ABSTRACT
Temporariness is but one of the three components of the ideology of temporary labour migration, but focusing on this criterion alone has explanatory power in analysing the divergence in contemporary programmes between our example states. In the USA, where migrant rights have the longest and most sophisticated history of political contestation and where illegal migration is vastly higher than in the other three states, temporariness predominated long before the current surge (Durand, Massey, and Parrado 1999). Illegal migration provides a pool of workers with even fewer rights protections than temporary workers. In Australia, the surge in low-skilled temporary work is almost completely hidden, reflecting the long-standing (and atypical for Western democracies) consensual approach to migration management that marks Australian party politics. In Canada, relative transparency about rights restrictions based on skill level has attracted the most intense scholarly critique of these three countries (Preibisch 2007; Carens 2008; Fudge and MacPhail 2009). Finally, in the UK, where EU expansion has fractured the linkage between temporariness and low-skilled admissions, the immigration system has undergone a full-scale overhaul, with responses ranging from High Court review of permanent migration caps to crisis rhetoric (Casciani 2010; Guardian [UK] 2010).
