Abstract 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.
Julie M. Weise (Thu,) studied this question.