How can countries attract foreign workers without wading into the minefield of immigration politics? Some officials believe the answer lies in rebranding. Don’t call it immigration—call it “labor mobility.”
The challenge many countries face is, in fact, twofold. Advanced economies are suffering from shrinking populations and labor shortages. Meanwhile, in countries like India, where I live, the population continues to grow, but jobs remain scarce.
Migration once seemed like the obvious solution. But today, political resistance to immigration in the developed world has become too strong for politicians to ignore.
Indian officials believe they’ve found a way out of this deadlock. Over the past few years, the government has quietly signed at least twenty “labor mobility” agreements with countries in Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf. This month it also introduced a draft law on international mobility designed to ensure that Indian workers eventually return home.
If these programs operate at India’s scale, they could finally create a true market linking labor-exporting and labor-importing nations—the kind of system that, as one expert put it, the world urgently needs today.
Yet even the terminology itself hints at potential risks. The concept of a permanent rotation of migrants moving within a global “labor pool” reduces people to faceless units. The idea came from economists—but in practice, young migrant workers inevitably bring the human element with all its unpredictable consequences.
The German Lesson: How an Old Idea of Temporary Labor Returns Under a New Name
The notion of “labor mobility” is hardly new. India is, in many ways, following Germany’s example: in the postwar years of economic boom and reconstruction, West Germany brought in a generation of Gastarbeiter—“guest workers,” mostly from Turkey—for its factories, mines, and farms.
But the German model became known more for its flaws than for its successes. Employers quickly discovered that a constant rotation of workers was inefficient. Many of those “temporary” laborers sought to stay—especially once they were allowed to bring their families. Germany, viewing them not as immigrants but as hired labor, made little effort to integrate them. Many never learned German. The social repercussions remain visible today.
In the end, Germany recognized former “temporary” workers as full-fledged immigrants. Today, the country is home to third- and fourth-generation descendants of those Gastarbeiter—about four million citizens. For those who had warned that the program would create inequality and a “two-tier society,” this was a positive outcome. But from the perspective of the original labor mobility goals, it was hardly a success.
American economist Lant Pritchett, who has been developing and promoting the concept of labor mobility since the 1990s, believes Germany’s experiment failed because it lacked a coherent system for ending contracts and defining what came next. As he put it, “there was neither a contractual obligation to return nor a pathway to citizenship.”
In Germany, such a system proved unsustainable. But in countries that pay less attention to individual rights—such as those in the Persian Gulf—it can function. In Qatar, for instance, it is clear that even long-term residents will never be granted citizenship.
Pritchett suggests a third way: a system in which migrant workers enjoy legal protection regardless of where they are employed, yet are still required to return home after a certain period. How to enforce that in practice, however, remains an unresolved challenge for labor mobility programs.