Guest Workers Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Guest workers are people who sell their labor in a country other than their country of citizenship. As the term implies, guest workers are different from immigrants in that guest worker s are in a host country strictly to work and are expected to eventually return to their home country. The term also implies that the temporary migration is voluntary.

Although various historical forms of temporary migration could be described as examples of guest workers, contemporary usage of the term generally refers to explicit policies that facilitate temporary migration for labor purposes, often bilateral agreements between sending and receiving states. Examples include Mexican agricultural workers in the United States under the bracero program from 1942 to 1964,West Germany recruiting guest workers from Italy and the Mediterranean (especially Turkey) from the mid-1950s to 1973, and Persian Gulf oil-exporting states utilizing large numbers of Asian guest workers from the midto late 1970s to the present.

Political Economy Of Guest Workers

States seek guest workers for a variety of reasons, a prime motivation being a shortage of labor at particular skill levels for a particular wage. This could be a lack of unskilled workers willing to take up what is often referred to as “3D” work—difficult, dirty, and dangerous—at a relatively low wage, or a lack of highly skilled workers able to meet the demands of particular industries, such as information technology or health care.

While the demand for guest workers is often driven by market forces, it is essential to recognize how guest workers are often a form of “unfree labor” exempt from market determination of wages and working conditions. In a well-functioning labor market, where workers are free to leave their current job in search of better conditions elsewhere and employers have the recourse to hire and fire workers, workers and employers are, in a sense, in a constant negotiation over wages and working conditions. In contrast, many guest workers are severely limited in their ability to contest the conditions of their employment, as they are legally obligated to honor a contract made with a specific employer, usually for a specific period of time. Contracts and/or work visas essentially render the guest worker a captive of the employer, with the worker having a choice only between, on the one hand, continued employment under conditions provided for in the contract, or, on the other hand, leaving the country, often with financial penalties. While it could be argued that workers are free to negotiate contracts before departure to a recipient country, there are significant information asymmetries involved, especially for workers with no overseas experience.

Another common concern about guest worker programs is the possibility they will lead to permanent migration. While guest worker programs are consciously designed as a form of labor supplementation that is short of permanent migration, history demonstrates that liberal societies are reluctant to cross the invisible line of denying basic civil liberties and human rights that would be required to locate and forcibly deport guest workers who have overstayed the conditions of their employment.

Host Country Policies

A good example of the above phenomenon is the West German guest worker program that formally ended in 1973 after the first oil shock. West Germany had begun recruiting seasonal guest workers for agriculture in the 1950s, but by the 1960s the rapidly growing export economy led to recruitment of guest workers for industrial production. The guest worker program was designed to have workers rotate by going home after a year or two and did not encourage family reunification in Germany. However, guest workers learned that rotation could be delayed with the help of employers and that relatives of current guest workers could be requested by name through their employers. After the 1973 OPEC-induced oil shock, the global economy slowed and West Germany ended the formal program of guest worker recruitment. However, in the following decades, the West German government came to realize that even offering financial incentives to leave would do little to reduce the guest worker population, which in the early twenty-first century remains relatively large in Germany.

There have been suggestions that the United States should embrace some sort of guest worker program as a way to deal with undocumented migrants from Mexico, but it is doubtful that such a program would actually succeed in maintaining a fixed level of rotating guest workers. Much more likely is a repeat of the German experience, where guest workers eventually become permanent residents. When this happens, the guest workers, and their descendants, face some longer-term problems, including the lack of eligibility for citizenship, children being born and raised in the host country, and identity issues. States that are not committed to a liberal identity and liberal values, such as the oil-exporting states of the Persian Gulf, are much more likely to maintain an effective guest worker program and to discourage permanent migration.

Remittances And Welfare-enhancing Effects

While much attention is paid to the policies of receiving states, it is important to recognize that sending states often have an explicit policy of encouraging guest worker migration. The paradigmatic example is the Philippines, with some eight million Filipinos having migrated (nearly 10 percent of the population). Many other Asian states and an increasing number of Latin American states have more or less explicit policies to support, encourage, and sustain emigration. The primary reason that less-developed countries encourage emigration is the promise of remittances—money that migrants send home to family and friends. Remittances are a particularly valuable form of external finance, because they are in the form of hard currency. They are stable in that remittance income does not decline in a financial crisis in the sending state, and, unlike loans or foreign direct investment, there are no corresponding future foreign claims on state finances.

Economists generally think of migration, whether permanent or temporary, as welfare enhancing for both sending and receiving countries. A particular economic argument for the increase of guest workers relates to the declining fertility rates and aging populations of many wealthy countries like Italy and Japan. Migration of guest workers to these economies would provide more economically active workers to help support the social welfare programs from which an older, retired population receives income in pay-as-you-go taxation systems. However, economic logics do not capture the full complexity of societal reactions to large numbers of guest workers in receiving countries. Additionally, a static analysis of the immediate benefits of migration for sending and receiving states does not address the dynamic long-term effects of sending countries losing skilled workers either temporarily or permanently.

Bibliography:

Castles, Steven, and Mark J. Miller. The Age of Migration. 3rd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Hollifield, James F. “France: Republicanism and the Limits of Immigration Control.” In Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, edited by Wayne Cornelius,Takeyuki Tsuda, Phillip L. Martin, and James F. Hollifield, 183–214. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Kapur, Devesh, and John McHale. Give Us Your Best and Brightest:The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World. Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development, 2005.
Koser, Khalid. International Migration: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Pritchett, Lant. Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on Global Labor Mobility. Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development, 2006.
Rupert, Mark, and M. Scott Solomon. Globalization and International Political Economy: The Politics of Alternative Futures. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.

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