Today, we know the people who uproot their lives under the auspices of government labor migration programs as “guest workers”—the more than 50 million people around the globe who cross borders to, from, and within every inhabited continent for work. We know them as the dominant labor force for American agriculture since the pandemic. We know them as the African and South Asian laborers who built Qatar’s World Cup stadiums under scandalous and often deadly conditions. And we will know them more each year, as their numbers continue to expand amid both demographic decline and fear of immigrant settlement in high- and middle-income countries including the United States.

Guest Worker is the history of the initial twentieth-century social and political experiment that enticed dozens of world governments and millions of individuals with its promise of orderly temporary migration. The story of these programs began after World War I in exchanges of ideas and policies among Europe’s industrialized economies, its largely rural countries of out-migration, and its colonies. They initially bore the hopes of labor unions, international organizations, and migrant-sending governments to actually improve migrant workers’ pay and conditions. Those goals would prove quite difficult to achieve.

Yet even amid grueling and dangerous work, what bilateral temporary labor migration programs did achieve was this: millions of people came to embrace migrant labor as not just an economic necessity but a creed all its own. As today, their exploitation was real, but so too were their hopes, their dreams, their marriages, their fancy new bicycles bought with money earned abroad, their pride, and their regrets. Their experiences were intensely personal, yet the meanings that temporary migration held in their lives were also broadly shared across continents. Weise’s social history narrates this story via a close focus on those who migrated under the auspices of France’s pioneering labor migration agreements with Spain, Mexico’s agreement with the United States, and colonial Malawi (Nyasaland’s) agreement with South Africa, which only expanded after the colony’s transition into an independent nation.

In all, the histories of the twentieth century’s temporary labor migrants show what happened when people at the world’s economic margins caught glimpses of the era’s unprecedented prosperity—and tried, in their own way, to claim it as their own.