A curious development is playing out in Europe today. At the same time as anti-migrant rhetoric and a politics of European nativism is on the rise across the continent, government schemes for the recruitment of foreign workers, often through short-term visas, are being expanded in a number of European states.
There is a further apparent paradox: some of the governments at the forefront of this trend are led by far-right parties that promote narratives of migrant “invasion,” traffic in moral panics of racial replacement, and implement ever more restrictive and cruel border policies targeting asylum seekers and so-called “illegal” migrants.
In Italy, for instance, the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni has approved quotas for the recruitment of 500,000 non-EU workers between 2026 and 2028, of which 267,000 will be in the form of seasonal work visas for sectors such as agriculture and tourism. Greece, under the center-right New Democracy government, signed a labor mobility agreement with Egypt in 2023, with the aim of bringing in Egyptian workers for seasonal jobs in agriculture and, soon, also in construction and tourism.
Even Hungary, which under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has enacted some of the harshest measures against migrants, has in recent years introduced a new legal framework for the temporary recruitment of foreign workers, with a quota set at 65,000 in 2024. These schemes are part of a broader trend. In 2023 alone, more than 2.4 million temporary work permits were issued across countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), up from 1.5 million a decade before.
The rise in guest worker schemes testifies to a growing political alignment on the management of migration between the far right and mainstream European politics. A recent article in the Economist, for instance, hailed temporary migration as a “pretty good alternative to the permanent sort” — a way to address labor shortages while sidestepping…
Auteur: Davide Schmid
