Escaping politicization to attract desirable migrants? Business migration in Switzerland

Thirty years after its initial formulation, the liberal paradox could not be more topical. Economic transformations towards knowledge-intensive service economies, together with demographic decline, make attracting needed labour an urgent need of liberal democracies. At the same time, the politicization of immigration policy has reached an all-time high, posing serious limits to states' discretion to open up to foreign labour. In this paper, we put forward that one way in which liberal democracies escape this dilemma is by promoting forms of migration that are ‘desirable’ in the sense that they eschew traditional notions of long-term settlement and integration: business migrants. As a response to the liberal paradox, liberal democracies have been found to increasingly rely on a ‘market model’ of immigration characterized by a promotion of migration as temporary labour mobility and the circumvention of the social and economic rights traditionally associated with migrants' integration in liberal democratic welfare states. Literature on the market model has thus far focused on low-skilled labour migration however, while research on high-skill migration has generally assumed that states will offer far-reaching labour and residence rights in order to be attractive destinations. As a result, little attention has been paid to a novel form of ‘non-immigrant’ foreign labour that is not only temporary but also ‘extraterritorial’ in the sense that migrants do not formally enter the labour market of the receiving state: business migrants. Business migrants are migrants moving to another country for temporary assignments ranging from some weeks to several years while retaining their work contract with their home company and thus not formally taking up employment in the host country. They are thus ‘desirable’ to states in the sense that they bring economic benefits and needed skills, while circumventing obligations to grant social security access or long-term residence rights. In this paper, we analyze whether business migration presents an escape to the dilemma posed by the liberal paradox using Switzerland as a crucial case study. We first document the extent of business migration using rich register data, finding that business migration constitutes a substantial part of non-EU labour immigration to Switzerland. We then hypothesize that four key features – client politics, lack of judicial constraint, populist backing and low visibility - allow business migration to escape politicization and analyse these features in the Swiss immigration system using document and legal analysis as well as archival research. Finally, we contextualize the market model of business migration within the historical trajectory of Swiss immigration policy. Contrary to expectations of a paradigm shift, our examination reveals that the facilitation of business migration aligns with a longstanding exclusionary and market-based approach that has characterized Swiss immigration policy since the early 20th century. In this sense, the promotion of business migration is a continuation of earlier programs to attract labour while avoiding immigrant integration, a pragmatic strategy to circumvent popular opposition to immigration while serving business interests – at the expense of migrant rights.