Temporary migration: category of analysis or category of practice?

ABSTRACT

Temporariness has become an increasingly salient feature in international migration that presents itself as fragmented, non-linear, including different intermediate stops and multiple returns and new departures. This special issue proposes a new analytical framework that brings together the role of policies defining migrants as temporary and the role of migrant’s own agency in perceiving their migration project as temporary or permanent. The proposed analytical framework covers both low- and high-skilled, legal and irregular migratory flows, and different visa and citizenship regimes. This introduction starts by discussing the relationship between migration and time pointing to its multiple facets. The second section discusses temporary migration as a policy category looking at how it is regulated in more or less flexible regimes, including categories of temporary migrants that are not usually included in temporary migration debates, notably international students or working holiday makers. Section three turns to the lived experiences of migrants and the ways in which they conceptualise their migration (or their migration plans) as temporary or more long term, emphasising how these views can be also changing over time and through the actual migration experience. The final section brings the two strands together and presents the contents of this special issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration policy
• migrant agency
• temporary
• migration regimes
• skills

1. Introduction

International migration has been changing in a number of ways during the last two decades. It has increased in volume and in complexity as migrant pathways have both multiplied and diversified with new connections established in terms of migration flows between countries that were previously unrelated (WMR 2020, chapter 2). Migration paths have become fragmented and non-linear with multiple intermediate steps and transit points. Asylum seekers have travelled along the same routes as economic migrants and actually we speak today of mixed motivations rather than mixed flows acknowledging the complexity of migration drivers which can be both political and economic. At the same time immigration policies at main destination countries in Europe, North America and Australia have become increasingly restrictive and many countries have given preference to temporary or circular migration schemes (Triandafyllidou 2017). These have been seen as more appropriate for post-industrial economies where markets are volatile and factories are replaced by service platforms. Temporary migrant workers (whether employed in low skill jobs in tourism, catering, agriculture or care or in highly skilled occupations as engineers, sales managers or scientists) can be seen as the just-in-time, flexible, and dynamic labour force appropriate for a polarised labour market. In addition, while highly skilled workers are generally welcomed by destination countries, with special conditions for family reunification and settlement, low skilled workers are accepted only temporarily to cover specific labour shortages, ‘circulating’ between origin and destination country as necessary, so that the latter avoids the social and economic ‘costs’ of integration.

This turn towards temporary migration has attracted the attention of a number of scholars who have reviewed critically the impact of such temporary migration policies on migrant workers and their families (Chau 2020; Bélanger and Silvey 2019). Claudia Tazreiter (2019) and Nicola Piper (Piper 2010a, 2010b; Piper and Withers 2018) among others have highlighted the deficit in rights that temporary migration policies create for migrant workers and their families, forcing them into precarious status for long periods of time. Bélanger and Silvey (2019) have focused on how the very temporary status of migrant domestic and care workers creates different types of immobility (social, economic) for them. Other studies have pointed to the temporary migrants’ resilience and entrepreneurial spirit leading to the emergence of ethnic economies even under precarious status (Muniandy and Bonatti 2014). Specific labour market sectors like agriculture have been characterised by a permanent temporariness of the workers even if the need for them has been long term and structural and so has their presence in specific regions (McLaughlin 2010; Strauss and McGrath 2017; Corrado et al. 2018).

The role of intermediaries in regulating temporary migration has also attracted significant attention (Ogawa 2020; Bélanger and Silvey 2019) whether they acted as employment agencies, local brokers, or government representatives that regulated temporary and seasonal migration schemes (Gonzalez Enriquez 2013; Oke 2012; McLaughlin and Weiler 2016). This literature has pointed to important issues in the way migration is governed today but has largely focused on low skill and precarious workers in specific sectors such as agriculture or care work, neglecting to address temporary migrants in the skilled and highly skilled categories, who may also face important deficits in terms of rights and hurdles in their transition to a long-term status. This is typically the case of international students in Canada (Scott et al. 2015; Kenyon, Frohard-Dourlent, and Roth 2012) or also that of high-flying professionals (Sandoz 2019) or artists (Bei 2014; Kiwan and Meinhof 2011; Moravcsik 2010, 2013; Shepard 2010; Wilson 2010).

In addition to the literature specifically on temporary migration, an important strand of research that contributes to understanding temporary migration dynamics is that of migrant decision-making and agency. Such research has focused on the interplay between motivation, opportunity and ability to migrate under specific policy constraints (Koikkalainen and Kyle 2016; Koikkalainen, Kyle, and Nykänen 2019; Belloni 2016; Bal 2014; Carling and Schewel 2017; Collins 2017; Bivand Erdal and Oeppen 2017; Nakache, Pellerin, and Veronis 2015; Triandafyllidou 2019; Kuschminder 2018). This literature is inspiring but has largely focused on irregular migration (which might be by definition temporary) without addressing the role of agency in temporary regular migration more specifically.

This special issue comes to build on these different lines of research, proposing a new analytical framework that brings together the role of policies defining migrants as temporary and the role of migrant’s own agency in perceiving their migration project as temporary or permanent. The proposed analytical framework is conceived taking into account both low-skill and high-skilled, legal and irregular migratory flows, and also different visa and citizenship regimes, acknowledging the role that enhanced regional mobility regimes (such as the right to free movement within the European Union for EU citizens). We also take into account the fact that migration journeys may involve (temporary) return and remigration towards a new destination, putting together a chain of temporary migration steps. The overall aim of this Special Issue and of the proposed analytical framework is to highlight the interplay between the lived reality and the policy and legal concepts on temporary migration, and point out to the tensions and contradictions inherent in the latter.

Contributions to this Special Issue bring together different countries (both origin and destination) and world regions (notably Albania, Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, Germany, Ethiopia, Italy, Nepal, Spain, Taiwan), and investigate different skill levels within the wider temporary migration framework (care and domestic workers, less skilled manual workers, international students, highly skilled professionals and global artists). The papers by Irina Isaakyan, and Katie Kuschminder focus on temporary migration as a category of practice analysing the lived experience of temporary migrants in very different situations, notably of elite migrant artists and return migrants. The second set of papers by Sabrina Marchetti, Giulia Garofalo and Anna di Bartolomeo, and by Richa Shivakoti, analyse the role of intermediaries and their interaction with state actors in regulating temporary migration, while the third set of papers by Marshia Akbar, and by Chris Wright, Dimitria Groutsis and Annika Kabel investigate critically the relevant policies regulating temporary migration, notably in two countries of permanent migration par excellence, notably Canada and Australia. The analysis and comparison among such different countries and ‘migration systems’ contributes to further refining the proposed analytical typology of temporary migration.

This introductory paper starts by discussing the relationship between migration and time pointing to its multiple facets. The second section discusses temporary migration as a policy category looking at how it is regulated in more or less flexible regimes, including categories of temporary migrants that are not usually included in temporary migration debates, notably international students or working holiday makers. Section three turns to the lived experiences of migrants and the ways in which they conceptualise their migration (or their migration plans) as temporary or more long term, emphasising how these views can be also changing over time and through the actual migration experience. The final section brings the two strands together and presents the contents of this special issue.

2. The temporal dimension in migration

Before discussing temporary migration, I would like to delve a little deeper into the relationship between time and migration (Cwerner 2001). Time is a sociocultural construct and different societies have not only different calendars but also different concepts of time, for what concerns the pace of work or sociality. These differences become visible when people move to a new country, they structure the experience of the migrant who may feel as alien in their new environment, unfamiliar with the new rhythms of social and working life (the time for work and for leisure, the time of meals, the patterns of day and night that may vary and may even relate to the climate of a given country, see also Sorokin 1964).

Moving to a new country makes time more palpable and relevant in more than one ways: it intensifies the importance of memories, triggers nostalgia, longing for the earlier times when the migrant was at the country of origin, at ‘home’. Migration is also by definition forward looking: it involves expectations from the migration project (of achieving specific goals) and plans (whether to stay or return). In migration, time may be experienced in particularly stressful ways because it is defined by others – whether these are employers that define the working time, or institutions that set the pace of public life, of holidays or festivities; or other people that set the pace of socialising in one’s free time. In other words, in migration time may be experienced as heteronomous (Cwerner 2001, 20) because determined by others, and may be lived as alienating. It should be noted though that today the capacity that technology offers to connect and interact across distance, compressing thus both time and space can also counteract those effects as it allows for migrants to take back control of their socio-cultural time, and to feel embedded in their context of origin through advanced information and communication technologies that allow them to be virtually present, even if actually absent from the place of origin.

Beyond the multiple connections between time and migration, temporality shapes and frames the migration experience. First of all, time in migration is a legal concept: it defines who is legitimately present at the destination country and under what status: migrants may be admitted temporarily (e.g. as temporary foreign workers or international students, or people in need of international protection) or as long-term residents (notably as permanent residents, or family members of residents or citizens). Second, the time that a migrant spends at the destination country is a crucial factor that affects their acquiring a long-term resident status and eventually citizenship if they wish. So, time has also a political significance. From a socio-economic perspective, recent research has focused on the permanent or protracted temporariness that characterises different migration regimes such as those of seasonal migrant workers in agriculture or tourism (Curtain et al. 2018), contract labourers in fixed term positions (Cook-Martin 2019), circular migrants (Triandafyllidou 2013), and different categories of ‘working holiday makers’ (Robertson 2014). Pushing forward the boundaries of these studies, in this Special Issue, we investigate the interplay between policy regulations and migrant agency in different types of temporary migration. While we do not specifically address the conceptual relationship between time and migration, we contribute to this line of research by showing how temporary migration is classified in policy and experienced from the point of view of the migrant.

3. An analytical framework for making sense of temporariness in migration

In this section I would like to propose a matrix for analysing temporary migration that brings together its function as a policy category and its reality as a lived experience of (temporary) migrants. I use the term migration but recognising that people may have mixed motivations fleeing both poverty and insecurity, I include in the discussion people seeking international protection because of violence or conflict in their country of origin. In developing this analytical matrix, I am focusing, on one hand, on the role of the state or of international conventions that regulate migration and define the conditions of entry and stay. I propose to distinguish thus among forced temporariness (refugees, people seeking temporary international protection); regulated temporariness: people who come as seasonal or temporary migrants for a limited period of time; and flexible temporariness: people who can circulate relatively freely within a given world region – within what is called ‘an enhanced mobility regime’ (such as the EU, or Mercosur for instance).

On the other hand, I am looking at the expectations, plans and experiences of migrants themselves distinguishing among intentional and planned temporariness, unplanned and open-ended (where the initial intention was that of a temporary stay but the possibility of a longer stay was also contemplated) and befallen temporariness where the migrant is seeking for an opportunity to stay but the migration visas available to them do not allow for a long-term stay. Table 1 presents the possible combinations of temporariness as a policy category and as a category of practice, and within the boxes I offer relevant examples. Naturally there can be ambivalence and nuances within each box to the extent that a temporary migrant (e.g. a temporary foreign worker or international student) may prolong their stay by obtaining a permit of long duration and transition to permanent residency. Similarly, someone who initially planned to stay and was allowed to do so – for instance an EU citizen living and working in another European country – may opt for returning to their country of origin even if they are allowed to stay indefinitely.

Table 1. Analytical matrix of temporariness in migration.

Policy / Lived Experience	Planned and intentional	Unplanned but open-ended	Befallen (intention is different)
Regulated temporariness	International student Migrant farmworker Migrant domestic or care worker	Intra-company transferee	Migrant domestic or care worker, migrant farmworker
Flexible temporariness	Intra-EU migrant or migrant worker within Mercosur or ASEAN	High-skilled temporary worker under a privileged visa regime
Forced temporariness			Asylum-seeker or recipient of temporary protection

3.1. Temporary migration as a policy category

This matrix does not imply that every migrant seeks to stay permanently at the country of destination. It rather seeks to point to the complexities of analysing temporary migration as the formal categories do not correspond to their initial design, and similarly the migrants’ initial projects or expectations shift over time. Let me however elaborate here on these different types of temporariness.

Relevant scholarly literature on temporary migration has typically focused on the category that I label as regulated temporariness. Indeed regulated temporariness is a legal and policy construct that seeks to govern tightly the conditions of entry and stay of aliens in a given country. Regulated temporariness typically reflects the scope of entry (e.g. to undertake a course of study or professional qualification, or to fill a labour position that is defined as temporary) and involves limited rights. Regulated stay for international students or for trainees or researchers pursuing a higher degree may seem clear cut. By contrast when regulated temporariness concerns employment, the nature of this temporariness is ambivalent. The job may be temporary either because the nature of the work is such, notably seasonal work in agriculture, or tourism; or because the regulator anticipates that this is a temporary labour market shortage. There are two caveats here however. A seasonal job is temporary in duration within the year but is long-term in its nature in the sense that the same shortage and the same need for temporary labour migration will repeat every year – in that sense this is a permanent temporary or a circular migration movement that we are talking about. Typically, this is the case of agriculture, fisheries, or tourism. The second caveat is that a labour market shortage may be defined as temporary with a view to filling it under very specific conditions, presumably unfavourable to the worker. Regardless whether the jobs filled are seasonal or not, a regulated temporary migration scheme involves limited rights for the workers as typically their position would be to some extent tied to a specific job offer, employer or labour market sector, and their socio-economic rights limited. In addition, a temporary labour migration scheme may arise form a reluctance to accept the socio-demographic change that long-term migration can bring through the settlement of a migrant population at the destination country. Through regulated temporary schemes, migrants are prevented from bringing their families and settling for good. This was the case of guest-worker schemes in post-war Germany, or of current temporary work schemes in the United Arab Emirates (Cook-Martin 2019).

Time is an important dimension in regulated temporariness because it is also a prerequisite for transitioning, if one wishes, to another migration status. Thus, for instance, a working holiday maker in Australia (a working holiday 417 visa holder) can apply for a second 12-month visa if they work for at least 88 consecutive days in ‘specified work’ in ‘regional Australia’ – where specified work includes plant and animal cultivation, fishing and pearling or mining and construction, and regional Australia refers to a broad geographical space where skills shortages are identified (Robertson 2014, 1919–1920). An international student in Canada on the other hand, can obtain a post-graduate work permit for two years during which they need to demonstrate at least one year of full-time work experience in a skilled occupation to fulfil the requirements of Canadian Experience Class and apply for permanent residency (see also Akbar 2022 in this volume).

Flexible temporariness refers to the increased emergence of enhanced mobility regimes which allow for citizens from different countries to circulate and engage into education, employment or other activities freely within a wider region. Such regional mobility regimes usually arise from the recognition of social, economic and geopolitical ties among the countries and the wish to govern migration regionally through a common set of rules that facilitate free mobility. Usually, some provisions and obligations apply, such as registration with local authorities at destination, fulfilment of some requirements (such as having health insurance or registering with a local scheme, having a registered home address, and abiding by the host country’s labour and other regulations). Perhaps the most advanced such regional mobility scheme is that of the European Union (EU). In the case of the EU, the right to reside and work in another member State arises from the common EU citizenship that citizens of member States enjoy (as a function of their national citizenship in one member State). Thus, in this case, all relevant intra-EU mobility issues relate to EU citizens’ rights and their implementation in practice. Broader economic integration goals and trade liberalisation have played significant roles in the development of other mobility regimes such as that of ASEAN in southeast Asia (Jurje and Lavenex 2015), while for instance in the case of South American countries participating in Mercosur, there has been more emphasis on allowing all types of workers to move freely and benefit from social rights and security protection in host countries (Acosta Arcarazo and Geddes 2014).

Finally, the concept and policy category of forced temporariness aims to reflect a situation in which a person is forced to leave their country of origin because they need to seek protection elsewhere but where such protection is defined as temporary by the receiving country. This is typically the case of people receiving international temporary protection due to unrest or conflict at their country of origin but who are expected to return to their home country when the conflict ceases. This notion of forced temporariness as a policy category aims to reflect the regime of temporary protection, not the intention of the asylum-seeker.

The three types of temporariness as policy category demarcate different migration regimes and are instituted by different types of actors. Regulated temporariness is instituted by states in the effort to limit and closely define the conditions of stay of aliens living in its territory. Flexible temporariness reflects the joint decision of a number of countries to act together and institute a regional regime. Forced temporariness arises from international obligations to provide protection circumscribing it though as temporary. In regulated temporariness the considerations are predominantly economic in nature and reflect dynamics of the labour market and also of the higher education sector, while in flexible temporariness the considerations are broader and reflect a wider set of relationships and exchanges that exist among a set of countries.

3.2. Temporary migration as a category of practice

Looking at temporariness as a category of practice, the focus is on the relationship between temporary migration and migrant agency: is temporariness intentional, planned or befallen upon the migrant? Distinguishing between these three options, I want to emphasise that migrants, regardless of level of skills or migration status, exercise agency in important ways seeking to navigate obstacles and ‘use’ policies to achieve their migration objective (Triandafyllidou 2017, 2019). The distinction though may be characterised by a high level of volatility and ambivalence as intentions may not be well defined from the start, may change over time and may be shaped by existing opportunities and costs. Tazreiter (2019) points to the notion of ambivalence as a feeling, attenuation or attitude in response to shifting circumstances and experiences in the lives of temporary migrants. Axelsson, Malmberg, and Zhang (2017) point also to the ‘waiting zones’ in the lives of migrants where they decide to ‘wait’ intentionally so as to fulfil specific plans (for instance to improve their salary or qualifications) or requirements (for a certain period of work in a given sector so as to qualify for a different migration status) while planning their next steps. Such next steps may involve return, long term stay or remigration towards a third destination (see also Gemi and Triandafyllidou 2021). The distinction between planned/intentional temporariness, unplanned/open-ended and befallen (intention is different but the migrant is obliged to abide by a temporary migration status) needs to be appreciated in its complexity. The temporal element is multi-dimensional as it includes the objective or quantitative time (the number of months or years), the lived time (as time that is part of the migrant’s biography and sense of self and own trajectory), and the regulated time that is defined by the constraints placed on migrants by the state (Baubock 2011; Griffiths, Rogers, and Anderson 2013).

The life course perspective is particularly useful here as it allows to appreciate the context within which decisions are taken, in relation for instance to different life stages (e.g. studying, forming a family, acquiring a home, or preparing to retire) (Bailey and Mulder 2017; Axelsson, Malmberg, and Zhang 2017). Robertson (2014: 1918) points to the staggered time of temporary migration where several temporary phases make up a long-term migration project, which however remains ‘temporary’ from a legal status perspective. Such staggered temporariness creates vulnerability and precarity for both low- and high-skilled migrants. Robertson and Runganaikaloo (2014) investigate the experiences of international students in Australia who seek to transition to permanent status but find themselves obliged to adapt their life and education goals around changes in migration policy options available to them. In a recent set of studies on highly skilled migration, Bailey and Mulder (2017) explore the interaction between life course choices, host country, home country, migrants’ gender and ethnicity, opportunities for employment and labour migration policies. In either case it becomes clear that being highly skilled does not shield from precarity as temporary labour migration or study regimes push international students and highly skilled professionals often into a position of ‘modern labour nomads’ (Baubock 1998) in a middling position between exploited unskilled migrant workers and transnational knowledge elites (see also Isaakyan 2022 in this volume).

4. Contents of this special issue

Contributions to this Special Issue cast light to the above reflections through analysing different labour market sectors and types of migrants and bringing into dialogue the regulatory realities with the lived experiences of migrants. The first two contributions point to the interplay between temporariness as a policy category and as a category of practice: Irina Isaakyan (2022) in her paper on the management of temporariness by migrant opera singers focuses on elite migrants, those that are usually viewed as ‘permanent’: multi-lingual and educated, they are demanded by host labor-markets and, consequently, eligible for naturalisation schemes (Czaika 2018; Sassen 2010). She notes though that settlement (the symbol of permanence) may directly depend on their job contracts, while the nature of elite work makes them extremely transnational, thus conveying the temporariness of their presence at destination (Favell 2008). Based on 60 qualitative interviews with opera singers from the former Soviet bloc who rotate globally on temporary and seasonal contracts while, nevertheless, having their permanent homes in Italy or Germany, the paper highlights the different individual and collective strategies that these elite migrants develop with a view to shifting from regulated to flexible temporariness.

Katie Kuschminder (2022), in her paper on return and temporariness, looks at the temporal dimensions of return policies and return practices examining the imagining of return, decision-making for return, return visits, and return and reintegration experiences. The paper demonstrates the role of temporariness through the experiences of three different types of return migrants: assisted voluntary returnees (AVR) in Albania, participants of an IOM temporary return programme for knowledge transfer in Afghanistan and returning domestic workers and female professionals experiences of temporariness in return in Ethiopia. Returnees in Albania experience ‘imposed temporariness’ through the AVR programme, which limits their stay in the intended destination country; participants in the return programme experience ‘regulated temporariness’ as the duration of their return is regulated by the programme and cannot exceed three months, and the professional returnees to Ethiopia experience ‘flexible temporariness’ as they have the freedom to circulate between Ethiopia and their country of new citizenship. Finally, the domestic worker returnees to Ethiopia cross-sect these categories depending on the nature of their return. The paper thus assesses the different roles of temporariness in policy and practice across the experiences of these return migrants.

The following two contributions by Marchetti et al. (2022), and by Shivakoti (2022) elaborate on the role of intermediaries and their interaction with state actors in regulating temporary migration. Marchetti, Di Bartolomeo and Garofalo focus on migrant home-based care providers, comparing Germany and Taiwan. In the context of a growing marketisation of home-based care, the authors note that the precarious temporality of migrant care workers has become a fundamental characteristic of care provision. Private actors such as the for-profit agencies that promote temporariness in the transnational employment of migrant caregivers have come to occupy an important position in the regulation of temporary migration in this sector, strongly determining the temporary dimension of migration patterns and the employment and living conditions of the workers. Based on interviews with trade unionists, activists, experts and academics in Taiwan and Germany, the paper discusses the relationship between temporary migration – at the level of both policy and practice – and transnational agencies in two destination countries in which in-creasing care needs deriving from ageing populations are addressed with the recruitment of live-in migrant caregivers. The authors compare the German context, which represents a case of flexible temporariness, with the regulated temporariness that prevails in Taiwan highlighting how agencies occupy a central role.

Richa Shivakoti further elaborates on the role of intermediaries in the regulation of temporary migration in South Asia focusing specifically on the case of Nepal. Shivakoti takes a critical look at the dynamics behind regulated temporariness in a significant labour-sending country within Asia: Nepal, to understand how the state-society dynamics between the different actors in the migration policy network affects policies for temporary labour migrant workers and their rights. The regulation of temporary labour migration is dependent on the domestic actors and the migration policy environment of labour-sending countries, which plays a fundamental role as it can have noteworthy consequences for migrants. As labour migration has drastically increased, in volume and location, labour sending governments have had to increasingly rely on non-state actors, both domestically and internationally, to provide information, trainings, and services at home and abroad, and for rescue and repatriation. Understanding the different dynamics between the actors at the domestic level is now vital as migration policymaking often involves both state and societal actors in complex systems of mutual interactions. This article explores these relations between governmental actors, civil society organisations and private intermediaries, who are collectively behind the lucrative temporary labour migration industry and the regulation of temporary transnational labour migration.

The last two contributions elaborate on recent developments on regulated temporariness in two settler colonial countries, notably Canada and Australia. Marshia Akbar (2022) looks at the different types of regulated temporariness that have emerged in Canada since the late-2000s, as an increasing number of foreign workers have been admitted to the country with different types of temporary work permits. The rise of temporary migrants has been accompanied with a policy shift, from one-step to two-step immigration, to facilitate the retention of former temporary foreign workers and international graduates who had obtained Canadian work experience and credentials. Imposing specific eligibility requirements, the two-step model has created a relatively privileged class of high-skilled workers who have multiple pathways to transition to permanent residence, and a class of low-skilled workers who have limited to no options for transition. Using the analytical framework of regulated and flexible temporariness, the paper examines how unequal regulations are applied to govern the labour market participation and transition of these two groups of migrant workers. Low-skilled migrant workers are subjected to regulated temporariness as their labour rights, occupational and locational mobility, and pathways to permanent residency are restricted through strict regulations. For high-skilled migrant workers, on the other hand, temporariness is much more flexible as they can change their job, employer, workplace, occupation, as well as access social and citizenship rights by obtaining permanent status. Reviewing secondary sources, the analysis assesses how these different notions of temporariness are produced within the Canadian temporary migration programme and the two-step immigration model.

Chris Wright, Dimitria Groutsis and Annika Kaabel (2022) in their paper on Regulating Migrant Worker Temporariness in Australia: The Role of Immigration, Employment and Post-Arrival Support Policies examine Australia’s temporary migration regime paying attention to the ways in which migrant agency interacts with policy regulations. The study focuses on regulated temporariness under the temporary skilled visa, the Seasonal Workers Programme, working holidaymaker visa and international student visa schemes. The findings demonstrate that migrant temporariness is a form of insecurity driven not only by policies governing migrants’ entry and stay, as existing migration studies theories emphasise, but also by the insecurity of their employment and settlement.

This special issue does not include case studies on forced temporariness concerning asylum seekers or refugees and the ways in which they are classified by policy makers as receiving temporary protection until the situation improves in their country. While this type of forced temporariness is part of the proposed typology, it remains an area for future research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).