Temporary Foreign Work Permits: Honing the Tools to Defeat Human

In 1945, the French government decided to set up the National Office of Immigration (ONI) to manage and stimulate immigration to help with the reconstruction of the country after WWII.11 During WWII the “bracero” program in the US was set up to recruit Mexican workers in the agricultural sector on a temporary basis. [...] Further, there has been an unprecedented expansion of TFWPs in other parts of the world, in the states of the Arabian Peninsula following the increase in the price of oil in 1973 and, more recently, with the rapid economic growth in East Asian countries and the increasing political and economic interconnectedness between states in the ASEAN region (Kaur, 2010). [...] The price reaction function of(p ,p ) the smugglers is the solution of the f{ollowing equation: pN (pLI L ) if c ≤ pN (pL)p (p ) = (11) ∅ otherwise This shows that the reaction price of the smugglers is increasing in their marginal op- erating costs, c and in the price of a visa, pL, and decreasing in the number of smugglers, N. [...] The next proposition characterizes the visa duration τ̃ and the associated eviction price pL(τ̃) such that the pool of migrants’ skills remains the same after the sale of visas, compared to the status quo with irregular migration. [...] The only difference is that, instead of equalizing the marginal rate of technical substitution between instruments along the isoquant of the eviction price, it considers the isoquant of the visa price that leads to the targeted level of T guest workers in the economy.