Citizenship and autonomy: Bilateral labour migration governance and its discontents in Malawi, Mexico, and Spain, 1919–75

During the 1930s, the International Labour Organization sought to establish standards for bilateral labour migration agreements on separate but parallel colonial and nation-state tracks. I interrogate the ramifications of these discussions across the subsequent half-century, integrating global structural scales of analysis with migrants’ perspectives on the ground. First, I trace the concept of the ‘temporary migrant worker’ in the bilateral migration agreements signed in the 1930s to the 1960s between Spain and France; Nyasaland (later renewed by independent Malawi) and South Africa; and Mexico and United States. I then show how common post-war ideas and pressures led Mexico, Spain, and Nyasaland/Malawi to invest local authorities with substantial control over emigration and deprioritize migrants’ comfort and safety. Migrant-generated sources, notably letters, petitions, and oral histories, point to a resultant convergence of experience unanticipated by international policy discourses: migrants coming to perceive their own states as a primary barrier to progress, dignity, and autonomy.