This essay reflects upon post-World War II and post-Cold War admissions of low-skilled temporary foreign workers to North America and Europe. The author's hope is that lessons from history can help Polish (and other new European Union immigration states) develop well-informed labour migration policy. The lessons from North America and Europe suggest that admissions of low-skilled temporary foreign workers lead to short-term economic benefits and long-term economic, political, and social costs. This, in turn, makes coherent and humane statecraft difficult to achieve.Considering the complexity of temporary foreign worker admissions, Polish policymakers would be better off avoiding them like the United States, France, and Switzerland have largely done in the post-Cold War period after learning the lessons from the post-war era. The alleged labour shortages and illegal migration pressure could be addressed through settlementoriented policies which are more likely to prevent unexpected outcomes since they allow greater economic, social, and political integration of admitted immigrants. 4 Plewa

The article analyses Spain’s voluntary return policies, including the programme instituted specifically to assist migrants affected by the 2008/09 crisis. Voluntary return policies were implemented in Europe in the context of the 1973/4 crisis. Just like the Western European programmes of the 1970s and the 1980s, the current Spanish voluntary return policies also only elicited the cooperation of small numbers of migrants and countries of origin. The article recommends four broader policy measures to tackle the emerging trend whereby a considerable proportion of migrants will stay in Spain rather than repatriate.

This article analyses the effects of the politics of seasonal foreign worker admissions on migrant legality in the context of the post-1945 and the post-1990 seasonal foreign worker policy in Switzerland, France and Spain respectively. It seeks historical evidence attesting to the ability of seasonal admissions to restrict workers to their non-resident status. It presents implications for circular migration, the dernier cri in European migration policy aimed to strike a compromise between a perceived post-crisis demand for the admission of foreign workers and the reluctance to make them prospective citizens. POLICY IMPLICATIONS• Migration policy stakeholders have shaped foreign worker admissions according to their interests.• Under some conditions, low-skilled seasonal foreign worker admissions have contributed to irregular migration, either through workers' overstays or through parallel irregular entries • There are both differences and similarities between the seasonal admissions advocated under the post-2007 circular migration schemes, and those of the 1950s-1960s, as well as those of 1990s to early 2000s. The similarities could, under some conditions, trigger the repetition of some of the unexpected outcomes revealed by historical seasonal foreign worker admissions under the post 2007 schemes.

Seasonal migrants are a subcategory of temporary migrants. According to the International Labor Organization, seasonal migrant workers are people who work in a country other than their homeland and for only a part of the year, since the work they perform is directly related to seasonal conditions.

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