Trading migration? Explaining mobility provisions in preferential trade agreements

Notwithstanding a generally unfavorable political climate regarding international migration, preferential trade agreements (PTAs) increasingly include provisions facilitating the temporary movement of specific categories of workers. Today, approximately seven in ten newly concluded PTAs contain clauses that enable the mobility of workers and businesspeople—particularly business visitors and intra-corporate transferees, who constitute a substantial share of skilled temporary migration in advanced industrial economies. This trend is striking given states’ longstanding emphasis on preserving sovereign control over migration policy. This article investigates the drivers of mobility provisions in PTAs and the implications for broader economic and migration policy. We develop and test three theoretical logics: (1) a trade logic grounded in interests resulting from economic interdependence; (2) a politics logic centered on migration control objectives; and (3) an institutional logic emphasizing path dependence and diffusion. Drawing on the MITA dataset, which codes mobility provisions in PTAs globally from 1960 to 2020, we find that economic interdependence and institutional path dependence are the primary forces behind mobility provisions, while migration control prerogatives have little explanatory power for either the presence, scope, or depth of these provisions. Our findings underscore the economic rationale behind mobility provisions in trade agreements, highlighting a pattern of selective liberalization for highly skilled workers and an increasingly fragmented landscape of migration governance.