At the end of the 1990s Spain began to design programs directed at recruiting seasonal workers for the agriculture sector. During the past decade, coinciding with a period of intense economic growth, these programs were applied in certain Spanish provinces with the objective of promoting forms of temporary and circular migration. The implementation of these programs, in which a broad number of public and private actors participated, was an exception to the traditionally reactive Spanish policy on labor immigration. In addition, these programs gave seasonal migrant workers an anomalous legal status by blocking them from obtaining permanent residence permits and limiting their right to settle in Spain. This article analyzes the design and implementation of these programs in Spain, the involvement of various actors, and the way they were managed in two provinces where they had the greatest volume and continuity, Huelva, in region of Andalusia and Lleida in Catalonia.KEYWORDS: Seasonal migrant workers programs; induced circular migration; labor migration; agriculture; Spain. RESUMEN:A finales de los años noventa España comenzó a diseñar programas dirigidos al reclutamiento de trabajadores estacionales para el sector agrícola. En la década pasada, y coincidiendo con un período de intenso crecimiento económico, estos programas fueron aplicados en determinadas provincias españolas con el objetivo de promover formas de migración temporal y circular. La implantación de estos programas, en los que participan un amplio número de actores públicos y privados, supuso una excepcionalidad en la tradicionalmente reactiva política española de inmigración laboral. Estos programas dotaron, adicionalmente, de un estatuto legal anómalo a este tipo de trabajadores a través de la contención del acceso a permisos permanentes y la limitación del establecimiento. En este artículo se analiza el diseño y la implantación de este tipo de programas en el caso español, la implicación de diversos actores, así como su gestión concreta en el caso de las dos provincias donde estos programas han tenido mayor volumen y continuidad, Huelva en la región de Andalucía y Lérida, en Cataluña.PALABRAS CLAVE: Programas de importación de trabajadores migrantes estacionales; circularidad migratoria inducida; inmigración laboral; agricultura; España.

In the last two decades, temporary worker programs have experienced an unprecedented expansion as instruments of what is defined as the migration management approach. Various migrant rights activists have voiced concerns about the treatment of temporary migrants in these programs and taken initiative to advance their rights. For some migrant rights advocates, it is the temporary nature of migration that is primarily responsible for the rights deficit. Yet, other migrant rights activists accept the temporariness of labour migration while trying to ensure that migrants receive legal protections for their work rights and that these protections are enforced. Trade unions are among the actors who try to protect and advance temporary migrants' labour rights, but their role in supporting or challenging the principles of temporary migration governance has been neglected in the scholarly literature. The article addresses this gap by highlighting the divergent position of Canadian and Spanish Unions on temporariness of this type of migration. As the article argues, the difference is related to the following four factors: (1) the degree to which the unions in question are institutionally embedded in immigration policy-making, (2) the social environment (that is, discourses on temporariness advanced by other unions and grassroots organizations), (3) the degree of protectionism unions express vis-à-vis new immigrant flows and (4) whether regulated temporary migration is contrasted with permanent or unauthorized migration.

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Resumen La Covid-19 ha provocado una profunda crisis social en España que ha infligido una importante herida en las condiciones de vida de la población, pero especialmente en los sectores más vulnerables, entre los que destacan las comunidades inmigrantes. Durante esta crisis sanitaria, la toma de conciencia de los inmigrantes sinpapeles como sujetos esenciales que realizan una aportación imprescindible, pero que son objeto de no-derechos ha cristalizado en una relevante lucha política en torno al movimiento #RegularizaciónYa. El objetivo de este artículo es analizar el surgimiento y desarrollo de esta movilización social que se enmarca en los denominados estudios críticos de ciudadanía.

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Until 2006 Spain witnessed growing irregular maritime immigration from the African continent. This intensification in irregular migration has led to the design and application of a migration control policy whose instrumental and institutional structures are becoming increasingly complex. Irregular immigration at maritime borders has been addressed through what we have referred to and characterized as a multi-layered deterrence strategy which has been gradually implemented and upgraded along the main entry points and migration corridors. The Spanish strategy is tightly intertwined with the unfolding of the EU Integrated Border Management approach and combines higher inputs of surveillance and border control technologies with multilateral cooperation agreements reached with transit and origin countries. High-tech border surveillance increases interception probabilities, but effective migration deterrence is conditioned by high expulsion rates once the border has been crossed. It is in the task of border implementation that technology appears as one of the pillars of the control structure and where its effect on deterrence depends on its embeddedness in a mix of instruments and actions.

Over the past two decades a growing number of non-state actors has got involved in the management of migration control. This pattern, which has been referred to as the privatization of migration control, has revealed new constellations of public-private links in this area of migration policy. The objective of this article is to analyse the practices and processes involved with outsourcing migration control. To do so, we propose a conceptual framework that we have denominated "migration markets" and its derivative, the "migration control market", as the basis for the functional classification and analysis of these processes and the actors who participate in them. This analytical framework is useful because it allows for the characterization of various national cases and can be applied to comparative studies. In the second part of the article we apply this conceptual framework to analyse the current profile of migration control outsourcing in Spain.