Been doing a little thinking about kobold and goblin "migrants". I don't like how they're implemented right now, they're inorganic tools which are used as buildmats, and you still need an orc to get them to "work".
Instead, I'd like to change it so they're actual units. The spawn script (used by the town-portal) makes it easy enough to create new fortress members, although they can't be drafted into the military. This is perfect, because no orc clan would *want* them in the military.
The existing kobold and goblin workshops would be preserved, but a reaction product would be added to encourage their use by migrants only. At a basic level, this would be something triggered by AutoSyndrome, and to which the desired worker race is immune. I'm not familiar with what syndromes can apply, but obvious things could be risk of injury, or just making orcs who need to work at a goblin/kobold workshop completely miserable. At a more advanced level we could run actions from dfhack (also easy to trigger), and again I'm looking towards affected units being miserable at having to work. In a fancy implementation we could have the side-effects depend upon the work being performed.
It would be easy to control which workers can use the workshop by means of the profile manager, so you wouldn't get proper orcs doing goblin/kobold tasks by accident.
This also allows for thematic camps where goblins and kobolds do most of the hauling and other menial labour, if that's what you want.
Thoughts and feedback are appreciated, especially if you're familiar with syndromes and what appropriate effects we can apply to orcish workers using kobold/goblin workshops.
~ T