national audience based on two field surveys carried out in the fields and greenhouses of intensive agriculture in southern France and Spain as part of our respective doctoral research, this communication asks about the concept of ‘circular migration’, which has emerged internationally to promote the dissemination of temporary migration programmes (LMP). Because it sets return to the country as a prerequisite and sine qua non for participation, it seeks to reinvent the wheel, the famous noria, and this reality of a largely mythified migration past, of which Sayad has stressed the ability to create a consensus between its various actors around the phenomenon: “the image of migration as a continuous ‘rotation’ has a strong power of seduction on everyone: the host society is convinced that there are permanent workers...; the original company believes that it can obtain the monetary resources it needs in this way indefinitely [...]; immigrants are persuaded to fulfil their obligations towards their group "(Sayad 1999 (1977)). Similarly, at the IOM, the ILO or the WTO, the singers of ‘circular migration’ claim that the PMT is a win-win-win management model for human mobility through which they have a positive impact on the development of the original countries. The communication will first quickly return to the genesis of the LMP migratory patron, as well as to the circulation of the concept (within the migration government under way at international level) and its concrete forms. After the deconstruction of this category and the discovery of the game of actors promoting it, we will briefly present our two studies: IMO/OFII contracts in France and contracts originating in Spain. This bottom-up approach will lead us to stress the way in which LMP finally articulates the channelling of the international mobility of the migrant labour force and its immobilisation on the labour market, a immobilisation which makes foreign seasonal farmers a ‘stuck worker’ [Moulier-Boutang 1998], a dependent worker, linked (strictly in the strict sense) to an employer who alone decides whether the worker will return to the following year.