Population Research Discovery Seminars

Co-Sponsor(s):

Population Health Initiative

Evans School of Public Policy & Governance

With the rightward turn of governments in migrant-receiving countries, policy approaches to labor immigration have shifted from an emphasis on labor market integration to the punitive enforcement of controls against migrant workers who are undocumented or otherwise out of status.  These hardline policy approaches have sharply augmented the precarity of an already precarious workforce, but in the context of increasingly tight labor market conditions, they have also cut against employer investment in workforce development and worker retention.  To address industry concerns, many governments are quietly developing temporary migrant worker frameworks to import the labor that many industries depend on. These proposals aim to provide migrant-dependent sectors with a labor force that sufficient but deportable, building the precarity that drives down working conditions into the policy structures governing migration. But in doing so, these proposals may also create new and unexpected challenges labor management, affecting core functions such as the design of organization of production, skill-development, workforce renewal, and innovation.

 

Many of the emergent temporary labor proposal bear a striking resemblance to systems for the importation and use of migrant labor already well-established in the GCC.  This paper turns to the case of Qatar to analyze the implications of temporary labor frameworks for labor management.  In Qatar, where over 90 percent of the workforce is migrant, the legal structure reduces migrants to their function as labor, affording them only limited political rights, curtailing their access to the labor market, and ensuring that they are permanently deportable. This paper focuses in on the ways that Qatar’s temporary migrant labor system has structured both economy-wide and industry-specific labor processes and labor management strategies, specifically looking at approaches to production, skill, and workforce development.  It shows how those labor management practices shape working conditions, restrict worker voice, and determine workers’ ability to shape their immigration and career pathways.  It argues that the full implications of temporary labor policies for migrants grow out of the ways that industry tailors its labor management strategies to respond to restrictive immigration controls.

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Natasha N. Iskander, James Weldon Johnson Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service, conducts research on the relationship between migration and economic development. She looks at the ways that immigration and the movement of people across borders can provide the basis for the creation of new knowledge and of new pathways for political change. She has published widely on these questions, looking specifically at immigration, skill, economic development, infrastructure, and worker rights, with more than 40 articles and book chapters on these topics.  Her first book, Creative State: Forty Years of Migration and Development Policy in Morocco and Mexico (Cornell University Press, ILR imprint, 2010), looked at the ways that migrant workers transformed the economic development policies of their countries of origin. It received the International Studies Association – Distinguished Book Award in Ethnicity, Nationalism and Migration Track and was a Social Science Research Council—Featured Publication. Her most recent book, Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st Century Qatar and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2021), examines the use of skill categories to define political personhood, in ways that have become increasingly salient with the hardening borders and the pressures of climate change. It received the 2022 American Sociological Association — Sociology of Development Best Book Award, the 2022 American Sociological Association — Labor and Labor Movements Best Book Award, and the 2022 American Collegiate Schools of Planning John Friedmann Book Award.

Her current project focuses on concrete — the second most used substance on the planet (second only to water) and responsible for close to a tenth of all carbon dioxide emissions globally — as a material lens to examine at the relationship between climate change, migration, urbanization, and the future of work.