Provisional Futures: Migrants as wanted workers, yet temporary residents (TEMP MIGRATION)

TEMP MIGRATION lies at the intersection of migration research, the transforming world of work, and demographic and socio-cultural change. Globalization, digitalization and the COVID-19 pandemic have fundamentally changed labor markets and core processes of work. Against the widely circulated claim that future work will be largely automated, certain occupational sectors have proven indispensable – requiring on-site, human presence. Simultaneously, the scale and speed of demographic aging in industrialized countries and resulting labor shortages are striking.

The growing dependence on foreign labor to fill workforce gaps reflects prominent social currents worldwide: increased intake of temporary migrants, gradually restrictive migration regimes that constrain foreigners' rights to stay long-term, and – as a consequence – a concerning divide between those admitted permanently and those who are not. TEMP MIGRATION uses the lens of place-making and belonging in increasingly diverse socio-culturally spaces to carve out the subjectivities emerging among temporarily accepted labor migrants. We will analyze how states and employers design and produce temporariness and how this influences people’s rationales and actions in the context of their lives and experiences as temporary migrants. By capturing how time and temporariness shape orientations towards life in a foreign country the project seeks to reveal how these orientations result in practices that affect the receiving societies.

RQ 1

How does "being temporary" affect migrants' strategies and social practices in their country of residence, including investments in professional and social networks, in language acquisition, family formation, household decisions, and future planning?

RQ2

How do rationales regarding the place of living differ by industry and the "worth" migrants are accorded in a migratory regime of "skills" – exemplified by high-wage technology workers, (semi-)skilled health care workers, and low-wage construction workers – and differentiated by gender and race?

TEMP MIGRATION uses mixed qualitative methods to propose an integrative perspective on temporary labor migration on a global scale. It aims to advance theory building through an ethnographically-informed, qualitative study of temporary migrant-employing companies, migrant employees, and stakeholders to examine migrants' subjectivities while recognizing their reception by society and employers.

The project adopts an ethnographically-informed approach to understand how people make sense of their temporary lives as migrant workers in three countries with distinct migration regimes:

• Canada (external link)  (led by the Global Migration Institute, Toronto Metropolitan University)
• Switzerland (external link)  (led by ISEK Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich)
• Japan (external link)  (led by Institute of Asian Migrations, Waseda University)

Research networks include:

• Swiss Anthropological Association (SAA (external link) )
• European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), Network Anthropology and Mobility (ANTHROMOB (external link) )
• International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe (IMISCOE (external link) )
• Swiss Association of Migration and Mobility Studies (SAMMS (external link) )