, and the supply of migration-willing workers is only a necessary condition.

The few studies which have been carried out on foreign seasonal workers in France, only take into account the annual inflows of seasonal immigrants. This present article covers two other aspects of the problem: the seasonal nature of immigration in general, and above all the role of permanent immigrant workers in certain sectors influenced by seasonal changes.

In the past ten years, the British West Indies Temporary Alien Labor Program has received widespread judicial and legislative support and criticism. While sugar and apple producers who import West Indians argue that domestic labor is insufficient to harvest their crops, labor organizations and their supporters maintain that domestic labor is adequate. The resulting legal disputes focus primarily on the issue of whether or not West Indians are displacing U.S. workers or undermining wage rates and working conditions. This article examines the relationships among legal issues surrounding the program, the U.S. farm labor market, and the Jamaican peasantry. It argues that continued imports of foreign labor during times of high domestic unemployment, as well as the varied factors which underlie the continued willingness and ability of Jamaican peasant households to supply workers to U.S. producers, can be most clearly understood from an international and historical perspective, rather than focussing on the needs and problems of any one nation.

In recent years, overseas workers from Asia have been sending remittances of about $8 billion annually to their home countries. These remittances are an important source of precious foreign exchange for the major labor-exporting countries. The overall development impact of remittances, however, has not been well established. Remittances are spent primarily on day-to-day consumption expenditures, housing, land purchase, and debt repayment. Although only a small proportion of remittances are directed into productive investments, this does not warrant the conclusion that the developmental value of remittances is negligible. In fact, remittances spent on domestic goods and services in Asia ¹ provide an important stimulus to indigenous industries and to the economies of the labor supplying countries.

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Our working definition of Asia thus does not include the countries of that region called West Asia which contains Turkey, a major labor exporter.

This article highlights important developments in the character of temporary worker flows to Canada between 1973 and 1985 through the use of unpublished data and new measures for analyzing this data. The number of employment authorizations are converted to person years to indicate the overall labor market impact of temporary worker flows and this measure is employed in an analysis of unpublished data from Employment and Immigration Canada. The analysis reveals that a significant and growing proportion of employment authorizations are exempted from governmental procedures which link the admission of temporary workers to the Canadian labor market. In many cases, these exempt documents are being authorized for social and humanitarian programs (e.g., refugee claimants, in-Canada immigrant claimants). As a result, the actual “labor recruitment” component of these authorizations is considerably less than interpreted from published statistics of employment authorizations. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.

This presentation describes the development of migration to and from Western Europe and seeks to determine to what extent such immigration and return migration movements are influenced by governmental action and regulation.

U.S. job and spatial mobility are compared here for recent returnee migrants from two Mexican areas — Rio Grande, Zacatecas, in the interior; and Nueva Rosita-Muzquiz, Coahuila, near the U.S. border. Results suggest that the interior migrants fit a hierarchical migrant model: they move up the urban hierarchy from U.S. rural areas to towns and cities, experiencing substantial job mobility at first, but little after reaching the urban sector. Border migrants fit a shuttle migrant model: they return to the same job and place year after year, experiencing little or no spatial and occupational mobility, although they tend to hold somewhat higher status jobs.

This article uses within-year apprehensions data to test the economic determinants of Mexican undocumented immigration to the United States. These data are highly seasonal and within-year border patrol apprehensions suggest that this seasonality is not solely due to changes in border patrol enforcement. The results from this study are similar to those of earlier studies which used annual apprehensions data.

Temporary worker policy in the United States traditionally has been advocated as a means to meet shortages for labor — a demand problem. Over the past decade, however, there has been support for the use of such policies as a means of addressing illegal immigration — a supply problem. Despite the fact that experiences show that such endeavors actually foster illegal immigration, the drive for immigration reform in the 1980s was seriously encumbered with a variety of attempts both to expand existing and to add new temporary worker programs. This article reviews the evolution of temporary worker policy and indicates how efforts to admit more temporary workers complicated the immigration reform process. Indeed, it was not until the major temporary worker proposals were finally removed from the Simpson-Rodino Act — by the adoption of a highly controversial “second amnesty” program (i.e., the Schumer Amendment) — that passage of legislation was achieved. Because this program functioned as a bargaining chip in the effort to establish a system of employer sanctions, it is unlikely that this expedient measure will set a precedent for future replication. Hence, it can be anticipated that efforts will eventually be made to revive temporary worker policy and, in the process, rekindle the debate over this contentious issue.