Chapter 14. Guest or Temporary Foreign Worker Programs

The purpose of guest or temporary foreign worker programs (TFWPs) is to add workers to the labor force but not permanent residents to the population, meaning that TFWPs are based on the principle of rotating foreign workers in and out of the country. A third of the roughly 115 million foreign-born workers in the world’s 3.5 billion strong labor force in 2013 were guest workers, including up to a third in Gulf oil-exporting and other Middle Eastern countries. The US immigration reforms debated over the past decade would expand current and create new guest worker programs.