The triple-win illusion: temporary migration and cheap labour in Japanese and Spanish agriculture
The triple-win illusion: temporary migration and cheap labour in Japanese and Spanish agriculture

Summary/Abstract: This article examines how state-managed temporary migration schemes in agriculture serve the structural imperative to secure cheap and controllable labour in core economies. Using a comparative case study of Spain and Japan within a world-ecology framework and the Most Different Systems Design approach in comparative politics, this analysis examines how distinct demographic trajectories, agrarian structures, and migration regimes nonetheless converge around similar logics of labour cheapening, mobility control, and socio-legal stratification. The study combines secondary literature, legal and policy documents and statistical data to reconstruct the historical evolution, institutional design and social effects of Japan’s TITP/SSW schemes and Spain’s GECCO programme. The analysis shows that the celebrated “triple-win” framing functions primarily as a legitimising discourse: it presents highly asymmetric arrangements as mutually beneficial while masking their role in sustaining exploitative agricultural labour regimes. Despite divergent narratives and policy architectures, both cases generate temporary, segmented and politically manageable migrant workforces. The article concludes that agricultural migration policies in the global core are best understood as nationally specific articulations of a shared structural logic rooted in contemporary agro-capitalism.

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