Provisional Futures: Migrants as wanted workers, yet temporary residents (TEMP MIGRATION)

TEMP MIGRATION is a SNSF funded starting grant project led by Prof. Dr. Helena Hof. It focuses on the growing proportions of temporary migrants in liberal democratic states. The project adopts an ethnographically-informed approach to understand how people make sense of their temporary lives as migrant workers in three countries with distinct migration regimes: Canada, Switzerland and Japan. The central focus lies on negotiations, strategies, and subsequent processes arising from being temporary, with the aim of theorizing how this impacts migrants and their interactions with the receiving societies. TEMP MIGRATION seeks to provide an in-depth account of temporariness a) as experienced by people of different ‘skill’ levels – exemplified by case studies of temporary labor migrants in IT, health care and construction –, as well as b) across labor-importing countries of distinctively different mobility regimes.