Western democracies have an economic interest in admitting immigrants but at the same time they fear the political costs of doing so. A recurring idea to help reconcile this tension is to allow for temporary mobility of immigrants while restricting their permanent settlement. Trying to shed light on this matter, this article studies whether and when liberal democracies design immigration policies that prioritise (temporary) mobility over (permanent) migration. First, the underlying rationale of states for such a mobility preference is identified, before conceptualising the temporal design of immigration policies based on the combination of entry and stay regulations. Second, three theoretical explanations for the variation of countries’ mobility preference are developed: liberal constraints, institutional path-dependence and domestic politics. Third, a comparative analysis tests the arguments by studying the combination of entry and stay regulations in the immigration policies of 33 OECD countries between 1980 and 2010. The results confirm that most liberal democracies have a mobility preference in their immigration policies, but largely confined to labour migration and to a declining degree over the past decades. The temporal design of immigration policies is path-dependent on historical immigration regimes with a tendency towards a lower mobility preference the more countries become familiar with large-scale immigration.