State labor sponsorship: The role of nation state regulation in undermining migrant employment standards

Abstract

Temporary worker programs are on the rise both across the globe and particularly within the United States. Established research focuses upon the impact of immigration policies as well as outcomes for migrant communities within the labor market. In contrast, my work draws attention to the population of citizen-workers who participate in cyclical migration patterns within transnational labor markets. My multi-site ethnography, consisting of 109 interviews with US guest workers, oil industry employers, and Indian labor brokers, evaluates the impact of temporary worker programs on migration patterns from India to the Middle East to the United States. (In this article, I use the counter-naming of the Middle East as Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA). I avoid use of colonial terminology such as Middle East to refer to the countries in the region of North Africa and West Asia. The language is archaic and perpetuates the historic referencing of Europe as the central geographic reference point.). In particular, the study evaluated a multi-country migrant recruitment chain to address the question: How does the non-citizen visa situate migrants as global labor within the transnational economy? Findings identify that non-citizen visa pathway is a contemporary mode of governance through which labor is traded among third parties. The article outlines the complicity of nation-state regulation in shaping limited economic outcomes for migrants within cyclical multi-country labor markets.