Temporary migration and inequalities in the Asian–European migration system

Abstract

Temporary migration (TM) has always been central in the global history of migration (Oltmer, 2016). In the 20th century, after the Second World War, the most common formof TM tookplace in the context of bilateralworker programs, such as the Bracero program between the United States and Mexico (Driscoll, 1999), the guest worker programs in Europe (Castles andKosack, 1973), or in the temporary recruitment of migrant workers, mostly from Asia, by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Battistella, 2015). While the guest worker schemes have been abandoned in Europe during the 1970s, which consequently led to a gradual decline of temporary labor movements, it expanded and continues to dominate population movements in the GCC and Asia. In comparison to these migration contexts, movements in the AsianEuropean system were, with few exceptions (e.g. migration from India and Pakistan to the UK), less significant and might have received, therefore, only modest research attention. The volumes edited by Pitk€anen et al. (2017, 2019), which compiled diverse studies on the two-way migration processes between Asia and Europe, are a notable exception. Some other studies have probed TM of specific migrant categories in the Asia-Europe migration system: European expatriates in China (Cai and Su, 2020), mobile academics returning to China (Wang, 2020), international students moving from Asia to Europe (Aksakal et al., 2019) and from Europe to Asia (Baas, 2019), or Thai berry-pickers working seasonally in Sweden and Finland (Niyomsilpa et al., 2017), have been scrutinized. Despite these efforts to understand the reasons for and the outcomes of TM, the question remains: what exactly is temporary migration?