He Came, He Saw, He Stayed. Guest Worker Programmes and the Issue of Non‐Return
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critics of guest worker programmes have pointed out that many temporary workers do not return home when their contracts expire and thus end up swelling the ranks of undocumented workers in a host country. This article argues that this outcome is not inevitable. Whether or not guest workers return home or stay behind depends to a large extent on how the guest worker programme is administered. By comparing the US Bracero Program with the Canadian Mexican Agricultural Seasonal Workers’ Program, it is shown that three aspects of programme administration account for why so many Braceros stayed in the US illegally, while almost all temporary workers employed in Canada return to Mexico at the end of the season. The three aspects are recruitment policies and procedures, enforcement of employment and housing‐related minimum standards, and the size of the programme. It is suggested that the administration of the programme, in turn, reflects various interests that shape the State’s position on foreign labour. Whereas in the US the Bracero Program was tailored to meet the needs of agribusinesses, the Canadian state responds to a wider variety of interests, including its own concern with the definition of ideal citizenship, as well as the need to protect domestic workers and the Mexican Government’s interest in assisting those who are most needy. Additionally, unlike the US, where braceros were employed mainly in agribusinesses, in Canada Mexicans are brought to work on family farms. While desertion was a frequent phenomenon in the US, the paternalistic relationships that Canada‐bound workers develop with their employers make desertion unlikely.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".