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In the last two decades, temporary worker programs have experienced an unprecedented expansion as instruments of what is defined as the migration management approach. Various migrant rights activists have voiced concerns about the treatment of temporary migrants in these programs and taken initiative to advance their rights. For some migrant rights advocates, it is the temporary nature of migration that is primarily responsible for the rights deficit. Yet, other migrant rights activists accept the temporariness of labour migration while trying to ensure that migrants receive legal protections for their work rights and that these protections are enforced. Trade unions are among the actors who try to protect and advance temporary migrants’ labour rights, but their role in supporting or challenging the principles of temporary migration governance has been neglected in the scholarly literature. The article addresses this gap by highlighting the divergent position of Canadian and Spanish Unions on temporariness of this type of migration. As the article argues, the difference is related to the following four factors: (1) the degree to which the unions in question are institutionally embedded in immigration policy-making, (2) the social environment (that is, discourses on temporariness advanced by other unions and grassroots organizations), (3) the degree of protectionism unions express vis-à-vis new immigrant flows and (4) whether regulated temporary migration is contrasted with permanent or unauthorized migration.

Deportability, or a threat of deportation, can be viewed as a technique of discipline employed to make migrant workers efficient and compliant. Under the threat of deportation, migrants accept dangerous, dirty, degrading and difficult jobs for low pay. Deportability also prevents them from challenging their working and living conditions either individually or collectively. Most of the literature on deportability applies to unauthorised migrants. Yet, as illustrated in this article, migrants employed legally on temporary contracts are also disciplined through a threat of deportation. While for unauthorised migrants, it is the receiving state that is the most important actor (re)creating the regime of deportability, for legally employed migrants, other actors––such as employers, the sending states, recruiters and international organisations––assume a more important role in employing the threat of deportation as a disciplinary technique. In this article, we explore how power is reproduced in this disciplinary regime of deportability. We examine migrants' responses to the techniques of discipline that subjugate them. We argue that when migrants adopt calculative and reflexive practices to avoid deportation and secure their own employment, they often end up reproducing the disciplinary power of the deportation regime

Questioning the notion of transit migration, the book examines factors that shape Central American migrants' mobility and immobility in the transnational space, comprised on Central American countries, Mexico, and the US.

This dissertation interrogates the links between immigration, citizenship, and social inequality by exploring temporary migrants' lived experiences of social exclusion in Manitoba. Based within a provincial context that supports temporary migrants' transitions to permanent residency through the Provincial Nominee Program, I examine how the promise of permanent settlement and a two-step immigration process influences migration decisions and the lived experiences that follow. Also, this dissertation highlights the ways in which temporary migrants find ways to exercise agency as they negotiate a complex migration system that is designed to exclude them. Drawing on twenty-six in-depth qualitative interviews and informed by a narrative methodology, I analyze accounts of temporary migrants who work in the hog processing industry in two rural communities. Using a theoretical lens informed by segmented labour market theory and citizenship theories, the dissertation reveals how processes of social exclusion are the outcomes of both labour market positions and legal exclusion from full membership in a nation-state. As a result, temporary migrants are positioned in an uncertain state of partial legal and social belonging. Theorizing the social effects of temporary migrants' location both in the labour market and in the complex matrix of legal statuses demonstrates the nuanced ways that temporary migrants understand how they can and do fit in Canadian society and make decisions based on such understandings. A significant empirical finding from this research is that having options for permanent residency is not a panacea for temporary migrants' unequal and marginalized social locations. In fact, the promise of permanent residency can contribute to an imbalance of power where employers have control over the futures of temporary migrants and their families. Pervasive effects of non-permanent status persist long after transitions to permanent resident status and are compounded by s