Guest Worker Schemes Are a Machine for Labor Exploitation
European governments that have pledged to clamp down on immigration are still expanding schemes for workers to come on short-term visas. Their goal is to maximize predatory exploitation of migrant workers without giving them any rights or security.
A migrant worker from Africa participating in a march near Foggia, Italy, calling attention to the plight of foreign seasonal tomato pickers during harvest season. (Roberto d’Agostino / AFP via Getty Images)
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.
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