Circular Migration: A Triple Win or a Dead End

Abstract

In recent years circular migration has been promoted in international circles as a triple win solution, bringing benefits to destination countries, origin countries and migrant workers themselves – and a major mechanism to reap development benefits of labour migration. This paper reviews issues relating to the conceptual basis of circular migration, the claimed benefits of circular migration, and its wider implications for migrant rights and protection, in particular those relating to low skilled workers. The paper distinguishes between ‘Spontaneous circular migration’ and ‘managed’ or ‘regulated’ circular migration programmes. Recent years have seen increasing interest in these managed programmes as a migration policy tool to address a number of sensitive and contentious issues of today’s international migration.The paper highlights the shallow basis of the ‘triple wins’ argument, based on a survey of literature and reviews of some temporary and circular migration programmes. The author argues that there are few real differences between temporary labour migration and circular migration movements/programmes to brand the latter as an innovative tool.The study finds that the benefits of circular migration have been highly exaggerated in recent discussions. There is little evidence to support that circular migration represents the natural preferences of most migrants. It is difficult to see migrant workers as winners in circular schemes since they have limited choice regarding the jobs, change of employers, timing of return, and family unification, among others. Countries of origin are hardly winners either, given the small quotas of legal migration opportunities provided, if any, and the large concessions they have to make to gain such quotas. The current model seems to make the destination countries winners in providing them ‘labour without people,’ or ‘circular migrants’ with ill-defined rights, making it easier for employers to exploit workers, and to engage in flexible hiring and firing, in line with economic and business conditions, and short term savings in integration costs.The paper concludes that overall there has been little progress in developing circular migration programmes with the predicted triple wins. There are some managed circular migration programmes of a pilot nature, which are small in scale and unlikely to make any significant development impact in source countries facing problems of high unemployment, poverty and lack of decent work.The paper argues that the main focus of the debate on circular migration should be on its role as a mechanism for expanding legal avenues for workers from developing countries to destination countries rather than on diaspora engagement with home countries as interpreted by some researchers. Managed circular migration programmes are only one of the options – and hardly the best option – for expanding legal migration avenues. A comprehensive approach should look at permanent migration programmes to address permanent or long-term labour shortages induced by demographic and other factors, regular labour admission programmes with guaranteed rights for workers on a par with national workers, improved seasonal worker programmes, and other options in addition to circular migration. The author concludes that the foundation of any such programmes is respect, promotion and realization of human and labour rights of migrant workers in line with international instruments, which can deliver the promised wins. At the same time, the limited role that labour migration can play in economic and social transformation of countries of origin needs to be recognized.