Foreign worker
Encyclopedia : F : FO : FOR : Foreign worker
See also expatriate.
A foreign worker (also: "guest worker" or "economic migrant"), is a person who works in a country other than the one of which he or she is a citizen. Foreign workers are often in other countries for a much more preferred job for him or her.
The term migrant worker is also sometimes used as a synonym for foreign worker, but this term may have a broader meaning as was also used in the past for nomadic agricultural workers who were not from another country - for example, people from Oklahoma working in California during the Depression.
Types of foreign workers
The term, in its broadest sense, may cover a multitude of cases. Most commonly, it refers to economic migrants, who typically travel (either legally or illegally) to a country with much more preferred job prospects than the one in which they currently reside. These "workers" will sometimes temporarily reside in the country in which they work and will often send most or all wages earned, back to their country of origin (usually to a family).Sometimes, a host country sets up a program in order to invite foreign workers, as did the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s, when over one million of so-called guest workers (Gastarbeiter) were attracted, mostly from Italy, Spain or Turkey.
Current estimates of the total number of international foreign workers stand at about 25 million #redirect , with a comparable number of dependents accompanying them. About 10 million of these, including 4 or 5 million illegal immigrants are working in the United States, which draws most of its immigrants from Mexico. Northwestern Europe has about 5 million migrant workers.
The term can also include international experts working out-of-country (usually, but not always, legally) and any number of cases in between.
Controversy
In recent years in the USA there has been much controversy over whether H-1B visas, intended to bring highly skilled workers to fill alleged gaps in the domestic labor pool, are instead being used to bring in skilled, but otherwise unexceptional, economic migrants as cheap labor to fill jobs that could readily be filled domestically.On the other hand, countries like Germany, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines have long experienced a brain drain of highly skilled workers to countries like the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and Austria. While the absolute number of such emigres are not large, the economic implications of such very skilled workers is significant.
Sometimes, citizens of countries with heavily urbanized area migrated to countries in order to do jobs such as farming and so on.
In certain less tolerant nations, foreign workers may be abused and treated as second-class citizens by the governments and/or prevailing social mores. For instance, in many middle eastern nations, it is not uncommon for employers to withhold passports from their employees, thus preventing the foreign worker from returning home. In conjunction with the withholding of salaries, it puts foreign workers in very difficult situations (particularly because the laws of these countries are typically not sympathetic to foreigners in practice). In the UK organisations such as Kalayaan protect the rights of UK migrant domestic workers.
See also
References
Knox, Paul; Agnew, John; McCarthy, Linda (2003). The Geography of the World Economy (4th ed.). London: Hodder Arnold. ISBN 0-340-80712-1.
External Links
- [The PBS newsmagazine NOW] focuses on America's "Guest Workers" including interviews with actual guest workers who work in Montana's forests
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.