Allowing Mobility and Preventing Migration? A Comparative Analysis of External and Internal Immigration Policies of OECD Countries

States have economic interests to admit immigrants but often fear the political costs of doing so. A recurring idea to reconcile this tension are guest-worker and other temporary migration policies. This strategy is intended to allow migrants in to reap economic benefits while their permanent settlement is restricted. These policies have however mixed popularity and are accused of facilitating worker exploitation and undermining labour standards. We lack so far systematic evidence of how countries design immigration policies to shape the temporality of cross-border movements. Do liberal democracies solve the tensions between open economies and closed states by designing policies that prioritize (temporary) mobility over (permanent) migration? I test this idea with an analysis of immigration policies across 33 OECD countries between 1980 and 2010. For that purpose, I compare external policies regulating cross-border flows (mobility) with internal policies regulating immigrant settlement (migration) and track their evolution over time. I find that countries have a mobility preference only on labour migrants where they have a sufficient discretionary space. In a second step, I test competing explanations for the varying mobility preference of national immigration policies. I demonstrate that path-dependencies are a powerful driver and that guest-worker policies have a long shadow on current immigration regimes despite their official abolishing. These findings provide important insights into the policy context of migrant rights in advanced capitalist economies.