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The insulation of globally mobile workers into communities is often influenced by political considerations within the host country. Most studies examining this area have focused on how expatriates and globally mobile workers seclude themselves into insulated communities when working abroad. This perspective does not take into consideration political and societal factors that often pressure globally mobile workers into secluded communities composed of people similar to themselves. This study examines how host-country political imperatives can help create and maintain insulated communities of foreign workers.

This study is based on a case study methodology that examines the J-1 Visa program in the United States and how it has, in many instances, evolved into a de facto guest worker program that secludes foreign workers into insulated communities. The case study includes interviews with five J-1 administrators at sponsoring organizations that employ J-1 recipients.

This study finds that political pressures do have an impact on the insulation of J-1 recipients into secluded communities in the United States. This is largely accomplished through the legal requirements of the program, pressure from sponsoring employers on the government and the significant political and economic ties that the United States maintains with the home countries of J-1 recipients.

This is one of the few studies to examine insulated communities of globally mobile workers from a political perspective. It is exploratory in nature and recommends that further studies be conducted.

This paper posits that legal avoidance – employers’ search for forms of employment to which labor and employment laws do not apply – is an important driver of the restructuring of work. It examines three examples of restructuring that enable employers to avoid legal liability and compliance costs: the classification of workers as independent contractors; the use of part-time and variable-schedule work; and employers’ deskilling of jobs and reliance on vulnerable workers. None of these strategies is itself unlawful, but their impact is to limit workers’ legal protections and weaken the law itself. Employers may also experience unintended consequences of restructuring.

This article compares the mobility experience of Austria, Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom post-enlargement. In all four countries, migrant inflows from the new EU member states account for the bulk of contemporary labour mobility. At the same time, issues of wage dumping have arisen everywhere, raising questions about compliance and the ‘re-embedding’ of mobility flows. Hence the article examines the labour market impact of recent East-West migration as well as policy responses by the social partners and public authorities that are geared towards the re-regulation of employment standards. Some commonalities are identified, especially in relation to the broadening of national wage floors and the growing role of the state in enforcing labour standards. However, some differences remain, especially whether re-regulation happens on the basis of collective agreements or statutory minimum rights. In this regard, different bargaining traditions, the power resources of labour market actors and the capacity of unions to build political coalitions with the state and employers are identified as crucial factors in shaping national and sectoral response strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine occupational health and safety (OHS) and workers' compensation legal entitlements and policy issues raised by the use of foreign temporary workers under the s457 visa scheme in Australia.

Interviews were conducted with 15 representatives of unions and employers along with written responses from government agencies and examination of government statistics, court and other documents.

The study suggests that foreign temporary workers can face significant difficulty in accessing their OHS rights and entitlements. This represents a challenge for government as well as unions and human resource professionals trying to manage workforce diversity.

Further detailed investigation is required into the extent of problems identified in this paper in Australia and other countries.

The study indicates that governments making use of guestworkers need to investigate whether these workers have effective access to the protection of OHS and workers' compensation laws and, if not, as indicated by this study, to make suitable policy interventions.

The human resource implications of managing guestworkers have been under‐researched to date despite the global growth in numbers. The paper starts to fill this gap, identifying a number of important policy issues in relation to OHS.

This paper studies the entrepreneurial undertaking and economic success of immigrants and natives in Germany, namely the West Germans, the East Germans, the guestworkers, and other immigrants.

The paper studies factors that affect the sorting of individuals into self‐employment and investigate whether the self‐employed fare better than the paid‐employed, and whether self‐employed immigrants fare better than Germans. Employing data from the German Socioeconomic Panel both the probability to choose self‐employment through a probit and the selection adjusted earnings are estimated.

The paper finds that the probability of self‐employment increases significantly with age for all ethnicity groups. More education and a self‐employed father propel self‐employment choices for West Germans only. Immigrants are rather pushed into self‐employment to avoid unemployment; however, they are able to traverse the socioeconomic gap through self‐employment. Except for the East Germans, the self‐employed earn more than their salaried counterparts, and immigrants fare the best, having the highest earnings of all groups. For immigrants, entrepreneurship maybe a way of “making” it in the new country. While self‐employment is a lucrative choice for immigrants, their rates remain low.

This study produces new empirical evidence on the importance of the self‐employment sector in Germany, where individuals fare well and where immigrants can achieve earnings over‐assimilation compared to natives and higher occupational prestige.

This paper is mainly focused on labor migration from Southeast Asia to Taiwan, showing a route of south–south mobility and discussing the causes of migrant workers in Taiwan, the issues faced by migrant workers as well as public response to migrant workers.

Besides a literate review on the topic of migrant worker researches in Taiwan, the data for this research was also based on qualitative interviews and observations conducted both in the fieldwork in Taiwan and in Indonesia between June and August during the summer of 2018.

The transnational mobility let many migrants from Southeast Asian countries to Taiwan end up losing their cultural capital and “make money” instead. For these migrants, they have experienced a downward social mobility of class through transnational mobility.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability. More migrant laborers from various origin countries were encouraged to include for further research.

Labor migration cases from Southeast Asia to Taiwan could very well serve as good examples in the carrying out of a reflection on the limit of focusing on social science only inside nation-states in order to push a forward thinking on the transnationalization of social inequality.

This paper calls attention to the close linkage between transnational mobility and social inequality. It showed how the transnationalization of social inequality could get new faces through the new waves of labor migration.

Samuel Huntington’s vision in the early 1990s of a “clash of civilizations” struck a chord to such an extent that his core theme was reignited after the attacks of September 11th. International migration seems to be viewed as an issue that signifies this so-called clash (Bade & Bommes, 1996). Migration, culture, ethnicity and conflict have become linked. The result is that conflicts arising from migration are more likely to be seen as an outcome of the multiplication of different cultures within one country. Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands and Switzerland have all been described as multicultural societies and advised to pay attention to this “fact.” This has been combined with the view that even if there was no road to multiculturalism without social conflicts, there was also no viable alternative to tolerance as a device for the interaction of cultures (Leggewie, 1990).

The purpose of this paper is to identify the preconditions for an upward economic mobility in time of immigrants working in agriculture. It argues this through an analysis of immigrants in the Greek countryside and a comparison of their performance to immigrants working in rural areas of other major host countries, for which the research has shown stagnant or even deteriorating economic conditions over time.

Field research in two Northern Greek rural prefectures between May 2007 and January 2008. Use of questionnaires addressed to 165 immigrants and 40 key‐informants.

The immigrants' ability to improve their economic conditions stems mainly from three labour market characteristics which differentiate the Greek countryside from other major host countries' rural areas. The first is the interpersonal relation of mutual trust that is built between immigrants and farmers. This relationship provides immigrants with a steady employment and allows them to develop strategies to increase their income by either working within or outside agriculture. The second is the lack of intermediaries in the labour market which allows immigrants to freely negotiate their wages, to move from agriculture to non‐agricultural jobs, and thus to achieve upward occupational mobility. The third is the lack of competition between old and new immigrants, which does not negatively affect their day wages. Therefore, we conclude that the structural differences in the agricultural labour markets of different countries lead to different opportunities of immigrants' economic improvement.

Fills the major gap in the European and Greek literature of immigrants in the countryside and especially their socioeconomic mobility over time.

The purpose of this paper is to outline some of the key issues related to migrant workers, work, public policy and HRM while introducing the five articles included in the special issue.

The paper reports on the issue which is made up of articles that present research based on surveys, interviews and longitudinal census data.

It is evident that high‐performing economies attract migrants from lower‐performing economies. However, with influxes of migrant labour there are a number of challenges that need to be met at the organisational and policy levels.

The indications are that some economies are beginning to slow and this means that migrant flows will also slow or reverse. The implications for migrant‐dependent sectors and countries are not clear, although all five papers indicate areas for further research.

Each article includes practical implications depending on the sector, skill and country being examined. Practical implications include the role of day labour centres as HR mediators between organisations and employees, the need for culturally sensitive and tailored training programs to assist professional migrants and the need for policies geared towards the assimilation of migrants and return migrants in order to assist their integration into the labour market.

The five articles presented here represent a wide range of approaches, skill levels and sectors within the five counties examined: the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, and Finland. Some, such as the US paper which includes the first national survey of day labour worker centres, present findings from a highly under‐represented area.

Applying a multidisciplinary perspective combining theories about immigration, citizenship and enterprise, this paper seeks to examine the influence of the political‐institutional framework in the development of enterprise amongst Turkish immigrants in the European gateway cities, pointing to the relevance of the case study for wider theoretical debate about immigration, globalisation and enterprise.

The paper is based on information gathered from European research centres on Turkish migration and employment combined with a review of national and European legislation on immigration, citizenship, entrepreneurship and the regulation of the “informal economy”.

The findings point to change and continuity in the positioning Turkish entrepreneurs in the EU. Continuity appears in a lack of citizenship and political rights for the majority of Turkish speakers and their inability to influence the political system compared with other people. Change appears in the expansion in the number of enterprises and perhaps more significantly in the growing economic differentiation between enterprises in terms of scale and purpose. One optimistic conclusion is that many of the entrepreneurs have broken out of the economic margins despite the political constraints faced by them.

The paper identifies that immigrant‐owned enterprises in the EU are creating jobs, typically by employing co‐ethnic workers, but also workers from diverse immigrant backgrounds. The potential of Turkish self‐employment in the EU is indicated in trends which show that in The Netherlands and Germany this has been the most significant source of net additions to employment growth.

The paper provides insight into how the political‐institutional framework and legal status influence the labour market positioning and repositioning of an immigrant group.