essay on migrant workers

The immigrant workforce supports millions of US jobs

Subscribe to global connection, dany bahar , dany bahar nonresident senior fellow - global economy and development @dany_bahar carlos daboin contreras , and carlos daboin contreras consultant - workforce of the future initiative at brookings @daboincj greg wright greg wright fellow - global economy and development @gregcwright.

October 17, 2022

Dozens of empirical studies have found that immigration benefits American workers. Even immigrant workers with little formal education have, with some exceptions , been found to have negligible effects on the wages of similarly educated workers .

As part of Brookings Workforce of the Future initiative’s ongoing efforts to identify immigration policies that benefit American workers, we present a new perspective on the role that immigrants play in the U.S. economy. Using the “complementarity index,” we show that immigrant workers are broadly complementary to natives, both because immigrants work in occupations that serve an unusually wide range of industries, and also because immigrant-intensive occupations often complement other jobs. Acknowledging this complementarity is essential given that current trends in occupation growth imply that the immigrant workforce will become increasingly central to the U.S. economy in the coming years.

In Figure 1 each dot represents an occupation. The vertical axis measures the share of workers in that occupation that were born abroad, using Census data from 2019. The horizontal axis tracks our own “complementarity index,” which measures the extent to which each occupation complements all others. The higher the index, the more that workers in the occupation are likely to fuel demand for other jobs.

Figure 1. Immigrants and occupational complementarity

Source: Census Bureau and authors’ calculations

The logic of our complementarity index is that an occupation is considered complementary to other occupations for two reasons: first, if it is present in many industries, in effect influencing the way goods and services are produced throughout the economy; and second, if within an industry its employment share grows or shrinks in tandem with other occupations, indicating that its use is tightly linked to the use of other workers. Formally, the measure captures the share of industries in which any two occupations were both present together and simultaneously grew or shrank over time. For example, we find that the complementarity between “food and beverage serving workers” and “cooks and food preparation workers” is 0.49, a relatively high value that indicates that the two occupations were used together in 49 percent of U.S. industries and, at the same time, that their employment shares were positively correlated.

The overall complementarity index (the horizontal axis of Figure 1) is then the simple average of all these pairwise complementarities for each occupation. For instance, “Office and Administrative Support Workers” and “Financial Specialists” are two of the most complementary occupations, reflecting both their pervasiveness in the economy and the fact that any particular occupation is likely to be reliant on administrative and financial support.

While recognizing that there may be many reasons for these observed correlations, the patterns in the figure suggest that millions of immigrants work in occupations that are central to the rest of the workforce, thereby supporting millions of American jobs. In fact, Figure 1 indicates that the majority of the most immigrant-intensive occupations are above average on this index.

Moreover, the concentration of immigrants in occupations that are central to the U.S. economy will be the case well into the future, as many of these highly central occupations are projected to be among the fastest growing jobs over the next few years, as Figure 2 shows. In the figure, the horizontal axis shows the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ projected employment growth for each occupation for the period 2020-2030, while the vertical axis measures the share of foreign-born workers in each occupation in 2019.

Figure 2. Immigrants and future job growth

The occupations in the upper-right quadrant correspond to jobs that are both immigrant intensive and fast growing (the dotted line marks the average value in both instances). For instance, “home health and personal care” occupations—which include nurses and other health professionals—will add over one million workers over the next few years, and approximately 25 percent of workers in these jobs were foreign-born, as of 2019.

A major challenge for policymakers is identifying the highest value policies. Our complementarity index addresses this by identifying specific parts of the immigrant workforce that create significant and widespread benefits for U.S. workers.

Taking the two figures together, we see that there are a handful of occupations that are immigrant-intensive, fast-growing, and that also have high overall complementarity with the rest of the economy according to our measure above. A few of these are “motor vehicle operators,” “food preparation workers,” “material moving workers,” and “building cleaning and pest control workers.” Each of these jobs requires little formal education but serves as a vital link along a wide range of industry production chains.

A major challenge for policymakers is identifying the highest value policies. Our complementarity index addresses this by identifying specific parts of the immigrant workforce that create significant and widespread benefits for U.S. workers. Accordingly, the index can serve as one basis for identifying the parts of the economy that would benefit most from targeted immigration reforms.

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Migrant workers still at great risk despite key role in global economy

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The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the key role that migrant workers play in the global economy, as well as the “terrible risks” that they are forced to take, to find work.

According to the new International Organization for Migration ( IOM ) Global Migration Indicators (GMI) 2021 report, launched on Thursday, over the past decade migrants in the worldwide labour force have tripled.

IOM’s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (GMDAC) also flagged that remittances sent home to lower and middle-income countries (LMICs) have outpaced foreign aid.

The analysis featured on the Global Migration Data Portal , provides snapshots of the latest statistics and trends, including the impacts of COVID-19 on mobility.

For example, remittances made up more than 25 per cent of total GDP last year in El Salvador, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Tonga.

“The availability of timely and reliable data can help us maximize the potential of migration for development ”, said Ugochi Daniels, IOM Deputy Director General for Operations.

Demand rising

Migration trends at a glance.

More people than ever live in a country they were not born in.

More than one billion people are on the move.

Many migrate out of necessity.

One in 30 people is a migrant.

One in 95 is forcibly

As exemplified by the many roles of migrants considered ‘essential’ during the COVID-19 pandemic, the report highlights an increase in demand for their labour.

Foreign doctors account for 33 per cent of the United Kingdom’s physicians, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and there is an overall reliance on foreign healthcare workers in Europe and the United States.

Surge in overseas workers

There are nearly 170 million foreign workers globally, according to the latest IMO estimates – more than triple the 53 million registered in 2010.

And foreign-born workers play a growing role in the labour force, making up an estimated five per cent of today’s global workforce.

“As we celebrate International Migrants Day this week, this report stands as a clear reminder of the role migrants play in the development of their communities worldwide”, said Frank Laczko, GMDAC Director.

“But while the global economy continues to rely heavily on migrant workers, people continue to face terrible risks when they cannot access legal pathways in their search for better opportunities.”

Migrant safety

While migration policies are difficult to measure, the data available show a trend toward limiting safe, legal migration options .

🆕 Global Competency Standards for #HealthWorkers will provide quality, culturally sensitive care to migrants and refugees, a 🔑 step towards achieving #HealthForAll, including for people on the move.👉 https://t.co/W0rOzuud4Q pic.twitter.com/sZ62jr547n World Health Organization (WHO) WHO

While 81 per cent of the countries participating in IOM ’s  Migration Governance Indicators  (MGI) have at least one government body dedicated to border control, just 38 per cent have a defined national migration strategy, with only 31 per cent aligning it with a national economic development strategy.  

“This reports highlights…the invaluable contributions migrants have in our communities and economies, and the need for concrete action to increase legal channels”, Ms. Daniels said.

Setting global standards

Also on Thursday, the World Health Organization ( WHO ) published the agency’s new  Global Competency Standards for refugee and migrant health services  to strengthen countries’ ability to provide services to refugees and migrants by defining markers to be incorporated into health workers’ education and practices.

“While facing similar health risks to their host communities, refugees and migrants may have specific health needs and are often vulnerable to adverse health outcomes due to their mobility, living and working conditions”, said Santino Severoni, Director of the WHO Health and Migration Programme.

The health workforce has a vital role in providing inclusive services that are respectful of cultural, religious, and linguistic needs, said the UN health agency.

“Refugees and migrants face obstacles in accessing people-centred and culturally sensitive health services in both countries of transit and destination. These can include…restricted use of health services, all of which shape their interactions with the host country’s health system”, said the WHO Director.

The document is accompanied by a Curriculum Guide to support its operationalization.

The competencies can be tailored to various environments and take into consideration the requirements and constraints of local health systems as well as the characteristics of diverse refugee and migrant populations.

“2021 is the International Year of Health and Care Workers ”, reminded Jim Campbell, Director of WHO’s Health Workforce Department.

“The same workers must be supported with a competency-based education, as outlined in the Standards…to take us a step closer towards universal health coverage for all populations, including for refugees and migrants”.

• migrant workers

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Created in partnership with the Helpdesk on Business & Human Rights

Migrant Workers

Who are migrant workers.

A migrant worker is a person who is to be engaged, is engaged or has been engaged in a remunerated activity in a State of which they are not a national [1]  (information on internal migrant workers is included in a separate call-out box below). Migrant labour is work undertaken by individuals, families or communities who have moved from abroad. Migrant workers contribute to growth and development in their ‘host’ countries or regions, while countries or regions of origin benefit from the skills these workers gather while away, and from any taxes or remittances sent ‘home’.

Migrant workers often face challenges to and abuse of their human and labour rights in the workplace due to discrimination against them. This can occur in many ways, such as:

• Unfair recruitment practices, such as charging fees, requiring migrants to put up a bond, or giving misleading or incorrect information about a promised job;
• Trafficking or smuggling workers across borders for work, and/or entering the worker into forced labour in the new destination;
• Unequal access to employment rights, remuneration, social security, trade union rights, employment taxes or access to legal proceedings and remediation; and
• Workplace racism or discrimination.

What is the Dilemma?

Migrant workers can make a  positive contribution  to business performance and productivity by filling skill gaps, increasing access to international knowledge, strengthening contacts in international networks and local networks through new language skills and cultural awareness.

However, migrant labour can also pose a dilemma to businesses as migrant workers — whether in a regular or an irregular situation — can face a range of challenges to their rights, including discrimination from other workers, employers and laws, unfair working conditions and harmful recruitment practices. Migrant workers are particularly at risk of other human rights violations, such as being trapped in forced labour due to abuse of vulnerability, a lack of understanding of their rights and a lack of social capital or power.

Businesses can struggle to ensure that migrant workers in their operations and supply chains have their rights upheld, especially when Governments do not fulfil their duty to protect and their obligations under international human rights instruments (such as the  International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families ).

Internal Migrant Workers

While this issue focuses on international migrant workers given their specific vulnerabilities to labour rights abuses, internal migrant workers also face similar challenges in securing adequate working and living conditions.

Exact global figures for the number of internal labour migrants (those who have moved within their country for work) are not known. However, disruptions arising out of the coronavirus pandemic have drawn global attention to their plight — particularly in India, where millions of  internal migrants  were left economically devastated by state-wide lockdowns in 2020.

Internal migrants remain on the periphery of the COVID-19 recovery process and are disadvantaged when it comes to securing social protections, safe living and working conditions and access to justice. India’s migrant crisis has also  put the spotlight  on other countries whose economies are dependent on internal migration, such as China, Thailand, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa and Brazil.

Prevalence of Migrant Labour

According to the  UN World Migration Report 2022 , there have been ‘historic’ changes in migration in the last decade, and even during COVID-19, there has been an increase in the number of displaced people in the world. While many of those displaced are fleeing from harm, many others are migrating due to dire economic conditions. It is  estimated  that there were more than 280 million international migrants globally in 2020, 245 million of which are working age (aged 15 and over). According to the International Labour Organization ( ILO ), the number of international migrant workers totalled 169 million in 2021, constituting nearly 5% of the global workforce.

Key drivers contributing to the growing mobility of workers:

• Lack of jobs and decent working conditions;
• The widening income inequalities within and between countries;
• A growing demand for skilled and low-skilled workers in migrant destination countries (often driven by strong growth, ‘shortages’ of domestic labour or rigid societal norms);
• Demographic changes, with countries seeing declining labour forces and aging populations.

Key trends include:

• According to the  ILO , women constitute 41.5% and men 58.5% of migrant workers (2021).
• Sector figures show that 66.2% of migrant workers are in services, 26.7% are in industry and 7.1% are in agriculture (2021).
• Of the estimated 169 million international migrant workers, 67.4% are in high-income countries and 19.5% in upper middle-income countries (2021).
• ILO research  suggests that the world’s migrant workers are distributed among the major regions as follows: Europe and Central Asia, 37.7%; Americas, 25.6%; Arab States, 14.3%; Asia and the Pacific, 14.2%; and Africa, with only 8.1% (2021).
• The labour force participation rate of migrants at 69% is higher than the labour force participation of non-migrants at 60.4% (2021).

Impacts on Businesses

Businesses can be impacted by migrant labour risks in their operations and supply chains in multiple ways:

• Legal risk : There is a close link between migrant labour and human rights abuses such as forced labour, modern slavery and child labour, as migrant workers are often in situations of vulnerability. Companies can face legal charges and severe consequences if they are found to have any of the above issues in their operations or supply chains.
• Reputational and brand risk : Campaigns by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), trade unions, consumers and other stakeholders against multinational corporations (MNCs) alleged to abuse migrant workers can result in reduced sales and brand erosion.
• Financial risk : Suppliers and clients may end contracts and relationships with companies that are found to abuse migrant workers’ rights, or be linked to abuse, in their supply chain, resulting in reduced sales. Divestment and/or avoidance by investors and finance providers (many of which are increasingly applying environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria to their decision-making) can result in reduced or more expensive access to capital and reduced shareholder value.
• Loss of diversity, skills and creativity : Where migrant workers are not treated fairly or with respect, they may leave for other employment and leave behind a skills gap.
• Operational risk : Changes to a company’s supply chains made in response to the discovery of harmful migrant labour conditions may result in disruption. For example, companies may feel the need to terminate supplier contracts (resulting in potentially higher costs and/or disruption) and direct sourcing activities to lower-risk locations.

Impacts on Human Rights

Abuse of migrant workers has the potential to impact a range of human rights, [2]  including but not limited to:

• Right to equality of treatment and non-discrimination  ( ICRMW , Articles 43 and 45,  ICCPR , Article 2,  ICESCR , Article 2): Migrant workers can be subject to unequal treatment when compared to nationals. This is likely to occur in recruitment processes, their treatment at the workplace as well as in terms of the legal protections that they are afforded in the workplace.
• Right to freedom from slavery and forced labour  ( UDHR , Article 4,  ICRMW , Article 11,  ICCPR , Article 8): Migrant workers are at a higher risk of being subject to conditions that may amount to forced labour and/or modern slavery. For example, migrant workers may face the retention of identity documents, debt bondage and restriction of movement, which are some of the indicators of forced labour.
• Right to freedom of movement  ( ICRMW , Article 39,  UDHR , Article 13): The freedom of movement of migrant workers can be severely restricted through, for example, the confiscation of passports or other travel documents.
• Right of migrants to form, join and participate in associations and trade unions  ( ICRMW , Article 26 and 40;  ICCPR , Article 22;  ICESCR , Article 8): In many situations, migrants may — due to their legal status, the legal frameworks in which they operate in or their relatively weak negotiating position — be denied the right to freedom of association. ICCPR and ICESCR specify that all workers (including migrant workers in a regular situation) have the right to form and join trade unions for the protection of their interests. In addition, Article 26 of the ICRMW affords migrant workers in both regular and irregular situations the right to join and participate in the activities of associations and trade unions.
• Right to just and favourable conditions of work  ( ICRMW , Article 25;  ICESCR , Article 7): Many migrants experience lower pay and poorer working conditions than their domestic counterparts. This can be due to discrimination, prevailing legal frameworks, the legal status of migrant workers and market dynamics.
• Right to an adequate standard of living (including access to adequate food, clothing, housing and water)  ( ICRMW , Article 43;  ICESCR , Article 11): Companies that provide housing to migrant workers can directly infringe on this right if the housing is not of an adequate standard.
• Rights to cultural identity  ( ICRMW , Article 31,  ICCPR , Article 27): Migrants have the right to enjoy their own culture, practice their own religion, and to speak their own language without discrimination. Due to their status, migrant workers may be denied this right as a matter of official policy or through societal discrimination.
• Right to an effective remedy for acts violating fundamental rights  ( ICRMW , Article 83,  ICCPR , Article 3): A lack of accessible operational-level grievance mechanisms may hinder migrant workers from accessing remedies for human and labour rights abuses. This is particularly the case where the legal framework and culture in a country prevent migrants from seeking adequate access to remedy.

The following  SDG targets  relate to  migrant workers :

• Goal 8  (“ Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all ”), Target 8.8 : Protect labour rights and promote safe and secure working environments of all workers, including migrant workers, particularly women migrants, and those in precarious employment.
• Goal 10  (“ Reduce inequality within and among countries ”), Target 10.7 : Facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies.

Key Resources

The following resources provide further information on how businesses can address violations of migrant workers’ rights in their operations and supply chains:

• ILO,  Fair Recruitment Toolkit : A modular  training manual  on fair recruitment to support in the design and implementation of fair recruitment practices.
• Institute for Human Rights and Business,  Migration with Dignity: A Guide to Implementing the Dhaka Principles : A  practical guide  to implementing the Dhaka Principles of fair and equal labour for migrants. The Dhaka Principles provide a roadmap that traces the migrant worker from recruitment, through employment, to the end of contract and provides key principles that employers and migrant recruiters should respect at each stage in the process to ensure migration with dignity.
• BSR,  Migrant Worker Management Toolkit: A Global Framework : A  toolkit  for respecting the rights of migrant workers throughout businesses and global supply chains.
• [email protected]

Photo essay: In the Philippines, women migrant workers rebuild lives, advocate for each other

Date: 16 September 2016

A global programme by UN Women, “Promoting and Protecting Women Migrant Workers’ Labour and Human Rights”, supported by the European Union and piloted in the Philippines, works to build the capacities of migrant women’s organizations and networks to better serve and assist women migrant workers. UN Women spoke with migrant women returnees and community leaders from La Union province, over 260 miles from Manila, where the programme supports various migrant women’s organizations. These are their stories.

“I migrated to the Middle East as a domestic worker because my husband was about to lose his job due to poor health. I worked long work hours—I was the only domestic worker for a household of ten—and endured verbal abuse. There was a time that I didn’t receive any salary for several months…,” shares 55-year old Virginia Carriaga.

After two years of abuse, Carriaga escaped from her last work place in Lebanon, and sought assistance from the Philippines Embassy. Prior to her repatriation, in the two months that she spent at the Embassy-sponsored shelter in Beirut, she became a spokesperson for other women migrant workers. Today, Carriaga is a successful business woman, owner of a variety store in Balaoan, with the assistance and trainings that she received from the government and women migrant workers’ organizations.

Primitiva Vanderpoorten, a retired nurse who worked in the United Kingdom for several years, invested her income in properties in her home country. Today she offers her resort hotel in Luna as a venue for meetings of Bannuar Ti La Union, an organization for women migrant workers, where she is a member: “Even as a nurse, I experienced offensive remarks from patients. They would ask why I was in their country and that I should go back to my country.”

“My son did not finish high school and got involved in delinquent activities. He resented me for leaving him in Philippines. Have I been a bad mother, I asked myself,” shares Virginia Estepa, a 62-year-old former woman migrant worker who now works as a health worker at the barangay (smallest unit in the community) in Naguilian. Like many others, Estepa migrated overseas to provide for her family. As women migrate for work, leaving behind their children, the social cost of the impact on their children is often less known or understood. Research shows that fathers, grandmothers and the extended families care for children left behind.

UN Women’s programme, piloting in three countries—Philippines, Mexico and Moldova—provides trainings to organizations and women migrant workers’ groups to strengthen their advocacy skills, knowledge on migrant women’s rights, organizational development, strategic planning and enterprise governance. Women migrant workers’ organizations and groups have been instrumental in providing information that enables women to migrate safely and know how to report abuse or seek assistance.

The training on organizational development was particularly useful for Carmelita Nulledo, 52, a former domestic worker from Singapore and Hong Kong and now a farmer and volunteer in various organizations. “From the action planning during our training, we have proceeded with mapping and simple surveys in the community. This will generate data about migrant women and inform any local planning and policies to address the needs of women migrant workers,” she shares. Like many of the migrant women impacted by the project, Nulledo volunteers at the local assistance desks for migrant workers and their families. “I had a positive migration experience, and now I am motivated to help others, she adds.

Women migrant workers’ organizations in the Philippines also provide reintegration assistance to returnee women migrants by providing livelihood and business trainings, and helping them access assistance programmes, such as scholarship for education and training, enterprise development funds, business counseling, legal and psychosocial services provided by the government under the national law and through local ordinances.

Delilah Dulay, 40, works as a master cutter at the Aringay Bannuar Garments Production, which is funded by the Department of Labour and Employment and the local government of Aringay in La Union province and provides decent work for migrant women returnees. Dulay had migrated to Qatar to improve her income. She landed with a domestic worker’s job where she barely slept for two hours every day and was paid significantly less than the salary she was promised. Upon her return to La Union, Dulay underwent trainings through Bannuar Ti La Union as part of the UN Women project and learned about her rights and gained skills as a garment worker.

“Being a member of a women migrant workers’ group helps me and the others find our confidence in facing day to day life and its challenges. We have a common bond stemming from similar experiences,” she says.

Edna Valdez, 58, worked for four years as a domestic worker in Hong Kong under harsh conditions. Today, she is the President of Bannuar Ti La Union. “The main challenge for women migrant workers is that they don’t know what rights they have. Even when there are laws and services in place, they don’t know how to claim their rights or access support. That’s why we lobby the local government units to set up Migrant Desks at each municipal office, in compliance with the national law, where migrants and their families can access information and support,” says Valdez.

Today, she volunteers at the Migrant Desk at San Fernando City La Union three times a week, refers women migrant workers to relevant government units for legal assistance and reintegration support. She also delivers trainings to prospective women migrant workers to help them identify the warning signs and risks of trafficking and illegal recruitment, and how to access legal assistance and support if they are abused.

As of June 2016, 118 women migrant workers have been trained on their rights, and an additional 45 on entrepreneurship management and 49 on organizational development. The pilot programme has developed critically needed capacity of women migrant workers and their groups so that they are able to build upon the gains made so far and continue to advocate for women migrant workers’ rights at the local and national levels.

Credit for all photos: UN Women/Norman Gorecho

[1] UN Women (2016). Filipino Women Migrant Workers Fact Sheet  

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Advancing social justice, promoting decent work

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Labour migration

Facing the global jobs crisis: Migrant workers, a population at risk

The global economic crisis is posing new challenges for the world's 100 million migrant workers. They may face reduced employment and migration opportunities, worsening living and working conditions and increasing xenophobia. Although no massive return of migrant workers has been observed so far, the crisis is having repercussions on their earnings and the remittances they send home. Ibrahim Awad, Director of the International Migration Programme at the International Labour Office, published a new study entitled "The global economic crisis and migrant workers: Impact and response". Interview with ILO Online.

ILO Online: How does the impact of the crisis on migration vary across countries and sectors?

Mr. Awad: Depending on countries of destination, migrant workers are present in such sectors as construction, manufacturing, hotels and restaurants, health care, education, domestic service and agriculture. Some of these sectors – construction, manufacturing and hotels and restaurants – have been seriously affected by the crisis with migrant workers experiencing the major shocks. In the United States, Ireland, and Spain, migrant workers in construction were particularly affected. In Malaysia, Japan, and the Republic of Korea, the impact is in manufacturing which has the largest job losses. In contrast, other sectors (e.g., health care, domestic service, and education), in some countries, have seen employment growth. In the United States and Ireland, jobs in health care and education have

ILO Online: Does the crisis have an impact on labour migration flows?

Mr. Awad: Contraction of the economy and rising unemployment may prompt destination countries to introduce more restrictive labour migration policies. Origin countries, which often heavily depend upon the remittances from migrant workers, respond to the impact of the crisis by exploring new labour markets and introducing reintegration and employment packages. To date, no mass returns of migrant workers have been observed, but new outflows from some countries of origin have slowed down. For example, in Mexico, the net outflow dropped by over 50 per cent between August 2007 and August 2008 ( Note 1 ). Potential migrants, considering the high costs of migrating and reduced employment opportunities in the destination, have chosen to stay home. At the same time, the number of returning migrant workers in 2008 remained similar to the previous two years. Voluntary return programmes implemented by destination countries have fallen far short of the targeted numbers. Migrant workers often choose to remain despite deteriorating labour market conditions in order to preserve social security benefits. The adverse economic and employment situation in the origin country also discourages them from returning home.

ILO Online: Before the crisis, remittances were growing in all developing countries. Has the crisis reversed this trend?

Mr. Awad: The rates of growth of remittances has declined, and in some areas so has absolute volume. A number of countries in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and especially Central Asia have been seriously affected. Thus poverty reduction and the sustainability of economic activity and employment in some countries are at risk. However, in some countries, such as Egypt and Pakistan, during certain periods since the crisis broke out, remittances have increased despite the economic downturn, suggesting they acted as countercyclical measures (i.e. rising when the economy is weakening, and falling when the economy is strengthening). Remittances are the most visible and tangible benefits of labour migration. At the macro level they bring in foreign exchange and contribute to correcting balances on current accounts in countries of origin. In many countries, remittances represent a high proportion of GDP. Through their direct and multiplier effects, they sustain demand and thus stimulate economic activity. Employment is generated as a result. At the household level, remittances can contribute to poverty reduction and human capital development through expenditures on education and health care.

ILO Online: How does the crisis affect migrant workers specifically?

Mr. Awad: In times of crisis, slack demand for labour increases the likelihood of precarious and irregular employment. Perceived or actual competition for scarce jobs spurs xenophobic and discriminatory reactions of nationals against migrant workers and their families. While little evidence exists, it is likely that migrant workers will be forced to take on jobs in poor working conditions and/or in the informal economy. Certain groups and individuals may demand more protectionist measures or show aggressiveness towards migrants. Examples of such reactions exist in different regions. However, it is important to emphasize that violence and xenophobia against migrant workers are far from widespread.

ILO Online: Some countries of origin and destination have started to adopt policies to deal with the consequences of the crisis. Do these policies have an impact on migrant workers and labour migration?

Mr. Awad: Policies encouraging voluntary return put in place by some countries of destination have not realized their objectives up to now. A response to the crisis that only takes into account the decline in overall demand for labour, without regard to differential sectoral demands may end up generating irregular migration. It is still too early to assess the impact of more restrictive admission measures on the operation of labour markets and on the migration status of foreign workers. The employment situations in countries of origin and the remittances they receive will have to be monitored to examine the effectiveness of their adopted policy measures. This also applies to the protection of the rights of migrant workers.

ILO Online: What does the ILO recommend to reinforce the protection and recognition of the crucial role of migrant workers?

Mr. Awad: Migrant workers have participated in promoting economic growth and prosperity and the creation of wealth in countries of destination, while contributing to poverty reduction and development in their countries of origin. The future may harbour more adverse consequences for migrant workers than observed to date, if the crisis becomes drawn out. It is therefore important to adopt appropriate policy measures to maximize their contributions to both countries of origin and destination. For instance, economic stimulus packages put in place by countries of destination should equally and without discrimination benefit regular migrant workers. This would ensure the most efficient operation of labour markets and the best utilization of available labour. Using relevant international labour standards ( Note 2 ), social partners can work together in countries of origin and destination to improve labour migration policies that can respond to the crisis or capitalize on the opportunities ushered by it. The ILO Multilateral Framework on Labour Migration sets forth principles and provides guidelines that can be of great value in elaborating these policies.

Note 1 : According to the National Statistics, Geography and Information Institute

Note 2 : The ILO Conventions on migrant workers – Migration for Employment No. 97, (1949), the Migrant Workers (Supplementary Provisions) Convention No. 143, (1975) and the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, are the three conventions which define together a comprehensive charter of migrant rights and provide a legal basis for national policy and practice on migrant workers.

Labour Migration, Vulnerability, and Development Policy: The Pandemic as Inflexion Point?

• Introductory Article
• Published: 18 January 2021
• Volume 63 , pages 859–883, ( 2020 )

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• Ravi Srivastava 1  

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This issue takes the current pandemic as a point of reference to reflect on the nature of migration processes in India which involve labour migrants who generally work in the lower rungs of the informal economy. It particularly focuses on the circular migrants who were hardest hit by the stringent lockdowns in India and abroad. While migration occurs for a variety of reasons and takes a number of forms, it mostly aims at improving the livelihood and employment prospects of the movers and supports the growth and development of the areas to which the movement occurs. But this does not happen without significant stress and costs. Patterns of unequal development, demographic changes, wars, and conflicts play a large role in migration. Overall, the global trend has been towards higher mobility, both between countries and within countries, although at various levels, the data is fuzzy. This has contributed to greater well-being and prosperity, notwithstanding the many stress points. However, migration is not a single phenomenon in terms of nature, distance, and temporality and migrant workers have diverse characteristics. Many are poor and have little or no skills or assets, and others are well placed and well endowed in skills and assets. The former have poor bargaining power, form segments at the lower end of the labour market at destination, and struggle to achieve basic rights. The diversity in characteristics is also shared by migrants moving within, and across, national boundaries.

Attempts to curtail or structure mobility are not new. This is obvious in the movement between countries since immigration controls and rules are available to sovereign countries. It is less obvious in the case of internal migration where constraints and barriers on specific types of migration mobility operate through higher economic and non-economic costs. Historically, short-term controls on pandemics such as the Corona-Cov-2 pandemic of 2020 have operated through checks on population mobility, which reduces spatial transmission risks (see de Haan in this volume). These restrictions have dramatic and negative consequences for the economy and for economically vulnerable populations. Among the vulnerable, migratory populations and refugees are likely to be deeply affected, but research and policies have a strong tendency to ignore the existence of such populations (De Haan 1999 ).

1 International Migration

Internal and international (including cross-border) migration is generally seen with different lenses. This is understandable because international migration is subject to a country’s sovereign control over its borders and is permitted through its immigration rules. Moreover, the costs of international migration and information asymmetries are much higher, but benefits to migrants could also be higher due to higher wage/earning differential between countries. While there are also other differences, both internal migration and international migration are impelled by similar factors-in the case of economic migration, lack of adequate opportunities at source, or availability of better opportunities at destination; or in other cases, force of compulsion (as in the case of refugee migration or internally displaced persons (IDPs) ); or other factors (Srivastava and Sasikumar 2005 ; King and Skeldon 2010 ; Srivastava and Pandey 2017 ).

Globally, international migration is a greater focus of monitoring and policy attention for various reasons (Srivastava and Pandey 2017 ). The ILO and the UN have adopted a number of specific conventions and recommendations to protect the rights of international migrant workers, while the UN, the IOM, and the World Bank routinely monitor the trends in international migration and remittances. On the other hand, internal migrants and migrant workers are guaranteed their rights and protected against exploitation under the laws of the land and the general ILO Conventions which are deemed to be sufficient to protect their interests (ibid.). Compared to international migration, internal migration is only the subject of sporadic reports.

The impact of the pandemic has been severe on international emigrant workers, particularly low-skilled emigrant workers on short-term contracts working in the informal economy and undocumented workers. Loss of jobs, wage theft, issues with visa extension, closure of border crossings, lack of access to any social protection mechanisms, cost of repatriation have all taken a heavy toll on them. Incomes also declined for those emigrants who continued in employment. The ILO estimates that global labour income losses, without income support measures, declined by 10.7 per cent during the first three-quarters of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019 (ILO 2020 ).

The World Bank (Ratha et al. 2020 ) currently estimates that international remittances would decline by 7.2 per cent in 2020, followed by a further decline in 2021. High return migration and low prospects of new emigration are estimated to cause an absolute decline in the total numbers of emigrants, more severe than the 2008 global crisis (ibid.).

For India, international migration is voluminous and India is the highest earner of international remittances, which, however, is projected to decline by about 9 per cent in 2020 (Ratha et al. 2020 ). On the other hand, India also has a significant volume of migration from other countries, although most of this from countries with which India shares a border (Srivastava and Pandey 2017 ). There is scanty literature on the impact of the pandemic on these migrants, whereas we know more about the actual and possible impact of the pandemic of international migrants, particularly worker migrants in the Gulf and other regions.

The broad pattern of Indian emigrants abroad was in the past dominated by middle and high-income states in the North, West, and South of the country. Over time, the pattern of worker migration tilted towards the Eastern states of the country-Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal (Srivastava and Pandey 2017 ). The pandemic with its impact on oil revenues is likely to have a significant impact on the GCC countries which depend on oil exports due to falling oil revenues. As Abella and Sasikumar (this issue) show in their paper, trends in aggregate worker emigration closely mirror, albeit with a lag, the growth trends in the Gulf economies. They point out that the Government of India’s Vande Bharat mission brought back nearly 60000 stranded Indians from various countries abroad, of whom 170,000-180,000 were migrant workers. Since the journeys involved a direct travel cost of $350-400, many workers could not avail of them. Nonetheless, the likely scenarios of employment loss on incomplete contracts or wage loss for those migrants continuing to be employed imply a loss of earnings for the migrants as well as a loss in remittances. This loss increases when the “sunk costs” of migration in terms of recruitment costs are factored in. Abella and Sasikumar consider the segment of low-skilled workers, migrating to Saudi Arabia to be engaged in the construction sector. Based on the distribution of length of contract and earnings of this group, they project estimated loss in earnings and remittances under assumptions of job loss or lower wages. They point out that two counter tendencies may imply that the actual decrease in remittances may not be as high as anticipated: first, the tendency of employed migrants to remit a higher proportion of wages during crisis, and second, that the loss in employment may eventually not be very high due to the irreplaceability of low-skilled migrants in some sectors.

The Southern state of Kerala continues to have a large stock of migrants abroad-more than two million, particularly in the Gulf states. Kannan and Hari, in this issue, offer a long-term view of emigration from Kerala and hypothesise the impact of the pandemic of emigration and remittances in Kerala. Migrant workers from Kerala are currently estimated to be about 17-18 per cent of its workforce. Kannan and Hari estimates the number of migrants from Kerala and total remittances over nearly a half a century. Although emigration peaked around 2012-2013, remittances have shown a steady increase, but their contribution to state income declined from over a fifth at the beginning of this decade to about 14 per cent between 2015 and 2020, mainly due to a rapid growth in Kerala’s state income. Significantly, the secular increase in remittances was not reversed either by the Gulf wars or by global economic crises, including the 2008 crisis. The fact that total remittances increased despite a decline in the total number of migrants, Kannan and Hari note, was due to the changing educational and skill composition of the emigrant workforce, with a much smaller proportion engaged in manual and low-skilled jobs. The paper also analyses the macro-economic implications of the emigration for the state economy over different phases, its impact on the labour market, on household income and consumption and (increasing) inter-personal inequality, despite the state’s low multidimensional poverty index (MPI) and high human development index (HDI). The other negative aspect of Kerala’s development is the persistence of educated unemployment, especially among women, despite the safety valve of emigration. The third negative aspect is the declining tax collection effort shown by the share in net state domestic product (NSDP) of own tax revenue. The paper notes that the economic crisis precipitated by the pandemic confronts the state with multiple challenges and possibilities. As far as emigration is concerned, the crisis could be a turning point in terms of a sharp decline in Kerala’s large-scale labour migration to the Gulf countries, but alternatively, it could set off a beginning of a change in the composition of emigration if the demand for health care personnel increases in the Gulf as well as in other countries.

The Kerala migration story is examined from another perspective by Abraham (this issue), which can throw light on the long-term prospects open to return migrants affected by the current crisis (assuming that the short-term prospects could be overshadowed by the severity of the economic crisis and unemployment). Using the Kerala Migration Survey data, Abraham examines the occupational mobility of international migrants, pre-, during, and post-migration. Abraham points out that the major destination for migrants in Kerala is the GCC and 95 per cent of the migrations to the Gulf countries are on temporary contracts. Kerala still accounts for the highest Indian emigrant stock in the GCC. It is also the state with the highest return emigrant stock in India, and a high proportion of return emigrants are still in the working-age group and active in the labour force. The contractual jobs are mostly low skilled but offer a much higher earning potential to the migrants, although at the cost of deskilling for many, and downward occupational mobility. Their post-return occupational choices in the home labour market would be dependent on their level of human and physical capital and re-migration intentions, but termination or non-renewal of the migrant's contract could have an adverse impact on the occupational choices of the return migrants.

Using data from the 2011 Kerala Migration Survey, Abraham constructs three mobility matrices over the three phases of geographical mobility of return migrants in the economically active age group. The study finds that skilled blue-collar workers are in a higher proportion in all three stages of migration and they along with elementary workers form the largest proportion of return emigrants in Kerala. However, the proportion of workers is twice in the service sector while abroad, as compared to in the source region. The proportion of higher-skilled workers (professionals, associates, and technicians) are more or less stable over the three phases, while there is a significant rise (from negligible) in the percentage of workers reporting as managers/self-employed post-return. The data show a high occupational persistence among pre-emigration and post-return occupational choices, indicating that work experience abroad does not lead to a significant level of occupational mobility for return emigrants in Kerala. Around a fifth of the return migrants show upward mobility, while ten per cent moved to a lower occupational category. Only about 10 per cent are engaged in self-employment (mainly as proprietors and managers). Thus, the paper concludes that international migration does not lead to upward occupational mobility for most migrants and that there is limited skill augmentation ensuing from foreign work experience. Understanding these occupational trajectories in “normal” circumstances is more crucial in the current pandemic situation, with high numbers of return migrants, also unable to complete their contracts and requires an urgent consideration about the reintegration strategies for the migrants in the local economy and labour market.

2 Migration and Labour Circulation in India

Once households are considered as a site of production and social reproduction, a site where multiple strategies of subsistence converge, and which is placed in a social and cultural setting of kinship ties and the village, circular migration by individuals becomes part of a household strategy with diversification at its core (Ellis 1998 ). Lucas and Stark ( 1985 ) and the new economics of labour migration literature seek to explain these decisions by a risk spreading within households. Chen and Fan ( 2018 ) suggest that, in addition, migration transition theory, social network theories, and dual labour market theories also provide an explanation of labour market circulation. Of these, only the last emphasises the production structure and demand. The economies of production and social reproduction are shared between the migrant and the non-migrant part of the household in an intricate manner, enabling employers to meet only the basic cost of reproduction of the worker over the employment period, contributing to much greater flexibility and cheapening of labour. This has led to theorisations which focus on the dynamics of capital accumulation, capital labour relations, and how they incorporate the production and care economies (Breman 1996 and 2019 , Larche and Shah 2018 ).

Further, it may eventually be possible for migrants to take longer-term decisions, to migrate with their families, eventually even to uproot themselves almost entirely from their village settings. This has led to studies which explore changes in labour circulation over time and the decisions to migrate and settle permanently in urban areas (Chen and Fan 2018 ; Hu, Xu, and Chen 2011 ; Anh et al. 2012 ).

Labour migration may be seen as part of the larger phenomenon of labour mobility through which labour flows meet the requirements of spatially distinct regions. The larger phenomenon of labour mobility includes labour commuting at one end, and permanent migration, at the other. Circular migration falls between the two ends of this spectrum. The circular migration that is implied here may not have any fixity, in terms of location or temporality. It includes international migrants, cross-border migrants, or internal migrants.

Attempting to find a completely common ground between the various definitions of circular migration is not easy, and some parts of all definitions are debatable. Zelinsky ( 1971 : 225-226) defines circulation as:

a great variety of movements usually short term, repetitive or cyclical in nature, but all having in common the lack of any declared intention of a permanent or long lasting change in residence.

According to Skeldon ( 2012 ), the term “circular” implies a temporary movement that involves return. However, it is also distinct from “return migration”, as it implies more than just a single out-and-return movement to return at any time. Hugo ( 1982 ) further makes a distinction between commuting, defined as regular travel outside the village from 6 to 24 h, and circular migration, involving continuous but temporary absences of greater than 1 day.

Circularity includes migrants who adapt the seasonality of production and employment in their villages to that in the destination locations-whether rural or urban. It also includes those migrants who have acquired a certain fixity of location in urban spaces and also those whose location changes with workplaces and who, therefore, return to their native villages only when work opportunities are exhausted or when they themselves need to recuperate. A single label-seasonal or short term-eludes the circular migrants. Studies in most cases have focused either on short duration or seasonal migrants or those whose stay away from home have no temporal fixity, and who Breman in this issue describes as footloose workers or as modern day nomadism, which ensures that the workforce at the bottom of the economy, shorn off social security, and protection, can be bought at the lowest possible price and only hired for as long as their services. On the other hand, studies in the urban informal economy and in slums and similar habitations have often focused on the circular migrant who is struggling to put a foot in and find herself a niche in the urban economy and civic spaces.

Lucas ( 2015 ) in a review of internal migration globally points out that there is a neglect of seasonal and temporary migration globally. Such a neglect can have serious welfare and development implications for countries.

Long-term migrants in cities comprise either those who totally belong to the urban milieu or have largely extracted themselves from their rural roots. It also includes those who are semi-permanent residents in urban areas but still are linked to their rural habitat, with or without a desire to return to it permanently. Breman suggests that migrants who do not come back to the villages other than for short visits enjoy higher and steadier income, usually originate from castes-classes higher up in the village hierarchy, and are equipped with better physical and social capital. Survey results do not permit a very neat categorisation between different types of migrants. The National Sample Survey Organisation carried out a survey of migrants in 2007–2008. The survey allows us to distinguish between (in)-migrants, long-term outmigrants from households (away for more than a year), and short-term outmigrants (those who were away for work for a period of more than one month but less than six months). Results have shown that both (in)-migrants and long-term outmigrants who happen to be much more concentrated in better socio-economic groups than the short-term outmigrants who happen to be predominantly concentrated in lower consumption quintiles are from Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes or Other Backward Classes (Kundu and Sarangi 2007 ; Srivastava 2012 ). Yet, as discussed earlier the long-term outmigrants also form part of the precarious workforce in the informal urban economy (Srivastava 2020b ).

The migration of those at the bottom of the workforce which is less motivated by choice and search for better opportunity than by the dearth of livelihood opportunities in their home areas is very much a result of unequal development (Srivastava 2011b ; Srivastava et al. 2020b ) which has led to an empirical demarcation between sending states and receiving states. In fact, as shown in Srivastava ( 2020b , Table 8), states sending long-term migrants and short-term migrants largely overlap. As per the data from the 2011 Census and the NSS Survey on Migration (2007-2008), most outmigrants originate in a few low-income states and mostly travel to a handful of middle- or high-income states. The major source states are Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Odisha, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh, whereas the major destination states are Delhi, Haryana, and Punjab in the North (along with other areas in the Delhi National Capital Region), Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Goa in the West, and Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala in the South. Recent studies also indicate that there is an increase in migration from the North-eastern states and towards the Southern states (see Lusome and Bhagat, and Peter et al. in this issue).

However, as Breman rightly observes in this issue, the contrast between home states (sending migrants) and host states (receiving migrants) is too simple and should not be reified. Gujarat happens to be a state of both in-migration and outmigration, and it is not the only one. Breman( 1996 ) and Breman ( 2009 ) show that the demand for outside labour is not necessarily caused by a lack of local supply and migrants are employed because they are cheaper and more docile. In fact, as shown in Srivastava ( 2020b ) a large amount of short-term outmigration emanates from within the high-income states.

At a more general level, one can ask whether such migration leads to an improvement in the condition of the individual and the household, and if so, in what way. Evidence shows that remittances lead to an improvement in consumption and decline in poverty, but effects are linked to the initial endowments of migrants and their current position in the labour market (Srivastava 2011a ). Bharti and Tripathi in this issue use the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) data for 2004-05 and 2011–2012 and analyse intergenerational mobility between father–son pairs, with and without remittances. They find no significant difference in the occupational mobility profile of the two types of households. Although this study is for all types of households, the results are likely to hold more for migrants at the bottom of the occupational ladder.

The seasonal, short duration, and footloose migrants have been analysed in a number of papers in this issue. The general conclusion is that these labourers are among the lowest substratum of workers, intensely exploited and denied a modicum of labour rights (Mishra; Breman; Adhikari et al. this issue), and changes in labour regulation have increased labour flexibility and non-standard employment without addressing issues of rights and dignity of labour, or the balance between capital and labour.

Breman, who has studied the footloose labour in Gujarat for over half a century, summarises his findings on footloose migrants as:

‘modern day nomadism, which ensures that the workforce at the bottom of the economy, shorn off social security, and protection, can be bought at the lowest possible price and only hired for as long as their services are required.

Class-wise, they can be clubbed as either semi-proletarians equipped with meagre and low yielding means of production (land, tools, cattle) or proletarians who are fully dispossessed from such ownership and at risk of even having forfeited control over where and when to apply their labour power. Their social profiles are structured on the basis of their primary identities defined by caste (Scheduled Castes or Dalits, Other Backward Classes); tribe (Scheduled Tribes or Adivasis) or creed (Hindus or Muslims). All these distinct clusters are further subdivided into a broad and stratified repertoire of hierarchical differentiation.

From day one, they are marked as outsiders lacking local language proficiency and familiarity with the alien habitat and its social intercourse.

A drift between their place of origin and the work that entices them away, labour nomads are not without assertiveness. However, it is a resilience that does not amount to a joint platform of protest and resistance.’

Mishra, in this issue, has analysed the unfreedom of seasonal labour migration from the rain-fed regions of three districts in interior Odisha, one of the low-income states of India. The paper historically traces the causes of dispossession of agrarian producers, ranging from land acquisition, peasant differentiation as agriculture commercialises, and rural distress and agrarian crisis. Rural labour that escapes distress is absorbed in an exploitative capitalist labour market through a network of social and economic structures which builds on the ethnicity, caste, gender, and tribal identity of the labourers. Capitalism uses these structures of discrimination to discipline and control labour. In the specific manifestations of migrant lives, the capitalist and non-/pre-capitalist forms of exploitation intersect and create conditions for “conjugated oppression” (Lerche and Shah, 2018 ).

The seasonal migration patterns in the study areas are quite diverse but dominated by inter-state family migration to brick kilns where migration is structured by the dadan system, in which advances given by sub-contractors or Sardars at around the festival of Nuakhali are used by labourers to settle old debts and defray current expenses. In return, labourers commit their labour, as a family unit, to work in the brick kilns, effectively bartering away their freedom and bargaining power. Overall, Mishra notes that despite some diversity, within and between the migration streams, there is a marked adverse inclusion, often characterised by unfreedom, of labourers at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy, in capitalist production.

Bihar (along with Uttar Pradesh) has long been seen as the largest reservoir of migrant labour to many parts of the country. This migration again combines different streams and variations reflecting the initial social and economic endowment of the migrant’s household and individual characteristics. Dutta, in this issue, follows up on a long tradition of village and migration studies, initiated nearly five decades ago by a group of researchers working with the legendary researcher, Pradhan H. Prasad. (Of this research team, A. N. Sharma and Gerry Rodgers continue this research right till the present day.) Although secondary data suggest that Bihar contributes the most to short duration outmigration, Dutta finds that most of the outmigrants in her study are long-term migrants. The number of cases where entire households have relocated is low. While about one in five individuals migrated from two-third of the households, migration, especially among low-status social groups and agricultural labourers, was male dominated. Shorter-term migration streams were dominated by migrants from the poorest regions, and those at the bottom of the caste and class hierarchy, and these also constituted the most precarious migration streams. Again, while on average, migrants’ educational level was higher than non-migrants, migration streams at the bottom of the education spectrum were dominated by the most vulnerable social groups and poorest source regions. The person’s social and economic status was closely intertwined with the migration trajectory, and despite long periods of migration, most migrants continued to be in precarious jobs and enjoyed virtually no access to social protection entitlements at destination.

Uttarakhand, a mainly hilly state, with a long history of outmigration, was part of Uttar Pradesh till 2000. Awasthi and Mehta in this issue write about the background of migration from this state and then focus on the profile of a sample of migrants who had returned to the State after lockdown. Long-term circular outmigration from the region again far outweighed short-term outmigration, and in many cases, the former had partially been replaced by permanent outmigration, reducing many villages in the hills to the status of “ghost villages”. Turning to their survey of returnee migrants, they find that two-thirds had migrated to other states and nearly a similar proportion of all return migrants were recent migrants. A high, four-fifth of the returnees, were in regular wage/salaried jobs, while about a tenth each were self-employed or casual workers, but the salaried jobs were low skilled, low income, and informal, which ended as soon as lockdown started.

A number of papers in this issue analyse the conditions of migrant workers from the vantage point of receiving states and regions. The paper by Jayaram and Varma in this issue analyses the conditions of migrant workers industrialised Gujarat with a focus on two cities-Surat and Ahmedabad-and three sectors-construction, textiles, and hotels. In Ahmedabad, the textile value chain ended with women home-based workers who received a fraction of the minimum wage. The condition for male migrant workers in the small and medium units varied with scheduled caste migrant workers at the bottom of the ladder as helpers and contract workers having no possibility of upward mobility. Female workers earned even less than the male counterparts. Safety hazards were high, and scheduled tribe migrants were hired by the medium size units to do the most unsafe jobs. In Surat, 70 per cent of the powerloom workers were from Odisha working on piecerates on long shifts and when the powerlooms shut during the lockdown, many were stranded without wages. In the construction industry in Ahmedabad, workers were drawn from tribal areas within the state or from adjoining states, such as Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh, through contractors, who paid them an advance. Again as lockdown struck, many workers were stuck without wages. Migrant women were often hired as jodis or couples - as 1.5 labour units, leading to a large gender wage gap and a lack of control over incomes. Women often delivered their infants on worksites, without basic facilities, and return to work within 15 days of their delivery (Jayaram et al. 2019 ). In the hotel industry, low-caste workers were generally employed in menial and insecure jobs. Under lockdown, workers immediately lost jobs and living spaces and left worksites with large wage arrears from contractors, who claimed that they were unable to recover wages from the hotel employers. Across the sectors, unsafe working conditions and poor living conditions, high congruence between work and social status, including gender, and a large role for contractors and intermediaries, were common features.

Maharashtra continues to be the largest major destination state for labour migrants. The paper by Singh et al. presents labour market characteristics in the organised construction industry in the urban economic agglomeration around the state capital, Mumbai. The construction industry also draws the highest number of circular/seasonal migrants - nearly 40 per cent of the total, according to NSS and IHDS estimates and employment in the industry grew at a remarkable rate between 1983 and 2011-2012 (Srivastava 2018 ). The industry employs a very high proportion of migrants and informal workers who are engaged through a dense system of sub-contracting, obfuscating the legal responsibility of employers towards the engaged workers. The paper tries to unpack the term “employer” by reflecting on the national level labour legislations, viz. the Inter-State Migrant Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) (ISMW) Act, 1979, the Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) (BOCW) Act, 1996 and the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 applicable to the construction sector, complemented with findings from fieldwork to provide a concrete understanding of the labour sub-contracting process. The perpetuation of the contracting system to engage migrants, the authors argue, is to provide employers with highly flexible and low cost labour, and the system evades regulation. The responsibilities under the laws are divided between the “contractor” and the “employer” and take no cognizance of the web of relationships.

Kerala, which has been a major source state for outmigration to other states as well as international destinations, has now emerged as a major and attractive destination state as a result of labour market characteristics and demographic changes. The state has also relatively the most proactive migration policies. Peter et.al. (this issue) estimate that the state is currently home to about 3.5 million circular migrants. The state began to see a heavy influx of migrant labour from the 1990s, and much of this was from beyond the neighbouring states, such as Tamil Nadu. Peter et al. present an analysis of the sectors engaging migrants and the emergence of long-distance corridors, with migrant labour coming to Kerala from the Eastern, Northern and North-Eastern states (Assam, Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh). They suggest that, like the rest of India, the temporary migrants belong to socially and educationally disadvantaged poor agrarian communities, whose livelihood opportunities in their native places have been severely constrained by a multitude of factors including climate change, disasters like drought and floods, conflicts, and oppression.

Kerala is one of the few states which has had proactive policy for labour migrants (Srivastava 2020c , Peter et al., this issue). Some of these measures date back to 2008. However, Peter et al. point out that the welfare schemes and regulatory framework had limited reach among the migrants. Collective bargaining largely eluded them, so that wages, although higher than other states, remained lower than local wages. There was also the “othering” of migrant labour, and even the “guest worker” label, which connoted the welcoming status being given to them, was an unfortunate extraction from international migration, where such workers acquired differentiated and lower rights compared to local workers. They further analyse the measures taken by the state for labour migrants during the lockdown. The state was impacted early by the pandemic and reduced economic activity forced a large number of migrants to return home from mid-March even before the lockdown. With lockdown, the government tried to meet the food-related challenges faced by the labour migrants, with the help of the local community setting up community kitchens, with partial success. Large-scale efforts were made to disseminate awareness about the pandemic among migrants in their languages. Many residential shelters were declared to be in situ shelters, and some new shelters were also set up. Government efforts were strongly supplemented by the community and civil society organisations (CSOs). The paper points out that Kerala's strong decentralised institutional set-up and disaster preparedness also equipped it to take steps arising out of pandemic-related crisis for migrants. But the state also made several mid-course corrections in dealing with the migrant crisis.

The North-Eastern states in India share international borders with Bangladesh, Myanmar, China, and Bhutan. Migration patterns in these states are complicated since these states are both source and destination states for internal as well as international (cross-border) migration. Lusome and Bhagat (in this issue) use Census and other sources of data to analyse patterns of internal migration in these states, and the impact of the pandemic on return migration. The paper also presents a rich texture of migration for states within the region.

On average, about a third of the people in the region are migrants, compared to 37 per cent for the country, and the region saw a rise of 5 million in the migrant population between 2001 and 2011. But 60 per cent of migrants in the region were intra-district. Overall, international migrants comprised 2.5 per cent of all migrants, but they comprised more than two-fifth of the migrants from outside the state. The North and the Eastern part of the country each contributed a fifth of the migrants from outside the region. The region also records a little more than one million migrants from the states in the region to other states-comprising about 2.2 per cent of the region’s population. A majority of these moved to states within the region, but about one-fourth migrated to six major agglomerations in other parts of the country. Within the country, migration from the region exceeds migration to the region and the pattern of migration has now shifted southwards. The paper estimates that during the pandemic, post-lockdown, nearly half a million persons returned to the North-East which was also about half the total estimated stock of migrants in other parts of the country. Most of these migrants were engaged in the unorganised sector of the economy and lost their jobs during the lockdown.

2.1 Gender in Circular Migration

While women outnumber men in internal migration in India, it is often identified as part of marriage or associational migration (Srivastava 2012 ; Rajan and Sumeetha 2020 ; Mazumdar, Agnihotri and Neetha 2013 ). This generalisation is one of the inherent reasons for the invisibility of female labour migrants. While marriage and associated migration are part of the social practice of patrilocality, increased care work responsibilities are core reasons for the majority of women withdrawing from the labour force. Rajan et al. (this issue) argue that among circular migrants, the vulnerability of women falls into several categories, first, where single male migrants leave women and children behind, and the major responsibility of economic and social reproduction falls on these women, second, where women migrate with men, joining the labour force or taking up care responsibilities at home, and third, where women migrate singly to join the workforce. In each of the last two cases, women workers are part of the lower end of the informal economy, where their contribution as workers remains invisible and unrecognised, and their access to social protection entitlements remains weak.

Dasgupta’s paper uses ethnographic material to analyse the situation of informal women migrant workers who work in the lowest rungs of the informal economy. Her fieldwork is based in the National Capital Region of Delhi which is also one of the largest urban economic agglomerations in which a large number of circular labour migrants are employed. Dasgupta focuses on two important sectors: domestic workers and construction workers. Her paper examines how migrant women workers organised their productive–reproductive responsibilities as construction workers and domestic workers. Of the women on whose narratives this paper is based, most had migrated from villages, and two from small villages and four-fifth were from Scheduled Castes or were Muslims. For most of the women, the migration to the NCR is as what is described as associational migration. The patterns of migration varied-some were settled construction workers, others were more short duration migrants, and most domestic workers planned to stay in the cities for a few years without any plan to stay there permanently.

Social networks and ties played an important role in finding the women a place in the labour market, even when clientelist ties were reproduced through petty contractors, or patriarchal relationships reproduced when women chose to work in the proximity of their husbands, given the incidence of worksite sexual violence. Women organised their employment and care responsibilities in a continuum using multiple strategies, depending on working hours, distance, support available from older siblings, or other relatives both at workplaces (in construction) and at home. Long working hours compromised their ability to bargain for better working conditions. Women who were spending more time in the city made choices about leaving older children in the village for schooling because of their own uncertain lives in the cities. The villages partially helped the families to reproduce and gave them a translocal existence.

The construction sector activity was, in principle, regulated by the Building and Construction Workers’ Welfare Act (BoCW Act), whereas there was no sectoral law for domestic workers. Labour markets in both sectors were fragmented and segmented, and wages and working conditions were decided locally. Women workers in construction were deployed in multiple activities but treated as a pool of low-skilled labour with no chances of upward mobility. Workers across sectors did not get weekly leave or sick leave. None of the construction workers accessed maternity benefits under the BoCW Act. The labour contractors’ presence in construction sector made invisible the capital owner from the workers. Social and economic institutions were closely intertwined in producing the specific characteristics of women’s employment as well as the inter-linkage between employment and her care responsibilities, while at the same time keeping features of her work and exploitation invisible and underestimated.

2.2 Commuting Labour

As we remarked at the beginning of this section, labour commuting constitutes one end of the spectrum of labour mobility and, apart from availability of more remunerative jobs, is increasingly influenced by the patterns of urban economic growth, particularly the growth of urban economic agglomerations, cost of living in urban locations, and improved roads and means of transport. Bhatt, Chandrashekhar, and Sharma, in this issue, estimate that in 2018-2019, 18.8 million individuals living in rural areas were working in urban India, for 2.3 million urban workers, the place of work was rural and 9.7 and 7.8 million rural and urban workers, respectively, had no fixed place of work. Among all rural workers, 7.3 per cent were rural-urban commuters, while only 2.1 per cent of urban workers were urban-rural commuters. Using data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for 2018-2019, the paper offers a rich analysis of the factors that influence commuting, which can be seen to complement decisions to migrate. The analysis of the detailed characteristics of commuters shows that rural-urban commuters are present in manufacturing and construction, wholesale and retail trade, transportation and storage, and education and that men are much more than women, and among men, the younger age cohorts were more likely to commute. The other detailed characteristics are not discussed here, and the reader may refer to the paper for further details. The authors also estimate a multinomial regression model for rural and urban areas, respectively. One of the caveats of the paper is that only place of residence and place of work (rural/urban/no fixed place) are mentioned, while distance of commuting is not given, and the data would capture both daily commutes and short-term outmigration, but this again does not undermine the basic results, given the fluidity and complementarity of different types of labour mobility.

3 Magnitudes, Despite Lack of Exactitude

Lucas ( 2015 ), in a global review, points out that, due to inherent difficulties, given the fluidity of circular migration, circular (internal) migration is poorly measured. This is undoubtedly true for India. But over a period of time, evidence has accumulated about the large and growing numbers of circular migrants, providing little justification for their non-inclusion in policy.

Figures from the Census and NSS are often uncritically used to present very low and misleading estimates of short duration circular migration. The Census of India provides decennial figures of internal migrants (450 million in 2011 or about 37.7 per cent of the total population (Srivastava 2020d )). It further provides numbers of migrants by reason, distance, and duration. The NSS surveys on migration also provide estimates of short duration migration. But it has repeatedly been shown that these figures cannot be used to estimate even short duration circular migration (Srivastava 2020d ).

Despite the uncertainty regarding numbers, alternative estimates have been made for short duration migration, based on NSS and IHDs surveys (NSSO 2010 ; Srivastava 2011a ; Srivastava, Keshri, Gaur, Padhi and Jha 2020a ). These studies also bring out the association of short duration circular/seasonal migration with low social status, poverty, low levels of education, etc. (see also Kundu and Sarangi 2007 ; Keshri and Bhagat 2012 ). Two Commissions and Committees set up by government itself (NCEUS 2007 and MoHPA 2017 ) have also gone into various estimates of short duration seasonal/circular migration.

The Economic Survey for 2016-2017 brought about by the Finance Ministry of the Government of India devoted a full chapter to migration flows. Using a Cohort-based Migration Metric, it estimated that annual inter-state labour mobility averaged 5-6 million people between 2001 and 2011, or a decadal inter-state migrant population of about 60 million and an inter-district migration as high as 80 million. Further, it estimated internal work-related migration using railways data for the period 2011-2016 indicating an annual average flow of close to 9 million people between the states. Further, based on Census estimates, the Survey claimed that during the period 2001-2011, the annual rate of growth of labour migrants nearly doubled relative to the previous decade.

In a study of the construction industry, Srivastava ( 2018 ) showed that the NSS significantly underestimated inter-state circular migrant workers in the industry. Further, in the wake of the pandemic and the migrant exodus, Srivastava ( 2020b ) has attempted to provide estimates of vulnerable circular migrants, focusing on inter-state migrants. The paper estimates that there are about 58.5 million short-term circular migrant, of whom 28 million are estimated to work in other states and 24 million in the urban areas of other states. Further, categorizing outmigrants in NCO groups 5-9 as being occupationally vulnerable, the paper estimates that there were 69 million vulnerable long-term circular migrant workers, of whom 24 million were inter-state migrants workers, and 19 million worked in urban areas of other states. Thus, the paper concluded that there was an estimated 52 million vulnerable inter-state migrant workers, of whom 43 million were located in other states.

4 The Current Pandemic and Circular Migrants

India responded to the pandemic from February 2020 onwards through screening of international passengers and announcing preventing measures. On 19 March, the Prime Minister announced one-day voluntary lockdown as a preparatory measure. But this was followed by a three-week country-wide lockdown from the midnight of 24 March, announced only at four-hour notice. The lockdown did not take into account the country’s economic structure or social demography. It addressed the middle classes when the Prime Minister evocatively asked citizens to treat their doorstep as a boundary (“Lakshman Rekha”) and not to cross it during the lockdown (Breman, this issue). Only essential services were allowed to function during this period. All other economic activities came to a grinding halt.

The extreme restrictions on mobility affected the poorest who had to access essential services (drinking water and toilets) away from their houses. The severe restrictions which placed India at the top of the Oxford University’s stringency index were considered essential to control the virus’s transmission and to give time for the public health infrastructure to be strengthened to respond to the pandemic. But it left the poor and the migratory populations high and dry. Many millions of people, men, women, and children-footloose migrant labour, students, tourists, and others-were stranded in different locations, often without food, shelter, and money.

The plight of India’s migrant labour during the lockdown has been well documented in a number of rapid surveys carried out by civil society organisations on the ground who had been in close contact with migrant labour communities before and during the lockdown. The SWAN network was one such network of activists set-up during the pandemic, which created channels through which migrant workers in distress reached out to volunteers, who then channelled support through their network. The network was able to collect data on the distressed migrants and put out three reports. The data collected have been analysed for this issue by Adhikari et al. (this issue).

The government announced a package of measures for the poor on 27 March, but the circular migrants were by and large not covered by the transfer of limited amounts of cash to women account holders through accounts opened since 2015 to push financial inclusion, or to farmers, and poor pension holders in a government social assistance programme (Srivastava 2020b ). Even the Public Distribution System (PDS) which ostensibly covers three-quarters of the rural population and half the urban population could not reach them. The paper documents that between March and July, even with some improvement over the weeks, only 18 per cent of the stranded migrants who reached out to them were able to access food rations. Across four states-Delhi, Haryana, Karnataka, and Maharashtra, only about 36 per cent had received assistance in the form of cooked food (Adhikari et al., this issue).

Short-term labour migrants often live in worksites and depend on contractors for payments. In many cases, payments for work carried out were also denied to them, but workers were held back at sites. Payment during lockdown was even rarer. Among nearly 24,000 workers whose data were available with the SWAN network, only 4 per cent said that they had been paid during lockdown, while 12 per cent that they had been paid partially. But in many cases, these payments related to work done before the lockdown (Adhikari et al., ibid.).

The footloose labourers who were ultimately dependent on meagre cash savings and uncertain food handouts, were eager to return to their villages. But the desperation was not limited to short-term migrants. Long-term migrants in India’s urban economy, who had lost their jobs and earnings, and in many cases, were unable to pay their rents and were also left out of the social protection net and also felt that they had no recourse but to fall back on their rural resources (see below).

The exodus of the migrants began in the first week of lockdown, but the severe governmental response pushed them back to their shelters or they interned in government shelters. But there was no containing these migrant workers once there was news of an extension of the lockdown. Millions of workers, often accompanied by their family members, including young children began walking back to their villages-often thousands of miles away. They also used whatever means they could muster-bicycles, pushcarts, hired passenger or transport vehicles to make these journeys (Srivastava 2020b ). As Adhikari et al. point out in this issue, the scenes were reminiscent of Steinbeck’s depiction of mass movements of the poor during the Great Depression, or the movement of people in the Indian sub-continent during partition. At least 900 people died during these journeys.

Nearly half the distress calls to the SWAN volunteers emanated from migrants who had less than a day of food supply available with them (ibid). Nearly 57 per cent of the distress calls came from industrial workers (in factories or construction), where many of the former could have been longer-term migrants, about 8.65% belonged to the non-group based employed category and about 20% were self-employed and both these categories are more likely to have been longer-term migrants. The paper points out that initially a majority of distress calls were from short-term inter-state migrants.

Over a period of time, distress calls from longer-term migrants or “settled population” and intra-state migrants increased, indicating a widening net of vulnerability. The impact of the lockdown on longer-term circular migrants has also been corroborated by other surveys (Gramvaani 2020a and 2020b ). Although these migrants had a better social network to tap into for loans or other forms of support, the loss of jobs and earnings of entire communities, in the face of the pandemic, and limited or no access to social protection programmes, exposed them to high risk and vulnerability. Once the lockdown was initiated, earners and remitters had to survive on savings, private or public assistance, reverse remittance from families in the villages, borrowing, and sale of assets. The scope for borrowing and sale of assets to finance subsistence or the journey back home was more likely to be available for long-term migrant workers than the footloose labour (Adhikari et al., this issue).

The harrowing journey home of the migrants was extensively captured by the Indian media, both print and visual. There were times in April–May when every highway in the country, South to North, West and North to East provided ample evidence of the large masses of migrants making their way home. The government stepped in only in early May, and then, too, there was lack of coordination between state governments and between states and the centre, regarding procedures and payments (Srivastava 2020b ). While the government stated in the Supreme Court that by early June, nearly 10 million migrants had availed of trains and state provided transport to go home, the figures of migrants who travelled without any official support was much larger (ibid.). Moreover, despite instructions of the apex Court, a large number of migrants had to incur substantial costs in making the journey. The SWAN network found that 85 per cent of the migrant workers who had returned home or were in transit had to incur high costs for this journey (Adhikari et al. this issue).

The impact of the lockdown was particularly severe for women and children. Women workers and/or spouses faced inordinate problems in accessing health support during pregnancy and for other needs. Many were subject to severe forms of abuse in the confined spaces with spouses. Travelling back was an even more harrowing experience for them. Women were more likely to be thrown out of work during lockdown and less likely to be re-employed as lockdown relaxed (Adhikari et al. this issue).

The gender dimensions of the crisis have also been highlighted by Rajan et al.. Migrant women (workers or spouses) were subject to enormous hardship during transit, and some did not even survive the journeys. Job losses have been particularly severe among informal women workers, and regaining lost jobs has been more difficult for them, resulting in the widening of gender gaps. There was of increased evidence of domestic violence. Loans, debts, and accompanying poverty had resulted in instances of early marriages, sex trade, trafficking, exploitation, while bonded labour and child labour had emerged as areas of concern and may all be on the rise. There was also concern that it was increasingly difficult to meet the pre- and post-natal and pregnant requirements of women. Although the Ministry of Health and the National Commission on Women had issued an advisory on taking special care of women and children, their safety remained an area of concern.

Adhikari et al. (this issue) and Rajan et al. (this issue) also point out that while the extent of food insecurity, loss of livelihoods, and lack of medical care for migrants have been widely discussed, anxiety, fear, depression, and uncertainties concerning their life have received less attention. In particular, they point out that being in a cramped space with no work and constant uncertainty surrounding food spawned a mental health crisis. There has been some recognition of this in government and policy making circles. But the technocratic solutions avoided entire the socio-political context of the migrant crisis which had exacerbated the mental health trauma of the workers.

5 Policy Implications

Papers in this volume underscore the deep-seated vulnerability of labour migrants, neglect of migrants in politics, in policy, and lack of accepted place for them in cities. They approach policy issues largely from two perspectives-that of labour policy and labour regulation and that of social security and social protection. They have also highlighted political inclusion, and the importance of organisations of migrant workers. Most of these issues cut across countries and international and internal migrants (De Haan, this issue).

One of the reasons for the lack of neglect of migrants in the internal policy discourse is that they do not have a political constituency and that they are not able to exercise even the right to vote (De Haan, this issue). In the recent elections in the state of Bihar in India, the presence of migrant returnees put migrant-related issues firmly on the agenda.

The migrant crisis revealed that India’s patchy social protection system does not address the requirements of the enormous mass of mobile workers in the informal economy. According to the ILO (cited by Rajan et al. this issue), India had the lowest percentage of population in Asia and the Pacific covered by at least one social protection benefit (effective coverage) in 2015. The social protection measures in place were more focused towards the rural population, leaving a much larger gap in covering the urban poor and migrant labour. The authors argue for a more migration-inclusive social protection policy encompassing public employment programmes, food, health, and cash transfer (Adhikari et al., Rajan et al., this issue). In their paper, Adhikari et al. (this issue) have argued for a bolstering of the two pillars of the relief response in India, viz. the Public Distribution System (PDS) and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREGP). Authors have also argued for a comprehensive and universal social security and social protection system as recommended by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS 2006 , 2007 ).

Ensuring social protection for migrants means not only creating these entitlements but also mechanisms to ensure that those programmes that exist can be accessed. This involves portability of entitlements such as the PDS, the right of children to attend schools, maternity entitlements of women, and nutritional and pre-school education entitlements of young children (De Haan this issue). These social protection claims have been created by the national government, and some of them (such as PDS, nutritional entitlements of children, and attendance in schools) have been created by law, but cannot be exercised by migrants. There has been some progress in this direction-migrant children cannot be denied the right to enrol in schools for lack of documentation, and post-lockdown, the central government has promised portability of the PDS by June 2021 under its “One Nation, One PDS scheme”.

But there are undeniable pitfalls in moving towards entitlements for migrants. First, social protection claims in India can be created by all three levels of government, central, state, and local and many claims that are created by lower level governments are only for their own citizens and exclude migrants under various domiciliary restrictions (Srivastava 2020a ; MoHPA 2017 ; Kone et al. 2017 ). Second, portability would also require a system of registration of workers (and establishments), and transfer of provisions (registrations and claims) across jurisdictions. At present, no universal system of registration exists, and the reliance is on the system of identification created by government called the UID. This system has several flaws: it creates last mile exclusion of the most vulnerable, and it is susceptible to misuse (Breman, this issue). Any registration system for social security/social protection should be consistent with data privacy, and the concerned law is still being debated in India.

Almost all papers in the volume have argued for a strengthening rather than a dilution of labour laws. The main objective of a labour reform agenda should be to bring about inclusive and equitable growth, ensure a fair distribution of gains in productivity between workers and owners of capital, ensure industrial peace through a responsive system of grievance redressal, eliminate job discrimination against migrants on the basis of caste, gender etc., reduce precarity of employment, and create a minimum floor of labour standards for workers. Jayaram and Varma argue that the migrant crisis could be seen as a direct result of the complete absence of labour governance architecture in the segments of the urban labour markets that employ them, fuelling impunity of employers to perpetuate extractive labour practices. They argue that a labour reform process must bring the protection of migrant workers to the centre of its agenda by strengthening institutional mechanisms for holding employers liable for violations of their labour rights.

Firms are currently able to evade regulatory responsibility towards workers by either not falling within the ambit of the organised (formal) sector, or if they do, keeping workers out of the regulatory framework through a maze of informal and sub-contracting relationships, as mentioned earlier. Jayaram and Varma point out there were as many as seven sub-contracting layers in their study of the construction sector. Migrant sub-contracted workers have no record of their employment relationship and do not even know who their principal employer is. Laws recognise either the principal employer or the contractor but do not take into account the maze of these relationships. The migrant workers, temporary and mobile, with no proper documentation, face an impossible task in negotiating their way through the labour conciliation and adjudication machinery or the criminal justice system, both heavily tilted towards employers (Jayaram and Varma, this issue). Papers in this volume point out that the labour law changes have constantly undermined efforts to fix responsibility on principal employers, and the role of employers is constantly obfuscated in value chains across different types of activities where contracting/sub-contracting is involved. They argue that the common factor between diverse extractive labour practices across sectors is that the relationship between migrant workers and their employers or contractors remains in the extra-legal territory. The inability of workers to invoke employers’ liability to provide for them as a statutory right leaves them with work relationships that are not legally regulated, but fragment and segment them based on social identities of caste, gender, and ethno-linguistic identity. Labour standards need to be maintained across the entire supply chain, where small margins push smaller manufacturers towards a race to the bottom. Jayaram and Varma argue for recognizing the big retailers/buyers as the principal employers with a graded system of compliance responsibility across the value chain.

The labour governance architecture does not recognise or respond to the complex intersection of informality, mobility, and caste- or gender-based discrimination that enables violations of migrant workers’ labour rights. Several important laws, such as the Minimum Wages Act, Employee’s Compensation Act, and the Bonded Labour Abolition Act, which are applicable to all informal workers, also remain unimplemented due to poor enforcement. The enforcement of labour regulation has been affected by the steady debilitation of the labour regulation and inspection system. Rather than relaxing employer compliances, simplification along with greater accountability in the system of inspections can be built on tripartite principles, through greater worker and civil society participation (NCEUS 2007 ; Jayaram and Varma, this issue). Opportunities for informal and migrant workers to register their own unions or ensure their participation in recognised unions through affirmative action would also improve the compliance environment.

The labour reforms process must initiate the comprehensive identification, recognition, and inclusion of the entire spectrum of non-standard employment (including home-based work, piece-rated work, and family-based labour) into the ambit of the formal legal-policy ecosystem. Wherever feasible, systems of firm registration and worker registration should be implemented, so that a direct identification and establishment of employment relationship is possible.

6 Does the Pandemic Denote an Inflexion Point for the Precarity of Circular Migrants?

The neglect of labour migrants in policies is not a benign neglect, arising due to their accidental invisibility, and lack of adequate information regarding migration flows and numbers. While its structural causes-unequal development and demographic imbalances-are undeniable, the present condition of migrant labour is deeply embedded in the pattern of capitalist development, and social-structural conditions in which the production and social reproduction of labour take place. Many of the papers in the present volume emphasise the role of social structure, and gender is maintaining what Shah and Lerche ( 2020 ) call “conjugate structures of exploitation”. The partial reproduction and social reproduction of the worker and her/his family in the rural village, the separation of worker from her/his social milieu, and in the case of wage worker: the pattern of recruitment and deployment in labour markets which are segmented in various ways, create a pool of highly low cost and flexible labour which circulates place to place and between town and country. Srivastava ( 2016a , b ) and Srivastava, Padhi and Ranjan ( 2020 ) point out how labour market informality and flexibility are increasing in India in the formal sector of the economy, while the informal sector is in any case almost entirely informalised. Srivastava ( 2019 ) also shows how labour market flexibility, informality, segmentation based on social structure, and labour circulation go hand in hand.

Concerns with the implications of the precarity of migrants based on their working conditions and living conditions were highlighted during the migrant crisis in India following lockdown, which several authors here and elsewhere have recognised as the largest exodus ever in conditions of crisis. The implications of these conditions were not restricted to the migrant workers and their families but were also felt by the entire population (since living conditions and forced mobility both could cause a worsening of the epidemic). Further, the impact of the sudden forced mobility had significant implications for economic activity both at destinations (from where the exodus took place) and the source areas.

Since, as discussed in Section 4, the Indian state first refused to acknowledge the crisis and then was forced to respond reluctantly to the humanitarian crisis, the question that we ask is whether the crisis constituted a point of inflexion in the migration question in India. A similar question can be asked with respect to international migrants, but for lack of space, we restrict ourselves to the vulnerable internal migrants in India.

A part of the answer became evident even in the period when the stringent lockdown began to unwind when state after state, almost on cue began to make changes in labour laws. Labour law falls in the concurrent list, and states can make amendment to the laws with the consent of the central government. They can also amend provisions by invoking special conditions under powers provided to them in the Acts. As many as twelve states made amendments to provisions in labour laws as soon as the lockdown began to unwind in May 2020 (PRS Legislative Research 2020a ). The maximum number of changes concerned increase in working hours ranging from 10 to 12 hours per day, changes in maximum hours permissible per week, and in overtime payments (ibid.). The rationale provided was work stretching necessitated by social distancing, meeting of labour shortages, or simply labour market flexibility required by new investments. However, several states made far more sweeping changes in labour laws with exemptions for periods between 1000 and 1200 days, in the name of attracting new investments and creating employment. The most extensive changes were proposed by states with the same political dispensation as the centre. Two states, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, approved ordinances repealing the provisions of all labour laws, with some caveats. These changes affected working hours, industrial safety, grievance redressal, formation of trade unions and industrial bargaining, and even social security provisions (Srivastava 2020b ; Shyamsundar and Sapkal 2020 ). Although made individually by states, the changes followed a clear template provided by the central government on the advice of employers (Srivastava 2020b ; PIB 2020 ). States such as MP and UP, which made sweeping changes in the labour laws, specifically claimed that they would create employment opportunities for migrant workers. The claims of higher investment and employment even in normal times have been strongly contested (Srivastava 2016b ; Bhattacharjea 2019 ). Jayaram and Varma point out that the proposed changes were applauded by industry associations because they benefit large industrialists who engage organised workforce in their factories, where workers’ collective bargaining and the state’s regulatory mechanisms are more effective.

Under protests from trade unions that the changes in working hours violated the ILO Convention on working hours and complaint made to the ILO, the ILO Director General wrote to the Government of India. Footnote 1 In July 2020, the central government told the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour that it did not concur with the changes proposed by the States, Footnote 2 and in October 2020, the apex court struck down the provisions in the Gujarat ordinance making changes in working hours in factories and stated quite clearly that the pandemic was not a “public emergency” in the sense implied by the legislation, and the provision could not be invoked by the Gujarat government to make changes in maximum working hours and overtime. Although all of this led to a partial roll back, it is noteworthy that the changes were proposed at a time when the migrant crisis was at its peak and its magnitude emanating from employment precarity was clearly evident.

Another part of the answer emerged in September 2020, when the government legislated three labour codes. Industrial Relations, Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions, and Social Security Codes amalgamating central legislations on the above subjects. Coming, as they did, after the migrants’ crisis, they provide a lens on the government’s treatment of the issues mentioned in the preceding section. Footnote 3

The Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act has now been subsumed in the Code on Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (in brief, OSH). The provisions of the Code on OSH and the Code on Social Security now suggest that the Codes provide greater visibility on inter-state migrant workers. Their definition has been widened in the Codes to include workers in establishments moving across state boundaries on their own, and, for certain provisions, even self-employed migrants. Further, for registration purposes, establishments will be required to report on inter-state migrants employed by them. The central and state governments will be required to maintain a database of inter-state migrants, and such migrants (including those self-employed) will be able to self-register on that portal. Employers/contractors engaging inter-state-migrant workers in establishments employing ten or more such workers (double of the numbers in the subsumed act) will provide a journey allowance under certain conditions and provide suitable conditions from employers and social security, facility of an annual health check-up if prescribed by government (a new facility). Finally, the state government will ensure that the benefits provided for building and construction workers are portable, and the benefit of PDS is available to the worker either in the source or destination state. An analysis of these provisions shows that while, by making references to inter-state migrant workers in these provisions, the Codes make migrants more visible, very few of them are new, significant or mandatory. The Code on Social Security lays the framework for social security for all workers, including migrants. But no scheme, others than those already pre-existing, is provided for migrants.

It is, however, more significant that most provisions relating to inter-state migrant workers in the Codes are circumscribed by the major provisions relating to industrial relations, working conditions, etc., which are aimed at the removal of the labour protective framework would lead to the informalisation of the small fraction of organised workforce in the country, rather than encourage unorganised units to formalise (Shyamsundar and Sapkal 2020 ).They weaken the scope for legitimate industrial action and jeopardise the right to association and social dialogue. Further, all the Codes weaken an already debilitated inspection system which will no longer even be complaints based.

Following the steps taken earlier in 2018 in the central sphere, the Codes have introduced fixed term employment in all establishments. The employees will have the same wages and leave benefits as permanent employees in the same category and will also be entitled to applicable social security benefits, and pro-rata gratuity benefits if they are employed in an establishment for more than a year. But the fixed term employees will not be able to graduate to being permanent employees and hence will also be denied career progression, thus creating a cadre of permanently insecure employees, unlike the treatment of such employees in several other countries across the world (Srivastava 2016a ). Fixed term employment, it is argued, would encourage employers to increase direct employment replacing employment through contractors. Yet provisions relating to contract labour have been further liberalised, and establishments and contractors dealing with less than fifty contract workers (compared to twenty such workers earlier) will no longer need any permission or registration. The Code on OSH further obfuscates the relationship between worker and employer and the responsibility of the latter by juxtaposing the definition of employer with the contractor (an issue raised by several of the contributors in this issue). Similarly, threshold levels for factories, standing orders on employment, permission for retrenchment have all been raised, significantly enhancing deregulation in all aspects of the labour market and pushing it towards greater flexibility and precarity. Given that circular migrants already form a very large chunk of such workers, this basic tendency is not likely to be reversed by the rather cosmetic references to (only) inter-state migrant workers in the Codes.

The new labour law architecture has been seen by the Indian government as a key factor in promoting competitiveness of industry, “ease of business”, and (in the context of the pandemic) economic revival. Yet, as a number of authors have argued, these arguments are highly debatable as industrial competitiveness depends on much wider range of factors such as infrastructure and the broader policy environment (Sood 2020 ; Srivastava 2016b ; Bhattacharjea 2019 ; Jayaram and Varma, this issue). The current changes are grounded in the logic of a “race to the bottom” and a “low” route to capitalist development, as several contributors in this issues and elsewhere (Srivastava 2011b , 2020b ) have argued, tilting the balance further towards large capital (Sood and Nath 2020 ). Analysts have noted that during July–September 2020, while India’s GDP contracted by 7.5 per cent, the real profit of listed companies increased by 25 per cent, and the share of real wages declined (Chenoy 2020 ). Although the crisis has increased the visibility of migrants, particularly inter-state migrants, in social protection policy, the policy changes aim at increasing flexibility and precarity. Unfortunately, there are no signs that the precarious conditions of circular migrants in India, who faced the brunt of lockdown and occupy highly disadvantageous positions in the labour market, will experience less precarious and less unsafe conditions as a result of these changes.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Alakh Sharma for having given me the opportunity to edit this issue and to S. K. Sasikumar for his critical suggestions and significant contribution to its production.

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Srivastava, R. Labour Migration, Vulnerability, and Development Policy: The Pandemic as Inflexion Point?. Ind. J. Labour Econ. 63 , 859–883 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-020-00301-x

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Domestic and Migrant Workers

Millions of people around the world are on the move, trying to adapt to life in countries not their own. In some cases this movement is voluntary, as people search for better life opportunities, education, or work. In many more cases, however, the migration is forced, as people flee poverty, civil unrest, and war, or as they search for employment that will simply allow them to survive.

A migrant worker is a person engaged in a remunerated activity in a country of which he or she is not a national. A domestic worker is defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as “a wage-earner working in a private household, under whatever method and period of remuneration, who may be employed by one or by several employers who receive no pecuniary gain from this work.” Domestic workers are usually occupied as housekeepers, nannies, cooks, drivers, gardeners, and other personal servants. Some domestic and migrant workers labor under slave-like conditions.

In the last decade there has been an increase in a form of modern-day slavery that is practiced in the “developed” or “first” world: the exploitation of foreign migrant domestic workers. Domestic workers who are taken to other countries by diplomats and corporate executives are among the most abused and vulnerable migrant workers. Although not bought as slaves, fundamental human rights of migrants are frequently violated or ignored. The exploitation can range from wage and hour violations to physical and sexual abuse. In many cases employers have withheld legal documents of migrant workers, thereby restricting their mobility. Domestic workers such as these are not covered by labor protection legislation; that fact combined with language and cultural barriers makes them easy targets for exploitation. The Break the Chain Campaign (formerly the Campaign for Migrant Domestic Workers Rights), an organization that publicizes the plight of these workers in the United States, reports that most domestic workers are poor women from developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America who enter the United States on temporary visas. Once paperwork is filed for their visas, international institutions and embassies take a “hands-off” approach to the plight of these domestic workers.

Prohibitions

International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. Adopted by General Assembly resolution 45/158 of 18 December 1990.

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Content by Mini Singh Research Analyst, FSE

Content in Arabic by Raja El Habti Research Assistant, FSE

Overseas Filipino Workers: The Modern-Day Heroes of the Philippines

Bayani is the Tagalog term for “hero.” In the Philippines, a bayani is someone who is courageous, humble, and selfless. They pursue causes that are greater than themselves, such as those impacting a community, a nation, or the environment. Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) is a term referring to Filipino migrant workers, individuals who have left their homes to work abroad and provide comfortable lives for their families. Referring to these workers, former President Corazon Aquino coined the phrase ‘Bagong-Bayani’ in 1988. OFWs are the country’s modern-day heroes because they not only boost the Philippines’ economy through remittances but are figures of resilience. OFWs endure homesickness, personal sacrifices, and horrible working conditions in order to support their families back home.

By the Numbers

The Philippine Statistic Authority estimates that about 1.83 million OFWs worked abroad from April to September 2021. The same data reveal that about “four in every ten” OFWs work low-status or ‘ elementary ’ jobs, such as street vendors, construction and factory workers, cleaners, domestic helpers, and agriculture laborers. A majority of OFWs work in Asia, specifically Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Singapore, and Qatar.

Because of their major contribution to the growth and development of the Philippine economy, OFWs are revered as the nation's economic heroes. According to data released by the Central Bank of the Philippines, remittances from OFWs reached a record high in December of last year: from the previous all-time high of US$34.88 billion, it rose by 3.6 percent to a record high US$36.14 billion in 2022.

“OFW remittances, at new record highs on a monthly basis, are a bright spot for the Philippine economy in terms of spurring consumer spending, which accounts for at least 75 percent of the economy, and in turn, support faster economic growth,” Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. Chief economist Michael Ricafort said .

Furthermore, most OFWs are Filipina women. The numbers clearly show that women dominate the workforce, accounting for approximately 60 percent of OFWs. According to data from the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, at least 18,002, or 75.05 percent of the 23,986 cases of abuse and other incidents involving workers in the Gulf Cooperation Council that were reported last year included female OFWs. On the other hand, male OFWs were involved in only 5,984 cases, or 24.95 percent of all cases.

These women are disproportionately more likely to suffer from terrible working conditions, as they are often subjected to abuse, excessive work, little pay, rape, or worse, being killed by their foreign employers. The International Labour Office published a working paper titled Philippines: Good Practices for the Protection of Filipino Women Migrant Workers in Vulnerable Jobs explaining that “Gender-based discrimination intersects with discrimination based on other forms of  ‘otherness’ – such as non-national status, race, ethnicity, religion, economic status – placing women migrants in situations of double, triple or even fourfold discrimination, disadvantage or vulnerability to exploitation and abuse.”

In 2020, there were 23,714 documented cases of contract violations involving the maltreatment of OFWs, according to data provided by the Philippine Overseas Labor Offices, and approximately 5,000 of these cases were reported from Middle Eastern countries. According to the Philippine Information Agency, Filipina women who work in the Middle East are subjected to the “ kafala ” system, which ties foreign workers to their employers. Under this framework, employers could easily lock domestic workers inside their houses and seize their phones, passports, and visas until the expiration of their contracts.

The Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a comprehensive report titled “ ‘I Already Bought You’ Abuse and Exploitation of Female Migrant Domestic Workers in the United Arab Emirates,” which explains real-world examples of how the UAE’s kafala system of visa sponsorship binds migrant employees to their employers and how the exclusion of domestic workers from labor law protections exposes them to abuse.

The report included interviews with 99 female domestic workers in the UAE between November and December 2013. 22 of the 99 domestic helpers questioned by HRW claimed to have experienced physical abuse at the hands of their sponsors.

“They slap me in the face and kick me. They have a stick for you. If I make a small mistake they would hit parts of my body—back legs, back, and head. Sir would slap or punch me in the face. If they come back from the mall and I am not finished they would beat me,” Shelly A., a 30-year-old Filipina worker said. “They would say, ‘If you had done work then we won’t hit you.’ ”

Injustices in Kuwait

Currently, there are over 268,000 OFWs who live and work in Kuwait with 88 percent of them working as domestic helpers and 73 percent of them being female. According to the Philippine Department of Migrant Workers (DMW), there were over 24,000 cases of abuse and violation against OFWs in 2022—a significant rise from 6,500 in 2016.

It is a significant sacrifice to work abroad. Being physically and emotionally thousands of miles away from one’s family for an indefinite period is challenging, isolating, and suffocating. Rowena, a 54-year-old Filipina worker in Bahrain found herself feeling “trapped” due to canceled flights to the Philippines because of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as being underpaid by her employer. “I don’t want to make trouble. I want to go home,” Rowena said .

Beyond this, many OFWs also work abroad without knowledge of the future or the dangers they may encounter in a foreign country. Even worse, a harsh truth of working abroad is that a number of OFWs return home as dead bodies.

In January of 2023, Jullebee Ranara , a Filipina domestic helper living in Kuwait, confided in her family over the phone that she was terrified of her employer's 17-year-old son. The 35-year-old appeared to have vanished by the next day, which prompted her friends in the Gulf state to share their worries about her disappearance on social media.

Less than 24 hours later, on Jan. 21, 2023, her body was found dead, with burnt remains and a smashed skull found beside a desert near Al-Salmi Road.

Ranara was discovered to be pregnant after an autopsy, and DNA samples taken from the unborn child were confirmed to match the accused, who is the 17-year-old son of Ranara’s boss. After being apprehended, the 17-year-old perpetrator confessed to his crime.

Since 2018, there have been at least four murders of OFWs in Kuwait that have garnered national attention, including the case of 29-year-old Joanna Demafelis , whose body was kept secret in a freezer in an abandoned apartment for nearly two years. Her employers, a Syrian and a Lebanese couple, received death sentences for the murder of the victim.

In 2019, 47-year-old Constancia Lago Dayag was discovered dead after being sexually abused and beaten to death by her boss. The same year, 26-year-old Jeanelyn Villavende passed away from serious injuries inflicted by her boss, who was ultimately given a death sentence for the murder.

“These are only the high-profile ones,” Migrante International chairperson Joanna Concepcion told VICE World News. “There are other cases that are not visible. The public is not made aware of the real gravity of the rampant abuses faced by Filipino domestic helpers in Kuwait.”

Actions taken by the Philippine Government

A week after the discovery of Jullebee’s body, her remains were returned to her grieving family in Las Piñas, Philippines. Without delay, Philippine President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. attended Jullebee’s wake and promised to provide the deceased’s family with all aid possible.

“I just wanted to offer my sympathies to the family and to assure them that all the assistance that they might need for the family and for whatever else, that is my promise to them,” Marcos Jr. remarked . “Their child made that sacrifice to work abroad because she has dreams for her family here.”

Recently, the DMW issued a deployment ban on new and aspiring OFWs in Kuwait, following the increasing reports of work mistreatment, including the horrific murder of Ranara.

“In order to strengthen the protection of the rights of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) in Kuwait, particularly workers who are most vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, action on the applications of first-time agency-hire domestic workers bound for Kuwait is temporarily deferred effective immediately,” the DMWs said in a statement on Feb. 8, 2023.

Senator and Committee on Migrant Workers Chairperson Raffy Tulfo proposed a total deployment ban in Kuwait. “We can enter into bilateral agreements but our terms should be clear and unequivocal. If there are violators to such agreements, we have to prioritize the welfare of our overseas Filipino workers and act at the soonest possible time. Make these violators accountable and liable without concession and pursuant to our laws and international conventions,” Tulfo said in a senate inquiry.

The DMW was also tasked with working with the Department of Foreign Affairs to communicate to the Kuwaiti government the "sentiments and concerns" of the Filipino people regarding all recurrent incidents of physical and financial abuse, failure to pay monetary benefits, as well as murder committed against OFWs after the deployment ban went into effect.

The deployment ban was not well received by migrant advocacy groups, who claimed it would not provide a permanent solution to the issues surrounding labor migration. They claimed that placing bans for an extended period of time would encourage OFWs to turn to illicit means and consequently put themselves at risk for human trafficking in their desperation to find jobs abroad.

“What about the already-deployed Filipinos? Are there any steps being taken to protect them and make sure they do not suffer the same fate as Julleebee and the others?” Concepcion said to Maritime Fairtrade News. “These problems cannot be resolved with a deployment ban. The Philippine government has imposed bans many times before, but lifted them soon after when the particular cases of abuse or murder had been resolved by the courts and the perpetrators punished by death penalty or long-term imprisonment. When the deployment restarts, the abuses also start all over again.”

Much Needed Reform

OFWs often serve as the backbone of their families back home. Based on the results of a survey published by the Social Weather Stations , they found that 7 percent of Filipino households have an OFW who helps support the family. In addition, seventy-five percent of households frequently receive money from their OFW family members.

It would be difficult and inconsiderate to discourage or ban OFWs from going abroad for work. To promote a better quality of life for OFWs, the Philippine government must enact concrete policies aimed at protecting the welfare of Filipino workers. Advocacy groups, such as Migrante International are urging for reforms, including the abolition of the kafala system, which has resulted in complete employer control over domestic workers and OFWs.

For Concepcion, the country’s over-reliance on OFWs remittances is equivalent to the perpetuation of the violation and murder of Filipino workers. She believes that a viable solution to this issue involves ending the government’s labor export program and creating decent jobs domestically through meaningful land reform and national industrialization.

“The government’s determination to continue its labor export policy is totally misguided. What it should do is implement immediate measures to protect our domestic workers and OFWs abroad and long-term measures to generate decent jobs in the Philippines,” Concepcion said . “We need to end the government’s Labor Export Program and instead ensure that more jobs are created at home. Filipinos won’t have to leave the country and their families to risk their lives abroad if they have gainful and secure employment here.”

It is clear that OFWs live up to the definition of a bayani and are now considered heroes of the Philippines. However, under the shiny title of ‘bagong bayani’ lies a dark and unfortunate reality. Numerous Filipino workers suffer from various injustices including being overworked, underpaid, abused, raped, and even worse, murdered. The only way OFWs can truly be safeguarded is if the Philippine government enforces concrete and actionable policies. With this, OFWs could avoid the potential death sentence of working abroad and have the chance to be treated as they deserve to be: as modern-day heroes.

Laurinne Jamie Eugenio

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Photo essay: The everyday lives of migrants

Migrant labourers built the cities we live in—but how much do we know about their lives and working conditions.

What has been missing in all this is conversation around their everyday lives, before the crisis. Needless to say, the living and working conditions of these migrant workers and their families are harsh, and exploitation is rampant, especially in the construction sector.

On a visit to Lucknow in the winter of 2019, I had the opportunity to interact with a group of migrant workers at a construction site for a week. There were two groups—one comprising young and old men who were migrants from Bareilly and Gorakhpur, and the other a group of four families from the areas around Panna National Park in Madhya Pradesh.

This photo essay is an attempt to capture their daily life, and a reminder to an apathetic system to include our workers in its imagination and policies to avoid a COVID-19 like exodus again.

The first group of construction workers had migrated to Lucknow from Bareilly and Gorakhpur, in search of employment.

Work on the site involved a range of activities. Here they are seen on-site, casting the roof of the building under construction.

These workers weren’t provided any safety equipment such as shoes, gloves, or helmets. In fact, despite it being peak winter, they did not have warm clothes.

The men live on site in make-shift arrangements, most often working between 12-16 hours a day, sometimes even till midnight. The lack of proper accommodation on-site means that the contractors can call upon them to work at all times, and for long hours, to ensure completion of projects.

As night falls, they take a break to prepare dinner.

In the case of the families comprising women and children, entire lives were lived within the premises of the construction site.

Women do most of the digging, lifting and transporting material kind of work, including carrying cement for brick laying.

Married women working at the sites are expected to cover their heads in the presence of their fathers-in-law. This affects their vision, especially at night, making them vulnerable to injuries and accidents.

Apart from working on the construction site, the responsibility of taking care of the families also falls upon women. They are the first to wake up at four in the morning to cook and complete the other chores.

There is no creche for the children in these families. They play in and around the worksite and are extremely vulnerable to accidents.

Sharmili is 12 years old and has never been to school. When her mother is working, she takes care of her younger siblings. She also teaches them alphabets and numbers, which are the only things she knows. Occasionally, site supervisors teach all the children in the evenings.

The next day, a brick fell on Sharmili from the first floor of the under-construction building and broke her head.

The cities built on the hard labour of migrant workers have so far failed to meet even their basic needs. The current pandemic serves as an important reminder to address the exclusion and discrimination of these migrants and work towards removing their cloak of invisibility.

• Learn more about labour and migration in India, and explore the Interstate Migrant Policy Index 2019 .
• Read about how the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed India’s apathy towards migrant workers.
• Read these personal accounts of migrant workers who could not make it back home during the lockdown.
• Support nonprofits and other organisations providing monetary support, food, medicines, and more to vulnerable communities, including migrants.

The lockdown brought forth images of the travails of migrant workers as they sought to go home during the pandemic. It also highlighted the tremendous contribution they make to our […]

Dheeraj is a documentary filmmaker currently working with the vocational skilling arm of Pratham, on media and research projects. His key area of interest lies in the study of visual mediums such as film and imagery. He has previously worked on various documentary films under the ambit of education, art and livelihoods. You can reach Dheeraj at [email protected]

Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Human Migration — The Life of Migrant Workers during The Great Depression

The Life of Migrant Workers During The Great Depression

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Migrant agricultural workers: a comparative analysis of both policy and COVID-19 response in Thailand, Italy, and Canada

Liam richardson.

1 University of Ottawa, Department of Public Affairs and International Affairs, Ottawa, ON Canada

Rachael N. Pettigrew

2 Mount Royal University Bissett School of Business, Calgary, AB Canada

International migrant workers play an increasingly important role in the global economy and labor markets. As of 2017, there were 164 million migrant workers around the world, representing 4.7% of all workers. Although found in a variety of sectors, both the Global North and South rely heavily on migrant agricultural workers to fulfill domestic labor shortages in the agricultural sector. This paper explores migrant agricultural worker policies and demand in Thailand, Italy, and Canada and compares the policy responses to COVID-19 and the subsequent treatment of migrant agricultural workers in these three countries. Using the documentary method, we first develop detailed cases of each country’s migrant agricultural worker policies, demand, and response to COVID-19. Then a comparative analysis is conducted between Thailand, Italy, and Canada to identify emerging themes in policy, COVID responses, and migrant agricultural worker treatment. Despite the critical importance of migrant agricultural workers to each country to agricultural economies and food security, many workers still face policy challenges and mistreatment that were exacerbated by COVID-19. This work highlights the need for governments and policymakers to create new inclusive policies that guarantee improved labor, health, and safety standards and quality of living for all migrant agricultural workers, guaranteeing their basic human rights.

Introduction

International migrant workers play an increasingly important role in the global economy (Martin 2016 ). Currently, there are approximately 258 million international migrants in the world and 164 million working in the country to which they have migrated (Popova and Özel 2018 ), which is 4.7% of global workers (Popova and Özel 2018 ). Migrant workers are concentrated in the construction, domestic service, hospitality, and agriculture sectors (Lewis et al. 2015 ).

Migrant agricultural workers play a critical role in global agriculture and food security. Many countries rely on agricultural migrant workers to meet the labor supply that cannot be filled from within their population. This gap in domestic labor is due to demographic changes such as market segmentation, an aging population, and/or disinterest in working in agriculture (International Organization of Migration [IOM] 2020a ) and is prominent in high-income countries, such as Canada, the USA, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Australia (Popova and Özel 2018 ; Martin 2016 ). Some countries in the Global South (e.g., Thailand) that are more economically developed than other countries in the region have begun to rely heavily on migrant agricultural workers to meet the agricultural labor supply (Bylander 2019 ). As a result, countries have developed labor migration programs to enable the entrance of essential workers into the country during peak demands of planting and harvesting, bringing with them vital skills and knowledge (Martin 2016 ). However, despite the critical role migrant agricultural workers play in food production and security, many workers face abuses, exploitation, and precarious employment (Lewis et al. 2015 ).

Agricultural employers seek flexible contracts and temporary forms of employment to meet labor demands while keeping expenses low (IOM 2020a ; International Labour Organization 2019 ). This flexibility, and seasonal nature of the work, creates challenges when creating and enforcing effective labor migration policies (ILO 2019 ) and as a result many migrant agricultural workers live and work in precarious circumstances (Augre-Granier 2021 ), such as poor pay, dangerous working conditions, extremely long working hours, poor living conditions, and a lack of critical personal protective equipment (PPE) (Augre-Granier 2021 ; Bylander 2019 ; Hennebry 2012 ; ILO 2019 ; Kaur 2010 ; Lewis et al. 2015 ). As international migration continues to increase (Martin, 2016 ), the abuses and exploitation of agricultural migrant workers may become increasingly concerning without vast improvements to national labor migration policy.

The arrival of COVID-19 in 2020 limited the movement of many migrant agricultural workers around the globe, which created a shortfall in migrant agricultural labor that has become the cornerstone of the sector (Dias De Vasconcelos and Pettigrew 2021 ). Many farmers decided not to plant their crops to avoid further losses and some watched their crops rot in the fields due to insufficient harvesting labor. The agricultural labor shortfall impacted farmers, workers, consumers, and national food security in many countries (Dias De Vasconcelos and Pettigrew  2021 ). The global impact of COVID-19 also further exacerbated the abuses and exploitation faced by migrant agricultural workers, shining a spotlight on the shortcomings of labor migration policies (IOM 2020a ).

In late 2020 the European Office of the World Health Organization (WHO) released a report promoting the health of migrant workers within Europe in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (WHO Europe 2020 ). The WHO report provides strong policy recommendations, but given its strict focus on Europe, we draw from the International Labour Organization (ILO) policy brief, which focuses on establishing labor standards for migrant workers globally (ILO 2020 ). The ILO released their policy brief in April 2020 describing specific actions policymakers should take to increase the protection of migrant workers from COVID-19 (ILO 2020 ). The brief describes migrant workers as among the most vulnerable due to, but not limited to, xenophobia, inadequate living conditions, non-payment of wages, and increased restrictions on movement. To mitigate the risks that COVID-19 poses to migrant workers the ILO highlighted three key actions (ILO 2020 ) for policymakers, including (1) the inclusion of migrant workers in the COVID-19 policy responses (e.g., income support, health care access, information, ensuring regular status, address housing hazards, legal supports); (2) extending supports to workers and their families to ensure workers “protection, safe return, and effective reintegration into labor markets” (ILO 2020 , p. 5); and (3) ensure the voices of workers and worker support organizations are included in the dialogue contributing to the country-level response to COVID-19 (ILO 2020 ).

As the ILO represents the international community on labor standards and global workers’ rights, these policy guidelines present important considerations for policymakers around the globe as COVID-19 policy responses were being drafted. The WHO and ILO recommendations behooves countries, including Thailand, Italy, and Canada to review and revise their labor migration policies to become more sustainable, with a greater focus on migrant labor and human rights, especially in times of crisis.

Aim of the study

The purpose of this paper is to review and compare the national labor migration policies of Thailand, Italy, and Canada and evaluate each country’s COVID-19 response and treatment of migrant agricultural workers. Although many countries share the need for migrant agricultural workers, this paper prioritized the review of countries with different labor migration policies, from different continents, economic levels, and representation from the Global North and South. The purpose of this paper is therefore to answer the following research questions:

• How do the migrant agricultural worker policies and demand in Thailand, Italy, and Canada compare?
• What was the efficacy of the policy responses to COVID-19 in Thailand, Italy, and Canada and how did they compare?
• Is the treatment of migrant agricultural workers similar in Thailand, Italy, and Canada and did COVID-19 impact these experiences?

To explore the migrant agricultural policies and context of Thailand, Italy, and Canada, country-level responses to COVID-19, and treatment of migrant agricultural workers we used the documentary method (documentary research method). Therefore, we review publicly accessible documents about government migrant labor policies, shifting legislation, and migrant worker experiences during COVID-19. The documentary method has been employed in diverse fields with a variety of data material (Schmolz 2020 ). The data material used in this research includes publicly accessible government policies, statistics, reports, international body reports (e.g., WHO, ILO, United Nations), news articles, and advocacy group reports. In addition, we conducted a secondary analysis of peer-review literature and country-level and global data. Per documentary method best practices, materials were assessed for credibility, representativeness, meaning, and authenticity (Payne and Payne 2004 ).

Our approach included first formulating an interpretation by reading through all data materials, per country, to gain an overview of the content and develop initial themes (Bohnsack, 2014 ). Followed by the second step of reflective interpretation (Reischl and Plotz 2020 ), exploring the how and why. The third step involved case description per country where we conduct a thorough context of migrant agricultural worker history, policies, and statistics and then describe the impact of COVID-19 on policies and treatment of migrant agricultural workers. This step allows us to summarize the discourse of the documentation available in the public sphere on COVID-19 and migrant agricultural workers. Then our fourth and final step, upon the completion of the three country case studies, we conducted a comparative analysis (Reischl and Plotz 2020 ) to explore the themes emerging between countries. We review how each country’s policies, COVID responses, and treatment of migrant agricultural workers are in alignment or differ from one another.

Case description per country: Thailand, Italy, and Canada

In this section, we begin by describing the historical context and legislated policies concerning migrant agricultural workers per country. Then, the findings per country are summarized to illuminate what the publicly available documents, including legislated policy, government reports, news media, and international bodies, are reporting regarding the experiences of migrant agricultural workers during COVID-19. We begin with Thailand.

Labor migration in Thailand began in the 1980s and 1990s when the Thai economy shifted from less-skilled, intensive labor to more high-skilled, technology-driven jobs (Chalamwong et al. 2012 ). Many Thai citizens began transitioning to skilled labor, in urban areas, to meet the growing demand (Pholphirul 2012 ). Societal shifts impacted the available workers in the agricultural sector (ILO 2021 ), where migrants plant, harvest, and spray fertilizers for crops, such as rice, corn, palm oil, sugar cane, cassava, and rubber plantations (Thetkathuek and Daniell 2016 ). In the mid-1990s, Thailand began to rely heavily on migrant laborers from bordering Southeast Asian countries (Tipayalai 2020 ), specifically Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos (Kaur 2010 ).

In addition to this labor shift, other factors such as political instability, lack of employment opportunities in their countries of origin, and the large wage differential between Thailand and Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos resulted in a dramatic increase of migrant workers between the mid-1990s and early 2000s (Chalamwong et al. 2012 ). Thailand’s government struggled to regulate the rapid flow of migrants, which led to high levels of irregular (i.e., illegal or undocumented) migration. An estimated 3,000,000 migrants crossed illegally into Thailand during this time (Tipayalai 2020 ). In an attempt to curb illegal migration and regularize the migration process, Thailand created two distinct procedures: the migrant worker registration periods and memorandum of understanding (MoU). (Mekong Migration Network 2020 ).

Thailand’s migrant worker policies and demand

Registration periods.

In the late 1990s, Thailand initiated a registration system allowing migrants from Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos to legally register to work in specific industries and provinces (Mon 2010 ). Registration periods, held every few years, hoped to reduce the number of irregular migrants by allowing those already working irregularly to register without penalty. Once registered migrants work legally in Thailand for up to 2 years without having to return home (Mekong Migration Network 2020 ). Registration periods proved to be effective, with the latest period ending in 2018 regularizing over 1.2 million migrants (IOM 2019 ). Despite the registration period’s relative success in reducing the number of irregular migrants, some aspects negatively impacted migrant workers.

Memorandum of understanding

The second form of migrant legislation in Thailand is the MoU signed with Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos (Bylander 2019 ). The MoU created formal migration channels and legal processes Thai employers could use to recruit migrant agricultural workers (Mekong Migration Network 2020 ) but have been relatively ineffective in increasing regular migration. In 2018, only 850,302 workers had registered entry through MoU, which is much lower than the 2,214,298 migrant workers gaining work permits through registration periods (IOM 2019 ). The number of irregular workers is still high in Thailand. Of the 3.9 million foreign workers, 811,437, or 20%, are undocumented migrants. Furthermore, it is estimated that 73% of Cambodians, 96% of Lao, and 91% of Myanmar migrants entered Thailand irregularly (IOM 2019 ).

The extreme cost and wait times faced by migrant workers render the MoU ineffective (Kaur 2010 ). At regulated border crossings, migrants are required to complete considerable paperwork which leads to delays and large costs for the migrant. In 2020, a 2-year work visa cost $2,900 Thai Bhat, which employers sometimes deduct from migrants’ pay. Migrant workers’ typical daily wage is $120–$150 Thai Bhat ($3.50–$4.50 USD) (Mekong Migration Network 2020 ), making paying migration fees nearly impossible and disincentivizes legal entry.

Migrant workers can wait 6 months to a year before being legally allowed to work in Thailand (Bylander 2021 ). In contrast, those crossing illegally into Thailand did so 78 days faster and for an average of $286 USD less (IOM 2019 ) than those arriving through regular pathways. Therefore, irregular channels into Thailand are faster and less expensive for workers, making it more appealing.

In 2017, Thailand introduced restrictive policies to crack down on irregular labor migrants (Bylander and Reid 2017 ). As a result, migrants who registered required both permission from their employer to change jobs and to check in with government authorities every three months. This new restriction made it more difficult for documented migrants to change employers, which lead to increased abuse by employers and disincentivize some migrant workers from registering (Bylander 2021 ).

Thailand’s response to COVID-19

On March 25, 2020, Thailand declared a state of emergency to help control the spread of COVID-19 (Khaliq 2021 ). Following the declaration, thousands of migrant workers attempted to return home (e.g., Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar) (IOM 2020b ). Due to Thailand’s heavy reliance on migrant labor and the rapid exodus of migrant agricultural workers, Thailand faced severe labor shortages (Leadholm 2020 ), which strained both Thailand and the wider Southeast Asian supply chain, impacting food security (Gilmour and Lin 2021 ).

The COVID-19 restrictions exacerbated the abuses and exploitation migrant agricultural workers already faced. Agricultural migrant workers are offered sparse benefits or protections (Gilmour and Lin 2021 ) and often have no access to sick leave, unemployment benefits, and health benefits. Many migrant agricultural workers also faced precarious situations making them particularly vulnerable to contracting COVID-19. Moreover, migrants in Thailand faced extreme prejudice and were often blamed for bringing the virus to Thailand (Marschke et al. 2021 ). This prejudice led to questionable policy steps made by Thai government and employers, including putting both COVID-19-positive and negative migrant laborers in the same living quarters, which lead to COVID-19 outbreaks among migrant workers throughout the country (Marschke et al. 2021 ).

In response to a large COVID-19 outbreak, linked to Burmese migrant seafood workers, the Thai government announced on December 29, 2020 that all undocumented migrant workers could register for a two-year work permit (Wongsamuth 2020 ). The goal of the policy was to curb COVID-19 spread among migrant workers, as irregular workers would no longer have to move between provinces to avoid persecution (Wongsamuth 2020 ). As of February 2021, 654,864 migrant workers gained amnesty in this way (ILO 2021 ). This regularization decree, which was a critical piece to the Thai government’s COVID-19 response strategy for migrant workers, was aligned with the ILO recommendation to ensure migrant workers maintain or become regularized. The IOM ( 2021 ) found that this strategy was critical as regularized migrant workers were more likely to receive COVID-19 testing, treatment, and vaccinations, all helping curb the spread of COVID-19. However, despite some successes, this regularization also brought significant challenges to migrants seeking regular status. First, the regularization process was employer driven and forced migrants through multiple steps for which they were required to cover the financial cost (IOM 2021 ). In addition, migrants would not have the opportunity to become legally documented if the employer did not want to register them, which was common among employers that employed irregular migrants. The combination of this program being employer driven and overly expensive made gaining and maintaining regular status difficult for many migrant workers (IOM 2021 ). Furthermore, migrants have continued to enter Thailand illegally despite increased government enforcement (Charoensuthipan 2021 ), as this registration period has proved to be only a temporary solution. The Thai government also failed to implement inclusive policies that ensured migrant workers had reliable access to social protection and healthcare, while also failing to provide adequate living conditions. In a study that interviewed migrant workers in Thailand, Kunpeuk et al. ( 2022 ) found that many migrant workers did not have access to social or health services and were in overcrowded living conditions. They found that migrant workers in Thailand were “disproportionately affected by COVID-19” (Kunpeuk et al. 2022 p. 11). For Thailand to reduce irregular migration, effort must be invested to reduce the burdens and costs migrants face when attempting to work in Thailand as well as create more inclusive policies and access to social and health security for migrants.

Italy’s agricultural sector has long ties to labor migration (Rye and Scott 2018 ). Beginning in the 1960s, Italy’s economy began to industrialize and shift to the tertiary economic sector (Corrado 2018 ). During this time, Italians pursued higher levels of education, which led to many Italians moving from the field to the office (Devitt 2018 ). In the 1990s, the Italian population also began to decline, impacting the number of Italians in the labor market. The combination of social, demographic, and economic factors led to a dramatic drop in employment in Italy’s agricultural sector (Devitt 2018 ).

Migrants from developing countries began entering Italy in the 1970s and increased rapidly into the 1990s replacing Italian workers exiting the industry (Devitt 2018 ). By 2015, an estimated 405,000 labor migrants were working in the agricultural sector, accounting for 50% of the sector workers; however, an estimated 80% do not have formal contracts (CREA 2017 ).

In Italy, the largest proportion of migrant workers come from Romania, India, Albania, Morocco, Poland, and Bulgaria, with smaller numbers coming from South Asia and North, West, and Sub-Saharan Africa (Corrado 2017 ). There are distinct differences in both the types of agricultural work and local culture, leading to regional differences in workers’ experiences. While all of Italy sees irregular migrants, Southern Italy has higher levels of irregular migration, as it is highly seasonal and requires large amounts of casual labor (Corrado 2018 ). Most employers use the “just in time” method (Perrotta 2015 , p. 4), moving migrants throughout Southern Italy following the harvest and production of fruits and vegetables (Perrotta 2015 ). This intense demand for flexible labor in Southern Italy fosters exploitative conditions for migrants, compared to more stable and long-term working conditions in Northern Italy (Corrado 2018 ). Over the last 30 years, Italian policies have struggled to address this challenge of irregularity.

Italy’s migrant worker policies and demand

Italy’s labor migration policy consists of two key acts: the 1998 Consolidated Act on Immigration and the 2002 “Bossi-Fini Law” (Amnesty International 2012 ). The 1998 Consolidated Act on Immigration was responsible for regulating the flow of migration into the country and is used to determine the quota defining the number of migrant workers granted entry each year, also known as the Flows Decree (Amnesty International 2012 ). Then in 2002, the Bossi-Fini law, named after leaders of the Lega Nord and Alleanza political parties who enacted the law, introduced the most restrictive immigration policies yet in Italy (O’Healy 2019 ). Since the increase of immigration into Italy beginning in the 1960s, governments have struggled to produce effective immigration policies dealing with migrant workers. The failure to introduce an effective immigration policy helped lead to an influx of undocumented migrant workers into the country, especially in the 1990s (Colombo and Sciortino 2003 ). Just before the passing of the Bossi-Fini law it was projected that there were one million irregular migrants in Italy (Paparella and Rinolfi 2002 ). Some people, in large part due to narratives by political parties, such as the Lega Nord, became increasingly intolerant of migrants, especially those who were not legally documented (Paparella and Rinolfi 2002 ). This messaging and intolerance toward migrants played a significant role in the creation of the Bossi-Fini law. This is clearly demonstrated during the initial introduction of the bill that states that immigration is destructive to the current Italian social order (Colombo and Sciortino 2003 ). Both the growing intolerance for migrants and the massive increase in illegal migration led to the passing of the Boss-Fini law in 2002, which enacted strict measures to influence the flow of labor migrants into Italy (Caponio and Cappiali 2018 ). Some of the new measures included ensuring migrants established their residence, place of work, and a long-term contract before being granted a seasonal permit (Ambrosini and Triandafyllidou 2011 ). The Bossi-Fini law was created to decrease the number of irregular migrants that were in and coming into Italy (Paparella and Rinolfi 2002 ); however, despite its strict measures, the Bossi-Fini law failed to solve the issue of irregular migration in Italy (Amnesty International 2012 ; Caponio and Cappiali 2018 ). This is in large part due to its failure to address the policy issue further discussed below.

The volume of irregular migrants in Italy is generally attributed to two policy-related factors: the annual quota system and the complexity of the process. First, the annual quota system fails to meet employer demand for migrant agricultural workers (Amnesty International 2012 ). Since 2011, the government annual cap for seasonal workers allowed via the Flows Decree system has been cut in half (Corrado 2018 ), despite increasing demand for migrant labor. Second, the process to obtain a seasonal work permit is complex and long, taking up to 9 months to process (Lopez-Sala et al. 2016 ). Both the complex process and an insufficient number of permits granted push employers to seek irregular workers to meet their labor demands (Tagliacozzo et al. 2020 ).

To fill the labor gap, the recruitment and control of migrant labor, most notably in Southern Italy, are managed by an illegal group known as caporalato , which translates to gangmasters in English (Tagliacozzo et al. 2020 ). While the caporalato’s role in Southern Italy’s informal economy predates the migrant labor boom, their focus has shifted to recruitment and control of migrant labor in the region (Tagliacozzo et al. 2020 ), acting as intermediaries between migrant agricultural workers and employers (Corrado 2018 ) and arranging transportation and housing migrants between locations (Perrotta 2015 ). In 2015, researchers inspected 8862 Italian agricultural companies and noted 6153 irregular workers and over 700 instances of caporalato involvement (Corrado 2018 ).

Italy periodically introduced regularization periods during which irregular migrants can become documented (Corrado 2018 ). However, regularization periods fail to solve the root of Italy’s migrant policy problems and put a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of the employer. Demonstrated in the regularization period of 2009 only allowed employers, not migrants, to apply for registration (Amnesty International 2012 ) which ultimately gave employers complete power over the migrant agricultural workers and impacted the effectiveness of this program.

Irregular workers have less power to negotiate pay and working conditions and are more vulnerable to coercive employer behaviors, leading to forms of forced labor. Irregular migrants are also paid lower wages than Italian workers, with some migrant agricultural workers making 40% less than their Italian counterparts (Amnesty International 2012 ). Living conditions are also extremely poor for many migrants, both regular and irregular, especially those from sub-Saharan Africa who sometimes stay on abandoned farms (Ceccarelli and Ciconte 2018 ; Perrotta 2015 ), with substandard living conditions (Tagliacozzo et al. 2020 ).

Italy’s response to COVID-19

Italy declared a state of emergency on January 31, 2020, attempting to curb the spread of the COVID-19 throughout the country (France24 2020 ). Italy quickly closed its borders and many migrant workers attempted to return to their countries of origin (Barcaccia et al. 2020 ). Many Eastern European migrant agricultural workers were unable to return to Italy in the spring due to travel restrictions (Pietromarchi 2020 ), which led to a projected shortage of 250,000–275,000 casual migrant agricultural laborers (Bathke 2020 ), thus forcing Italy to draft measures to facilitate migrant worker return.

In alignment with the ILO action guidelines (ILO 2020 ), in May 2020, Italy enacted a decree to regularize current irregular workers (Palumbo and Corrado 2020 ), which intended to “guarantee adequate protection of individual and collective health” and “facilitate the emergence of irregular employment relationships’’ (Human Rights Watch (HRW) 2020 , para. 4). The regularization policy began on June 1, 2020 and had two channels through which migrants could apply (Palumbo and Corrado 2020 ). The first channel targeted migrants already residing in Italy (pre-March 8) and focused on employer sponsorship to capture those already working irregularly. The second channel was a jobseeker permit, available to individuals who became undocumented before or on October 31, 2019 (HRW 2020 ). The program ended in August 2020, with limited success, as just over 31,000 agricultural migrants applied for a permit using the first channel, and only 12,986 workers in both agriculture and home care applied through the second channel (HRW 2020 ). Similar to Thailand, while the overarching idea of a regularization program aligned with the ILO policy recommendations (ILO 2020 ), numerous issues with the structure of the program limited its overall effectiveness.

Several limitations in the program led to low application rates among agricultural workers. First, the regularization plan was not enough to convince some employers to regularize relationships with their migrant agricultural workers (Palumbo and Corrado 2020 ). Second, some employers requested migrants pay the 500 Euros registration fee to regularize (Cizmic 2021 ), which was supposed to be paid by employers, but 44% of workers surveyed reported they were forced to pay (HRW 2020 ). As many migrants could not afford this registration cost, they were unable to legally register despite being willing.

Finally, reports indicate that regularization did not improve the working conditions for migrants (ANSA 2020 ). Reports of exploitation increased 10–15% during COVID-19 in 2020 (ANSA 2020 ). Outbreaks were detected among migrant laborers in Southern Italy, including Bulgarian farmworkers and workers in an industrial meatpacking plant. Outbreaks were largely due to poor living conditions and lack of access to PPE (Palumbo and Corrado 2020 ). Furthermore, due to mobility restrictions, undocumented migrants were not allowed to move to find new job opportunities (Sanfelici 2021 ) and were also not eligible to be part of the Ordinary Wage Guarantee, a sustenance program offered to 7 million Italian workers (Sanfelici 2021 ), pushing workers to continue to work due to lack of social protection (Tagliacozzo et al. 2020 ).

Failures by policymakers to include irregular agricultural migrant workers in this national income guarantee and social protection directly contradicted the ILO’s policy recommendations (ILO 2020 ). It also significantly increased hardships on all types of migrant workers; those who lost their job now had no access to any income source (Sanfelici 2021 ). In addition, the Italian government made little attempt to improve the living conditions of migrant agricultural workers during COVID-19 (Carlotti, 2020 ), again failing to follow ILO policy recommendations (ILO 2020 ). It is clear that despite attempts to regularize migrants and improve living conditions, COVID-19 highlighted the weaknesses in Italy’s migration policy and increased mistreatment of migrant agricultural workers.

Migrant workers have also become an essential part of Canada’s agricultural sector (Caxaj and Cohen 2019 ). In the middle of the twentieth century, the demand for industrialization, shift to urbanization, and demographic changes meant farmers could no longer rely on domestic workers to meet labor demand (Hennebry 2012 ). Canadian farmers requested an increase in foreign labor to help stay competitive with other nations, such as the USA, already using foreign worker programs (Hennebry 2012 ). In response, the Canadian government introduced the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) in 1966 (Basok and López-sala 2016 ), which has become the primary avenue for labor migration in Canada’s agriculture sector.

Today, over 69,000 migrants enter Canada to work in agriculture, representing roughly 20% of the sector workers (Statistics Canada 2020 ). Migrant agricultural workers are primarily found in Canada’s horticulture industry, which includes fruits, vegetables, nurseries, and greenhouses (Statistics Canada 2020 ). A majority of migrants come from Mexico, Jamaica, and other Caribbean and Latin-American countries (Gabriel and Macdonald 2018 ). Although all provinces and territories receive migrants (Hennebry 2012 ), the largest proportions work in Ontario and British Columbia, where labor-intensive crops are most prevalent (Caxaj and Cohen 2019 ). While some features of Canada’s labor migration policies are considered successful (Basok 2007 ), many also recognize Canadian policies’ negative impact on migrant agricultural workers (Caxaj and Cohen 2019 ; Hennebry et al. 2016 ; Preibisch and Otero 2014 ; Vosko, 2015). While Canada’s policies are strong in minimizing irregular migration, the structure of the policies creates a state of precarity and vulnerability to potential abuse for migrants (Caxaj and Cohen 2019 ; Gabriel and MacDonald 2011 ; Horgan and Liinamaa 2017 ).

Canada’s migrant worker policies and demand

Canada’s temporary and seasonal labor migration policy is governed through two specific programs: the SAWP and the agricultural stream of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP) (Haley et al. 2020 ). The original and largest of the two streams is the SAWP (Haley et al. 2020 ) which was founded in 1966. Currently, 12 countries participate in the SAWP (Government of Canada 2021 ).

The SAWP is founded on an MoU (Reed 2008 ). The agreements create formal intergovernmental relationships outlining the regulations for recruiting, hiring, and employing workers. In this bilateral agreement, each government has a role in administering the program. Canadian farmers request workers through federally sanctioned bodies (Hennebry 2012 ) and the sending country’s government recruits the workers (Basok and López-sala 2016 ). Each sending country is responsible for maintaining a pool of potential workers, ensuring the workers’ documentation, and appointing consular representatives to support workers while in Canada (Government of Canada 2021 ). Under the SAWP, migrant agricultural workers are limited to contracts no longer than 8 months (Zhang et al. 2021 ), which forces each migrant worker to return to their home country each year.

As a result of constraints of the SAWP and the increased use of greenhouses resulting in year-round demand for labor (Gabriel and Macdonald 2018 ), the Canadian government created an agricultural stream of the TFWP in 2011 (Gabriel and Macdonald 2018 ) that allowed 1-year work permits with an opportunity to extend (Strauss and McGrath 2017 ). TFWP differs from the SAWP because employers can recruit migrant agricultural workers directly and therefore employers often use recruitment agencies (Hennebry 2012 ). The TFWP does not restrict recruitment from specific countries, which has led to an increase in agricultural workers from India and Guatemala (Caxaj and Cohen 2019 ).

Canada’s labor migrant policies for the agricultural sector have been seen as successful in maintaining a very small overstay rate (1.5%), (The World Bank 2006 ). Its cooperation with partner countries, and providing access to healthcare for migrants have been noted as model practices (Hennebry and Preibisch 2012 ); however, there are also concerns with Canada’s labor migrant policy. Canada’s policies create a precarious status for migrant agricultural workers (Gabriel and MacDonald 2011 ). In addition to workers’ temporary status, policies create a power imbalance between workers and the employer in two ways. First, policy limits access to permanent residency for migrant agricultural workers (Gabriel and Macdonald 2018 ; Hennebry 2012 ). Second, a performance evaluation from the migrant’s employer is the primary criteria for workers to be allowed to return the following year (Binford 2019 ). Therefore, a poor evaluation can result in an inability to return the following year (Preibisch and Otero 2014 ), leaving the worker beholden to their employer. This gives the employer a disproportionate level of power over the worker ultimately leading to exploitation, labor rights abuses, and discrimination (Horgan and Liinamaa 2017 ) and minimizes workers’ complaints since complaints might risk poor evaluations (Perry 2018 ).

In both the SAWP and TFWP agricultural streams, employee work permits are tied to a single employer (Hennebry 2012 ). As a result, migrant agricultural workers’ ability to stay in Canada is tied to a single employer and those experiencing mistreatment often cannot seek alternative employment. Workers who complain or are unable to work risk deportation before the end of their contract (Horgan and Liinamaa 2017 ) and threats of deportation are common (Basok et al. 2014 ). Per the bilateral agreements, the sending country’s consular service is responsible for supporting employee complaints; however, migrants commonly note consular officers focus on appeasing employers instead of protecting the rights of the migrant (Caxaj and Cohen 2019 ).

Finally, the SAWP mandates migrant agricultural workers’ living accommodations are on the employer’s property (Depatie-Pelletier 2010 ), which can be problematic for workers’ rights and integration. Employers are often located in rural areas, isolated from nearby communities, and lack public transportation, which creates dependence on employers to transport migrants to receive basic necessities, such as food, healthcare, and groceries (Horgan and Liinamaa 2017 ). This reliance allows employers to control employees’ schedules and activities, severely limiting their social interaction, and integration into local communities and Canadian society. Although not-for-profits supporting migrant agricultural workers exist, workers’ inability to build social networks increases migrants’ vulnerability, relying solely on fellow migrant agricultural workers (Caxaj and Cohen 2019 ). Furthermore, living conditions in some migrants’ housing are poor with overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, and lacking indoor plumbing (Preibisch and Otero 2014 ). Migrant agricultural workers face the threat of deportation, poor working conditions, power imbalances, and social isolation, suggesting Canada’s labor migration policy is failing to protect migrant agricultural workers.

Canada’s response to COVID-19

By March 22, 2020, all 10 provinces and 3 territories in Canada had declared states of emergency in response to COVID-19 (Canadian Civil Liberties Association 2020 ). Given the bulk of workers arrive in spring for planting, the timing dramatically affected both migrant agricultural workers and farmers (Dias De Vasconcelos and Pettigrew 2021 ). Due to border closures, many migrant agricultural workers were unable to enter Canada or chose to stay home to mitigate personal health risks (Bolongaro and Hagan 2020 ), which created a sizable shortage of laborers (Bolongaro and Hagan 2020 ). March 2020 saw 43% fewer temporary foreign workers coming into Canada compared to 2019 (Falconer 2020 ). Attempting to mitigate the labor shortage, on March 26, 2020, the Canadian government announced migrant agricultural workers would still be welcomed in Canada (Curtain 2020 ). However, a labor shortage remained, with many employers putting increased pressure on the migrant agricultural workers present, which led to increases in labor rights violations and hazardous conditions (Landry et al. 2021 ).

Canada’s COVID-19 response attempted to curb the spread of COVID-19 and to ensure the safety of migrant workers. The Canadian government also mandated a 14-day quarantine period upon arrival for all migrant agricultural workers (Office of the Auditor General of Canada 2021 ). They also added additional responsibilities to employers to mitigate the risk and spread of COVID-19 toward migrant agricultural workers (Office of the Auditor General of Canada 2021 ). However, these policies ultimately did not protect agricultural migrant workers as the government did not introduce policies to improve the health and safety of communal living spaces or the removal of barriers to healthcare (Landry et al. 2021 ). Additionally, most migrant agricultural workers were not eligible for the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), which provided wage subsidies to individuals who had to stop working if they tested positive for COVID-19 (James 2021 ). This response is in clear contradiction to the ILO recommendation to include migrant agricultural workers in national income and social security responses. An independent audit conducted by the Office of the Auditor General of Canada (2021) found that many federal inspectors responsible for inspecting the quality of living and working conditions for migrant agricultural workers often ignored pandemic restrictions.

In 2020, over 1,100 worker complaints were submitted (Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC) 2020 ) and included working excessive hours, increased pace of work, and physical injuries (MWAC 2020 ). Some employers coerced migrant agricultural workers into signing documents restricting their right to leave the employer’s property (Thomas 2020 ). Migrant agricultural workers also faced increased risk and exposure to COVID-19 due to overcrowding in their bunkhouses, making quarantining and social isolation extremely difficult to perform (George and Basok 2020 ). In 2020, 12 percent of all migrant farmworkers in the province of Ontario tested positive for COVID-19 which resulted in three reported deaths (Faraday 2021 ).

Despite new, more restrictive quarantine policies in spring 2021 (Employment and Social Development Canada 2021 ), it seems the 2020 growing season lessons were not leveraged to improve safety for the 2021 growing season. Between mid-March and August of 2021, five migrant agricultural workers died in Canada and 4 of them were in quarantine at the time (Grant and Bailey 2021 ). Research found health and living conditions were substandard and living accommodations were overcrowded, making social isolation impossible (MacLeod 2021 ), again practices were not aligned with the ILO recommendations (ILO 2020 ). Furthermore, some migrants were forced to pay for their health examinations, work permits, and PPE (MacLeod 2021 ). Despite the increased risks faced, many migrants lacked awareness and access to COVID-19 vaccinations due to a lack of transportation and rural locations (Dryden 2021 ). Despite policy changes, the Canadian government has still failed to address systemic issues with its labor migration policies.

Comparative analysis of Thailand, Italy, and Canada migrant agricultural worker policies, treatment, and COVID responses

In this section, we move beyond the description of the individual cases by country and engage in a comparative analysis (Reischl and Plotz 2020 ) of the emerging themes related to the existing national labor migration policies impacting agricultural workers in Thailand, Italy, and Canada. We then compare the treatment of migrant agricultural workers and the efficacy of three countries’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Policy challenges and migrant agricultural worker treatment

Thailand, Italy, and Canada’s labor migration policies display several similarities, with the most prominent being the power imbalance between workers and employers, abuses migrant agricultural workers face due to the structure of labor policy, and the precarious nature of the workers.

Employer–migrant agricultural worker power imbalance

Analyzing the labor migration policy of Thailand, Italy, and Canada reveals all three countries either directly or indirectly put disproportionate power in the hands of the employer (Ambrosini and Triandafyllidou 2011 ; Bylander 2021 ; Perry 2018 ). This power differential increases the risk of employers abusing the rights of their workers. In Canada, the SAWP contributes to the power imbalance by linking employee contracts to only one employer and basing the opportunity for migrants to return the following year almost entirely on performance ratings provided by the employer (Preibisch and Otero 2014 ). One study of Ontario migrant agricultural workers found that 55% of surveyed workers either feared deportation or had received threats of deportation while working (Basok and Belanger 2016 ). The risk of deportation or not being allowed to return often forces migrants to put up with poor working conditions and abuses rather than confront their employers (Perry 2018 ) thus increasing this power imbalance. Similarly, in Italy the employer–worker imbalance is caused by employers’ complete control over migrant agricultural workers’ ability to gain residence permits to legally work in the country. For migrant agricultural workers to extend or renew their work contracts they need to obtain a long-term commitment from an employer (Ambrosini and Triandafyllidou 2011 ). When employers are unwilling, migrants inevitably end up becoming irregular workers, even if they would like to be legally documented. In Thailand, migrant agricultural workers are also bound to a single employer with virtually no opportunity to change employers within the 2-year contract (Bylander 2021 ). The Thai government’s 2017 crackdown on irregular migrants introduced a policy only allowing migrants to change jobs with their employer’s permission (Bylander 2021 ), which seems unlikely when workers are facing abuse. In this situation, irregular workers hold more power than those working legally because irregular workers can leave or change employers if they face abuse and/or exploitation (Bylander 2021 ). In Thailand, Italy, and Canada, migrant agricultural workers cannot leave an employer on their terms, which allows employers to abuse migrant agricultural workers’ rights.

Migrant agricultural worker mistreatment

It has been widely reported in Thailand, Italy, and Canada that migrant agricultural workers face mistreatment, exploitation, and challenging working conditions. In Canada, the power imbalance mentioned above allows some employers to force migrants to work in unsafe conditions, extremely long hours, or without proper PPE, and if migrants complain, cannot work, or refuse unsafe work employers can have them repatriated before their contract ends (Horgan and Liinamaa 2017 ). This mistreatment was highlighted in 2020 as MWAC reported migrants filed over 1100 complaints surrounding worker mistreatment (MWAC 2020 ). One study surveyed agricultural migrant workers in the province of British Columbia found roughly 31% of migrants reported being discriminated against and just over 15% reported being assaulted by their employer (Colindres et al. 2021 ).

In Italy, the prominence of caporalato in the irregular migrant agricultural workers’ employment, mobility, and housing have proven to degrade the quality of the housing workers live in, with many living on remote, dilapidated farms (Perrotta 2015 ) with poor health and sanitation conditions (Tagliacozzo et al. 2020 ). It was estimated that there are roughly 180,000 migrant agricultural workers in Italy were being exploited for their work and many suffer from forms of sexual abuse or violence (Donato, 2022 ). This mistreatment is not only constrained to physical abuse as Amnesty International ( 2012 ) found migrant agricultural workers make on average 40% less than Italian nationals.

In Thailand, systemic problems create insurmountable challenges for migrants to gain the appropriate permits to regularly work in Thailand (Bylander 2019 ), which puts migrants in exploitative situations where human rights abuses often occur (Bylander 2021 ). Workers who are both documented and irregular face mistreatment and substandard living conditions, which will be discussed more below concerning COVID-19. One study on migrant agricultural workers in Thailand found on average Thai workers made higher monthly wages than migrant workers (Chantavanich et al. 2007 as cited in ILO 2016 ). In terms of physical exploitation and abuse, Human Rights Watch found migrant agricultural workers regularly face intimidation and threats (HRW 2016 ). In addition, the ILO found roughly 33% of migrant workers in agriculture had their identification confiscated and held by their employer, which severely restricts their ability to travel and leave abusive situations (HRW 2016 ).

Precarious employment of migrant agricultural workers

In addition to a power imbalance and mistreatment, another similarity between each country’s labor migration policies is the precarious nature of their employment. The International Labour Rights Forum (ILRF) (n.d.) defines precarity as “precarious workers are those who fill permanent job needs but are denied permanent employee rights” (para 1) and precarious workers are prone to unstable employment and more dangerous working conditions (ILRF n.d.). Both Italian and Canadian policy requires workers to return to their home country each year. In Italy, workers rely on employers to apply for and pay for their permits to ensure their path to documentation (Amnesty International 2012 ). In Canada, there is little year after year predictability for workers, especially if one’s return is subject to a manager’s performance evaluation (Preibisch and Otero 2014 ). A study conducted by the Canadian Council of Refugees ( 2016 ) found that migrant agricultural workers being tied to one employer and their inability to gain permanent residence status creates a precarious environment for workers. Nakache ( 2013 ) argues that as seasonal agricultural workers do not have access to permanent residency or citizenship, they do not have equal access to social protections, therefore increasing their precarity. These findings are just as relevant today given the pathway to permanent residency and citizenship has not been simplified.

In both Italy and Thailand, migrant agricultural workers are in a consistent state of precarity primarily due to each country’s labor policy failing to create conditions where migrant agricultural workers can become properly documented to work in the country legally. When looking at Italy, it is believed that there are roughly 500,000 migrant workers in the agricultural sector (UNCHR 2020 ). Of all workers without contracts, 80% are migrant workers and over 130,000 of these would be classified as working in incredibly vulnerable situations (Meo & Omizzolo 2018 ). Thailand faces a similar issue with one report estimating there are over 800,000 irregular migrant workers working in low-skilled sectors (Tao et al. n.d.), which would include agriculture. In both countries, the work permit process is complicated, lengthy, and expensive and gives disproportionate power to employers to control the migrant agricultural workers’ legal status and forces many migrants to work irregularly (Amnesty International 2012 ; IOM 2019 ). Working irregularly stokes precarity because it offers no job stability and limited labor rights. Furthermore, in Italy, irregular migrants are consistently uprooted and moved from farm to farm by the caporalato (Perrotta 2015 ) , which leads migrant agricultural workers to be in a constant state of mobility and change. Additionally, once in Italy, irregular migrants are only able to obtain legal documentation during a national regularization period, but even during regularization windows employers still have discretion over their migrant agricultural workers’ ability to become documented and many employers do not allow their migrants to do so. As evidenced during the 2020 regularization period (Palumbo and Corrado 2020 ), many migrant agricultural workers stay irregular despite their wishes to gain legal documentation to work in Italy (Corrado 2018 ), keeping many migrant agricultural workers in a constant state of precarity. Very similar features also contribute to precarious employment for migrant agricultural workers in Thailand.

Divergent migrant worker contexts in Thailand, Italy, and Canada

Several distinct differences between migrant agricultural worker policies and contexts in Thailand, Italy, and Canada’s labor migration policies emerged, including the proportion of irregular migrant agricultural workers, the processes through which migrant workers navigate, and the geographic and geopolitical landscapes of each country.

Proportion of irregular migrant agricultural workers

The primary distinction between the three countries is the relatively small number of irregular migrants in Canada compared to Thailand and Italy. As discussed previously, the World Bank ( 2006 ) reported only 1.5% of seasonal agricultural workers to overstay their contracts in Canada, which is much lower than the proportion of irregular migrant agricultural workers in other countries. In contrast, it is estimated that 79% of migrants working in agriculture entered Thailand through irregular channels (IOM 2019 ) and 80% of migrant agricultural workers in Italy did not have formal work contracts (CREA 2017 ). This review suggests the large proportion of irregular workers in Italy and Thailand is caused by Italy’s failure to meet the demand for migrant agricultural workers and Thailand’s overly complicated and expensive migration process.

Migration processes

As mentioned, there are a large number of irregular migrants in Italy and Thailand, largely due to the complexity and inefficiency of the formers’ legal migration processes. Canada’s labor migration process through the SAWP is heavily supported by both the Canadian and partner governments. Employers in Canada can submit their application for migrant agricultural workers through the Government of Canada each year (Government of Canada 2021 ) and partner countries’ governments in return are responsible for recruiting and supporting workers (Government of Canada 2021 ). The formal partnerships between Canadian and partner governments help improve communication and ensure stakeholders understand what is required and ensure workers do not face unexpected costs. Additionally, the SAWP program is demand driven; therefore, as long as demand is proven by the employer, farmers are allocated an appropriate number of migrant agricultural workers without the limiting quotas seen in Italy (Hennebry and Preibisch 2012 ). Meeting labor demands through legal avenues eliminates the need to find workers outside the legal system.

In Italy, the challenge with irregular workers begins with their annual flows decrees system putting a cap on the number of workers granted entry each year, often failing to meet employers’ labor needs (Amnesty International 2012 ). In addition, recruiting a foreign worker is complicated, cumbersome, and time consuming, which leads employers to irregular workers to fulfill their labor needs (Amnesty International 2012 ). The Thai experience is similar. Workers face complex and lengthy processes to obtain legal documentation, which is a major driver of irregular workers (IOM 2019 ; Mekong Migration Network 2020 ). In addition, the cost for employers to register migrant agricultural workers through an MoU is often passed on to the worker (Mekong Migration Network 2020 ). Due to this relatively low pay, many migrant agricultural workers are unable to find the funds to meet the payment or are forced into debt. Thus, in both Italy and Thailand, challenges inevitably lead to migrant agricultural workers entering through illegal channels to begin work faster and avoid paying fees for documentation. Policy adaptation, as in Canada, which reduces the barriers to entry for the workers and employers, would be strongly recommended if the goal is to reduce irregular workers in Thailand and Italy.

Geographic and geopolitical differences

Canada tends to have fewer irregular workers; however, it is important to note that natural geographic barriers and surrounding geopolitical climates also give Canada an advantage in managing irregular labor migration. Thailand and Italy do not have this same natural geographic advantage. Thailand has a natural land border with Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, which increases the ease and possibility of migrants entering the country irregularly. Italy is also relatively easy to access from Eastern Europe and is accessible to African migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea. This route of entry into Italy is extremely dangerous, but the 2017 European Migrant Crisis demonstrated this trip is frequently undertaken despite the risk (Alfred 2017 ). This Mediterranean crossing has often been referred to as the “world’s deadliest migration route” (Bathke 2022 ). The Missing Migrant Project conducted by IOM estimated that in 2021 over 1,500 migrants drowned in the Mediterranean, although it is widely assumed the real number is much higher (IOM 2022 ). The geographic position of both Italy and Thailand in relation to their neighbors increases the ability for migrants to irregularly enter when compared to Canada.

In addition to the geographic location of countries, the geopolitical climates of neighboring countries also impact irregular migration in Thailand and Italy. Push factors that drive migration include economic difficulties, fear of violence or persecution, political unrest, and insufficient employment opportunities, and pull factors driving migration include increased safety and security, as well as employment opportunities (United Nations (UN) Office on Drugs and Crime, n.d.). Both the USA and Canada are classified as high-income and developed countries (World Economic Situation and Prospects (WESP) 2014 ) and also rank relatively high in stability and human rights (The Fund for Peace 2021 ). This similarity between rankings leaves almost no push to migrate to Canada from the USA, especially in an illegal manner. The same cannot be said for the geopolitical stability of the countries surrounding Thailand and Italy.

Thailand is classified as a middle-income country (WESP 2014 ) with a 2021 GDP of $534.78 billion USD (International Monetary Fund (IMF), 2021 ). In contrast, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar are all classified as the least developed countries (WESP 2014 ) and have combined GDPs of only $123.88 billion USD (IMF 2021 ). Thailand’s relatively higher rank on the fragile state index (The Fund for Peace 2021 ) and Human Development Index (UN Development Program 2020 ) compared to bordering countries means labor migration to Thailand stems from the increased opportunities offered by Thailand’s political stability and economic opportunity (Chalamwong et al. 2012 ).

Similarly in Italy, its location both in southern Europe and on the Mediterranean increases exposure to irregular migrants and those seeking asylum and refugee status (ANSA 2018 ). For example, in 2017 Italy reported over 130,000 asylum applications (Ministero dell’Interno, 2021 ), while Canada had just over 50,000 the same year (Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada 2022 ), despite its larger landmass.

Comparing Thailand, Italy, and Canada’s responses to COVID-19

COVID-19 had a dramatic impact on the agriculture sector, labor migration policies, and labor movement in Thailand, Italy, and Canada. Each country responded in a unique way relative to its existing policies. For example, both Thailand and Italy established national registration periods in an attempt to document irregular migrants already within their countries, while Canada focused its efforts on improving quarantine and testing protocols for migrant agricultural workers upon arrival. Despite distinct responses to COVID-19, two similar and critical themes were exposed in the three countries reviewed: the immensely important role migrant agricultural workers play in the agriculture sector in each country and how COVID-19 highlighted the exploitation, abuse, and poor working conditions of migrant agricultural workers face.

While migrant workers in agriculture were viewed as a critical component of the agriculture sector and supply chain before COVID-19 (Martin 2016 ), the struggle in accessing migrant agricultural workers during the pandemic only further demonstrated the importance they bring to each country. In Canada, the supply of migrant agricultural workers decreased in 2020, which led to labor shortages for many farmers across the country (Dias De Vasconcelos and Pettigrew 2021 ; Falconer 2020 ). In total Falconer ( 2020 ) found in 2020, there was a 14% drop in the number of migrant laborers in the Canadian agricultural sector compared to 2019, which strained farmers as they struggled to meet the labor supply. In Italy, which is historically inadequate in meeting employer demand for migrant agricultural workers, an additional shortage of roughly 250,000 workers made farmers struggle to meet the labor supply in previous years (Bathke 2020 ). Similar to both Canada and Italy, the rapid decrease of migrant agricultural workers was detrimental to Thailand’s agricultural sector as many farmers were unable to meet the labor supply as workers returned to their home countries (IOM 2020b ), which led to failed crops and food shortage in many areas of the country (Gilmour and Lin 2021 ).

Despite the marked differences in labor migration policies across Thailand, Italy, and Canada, the marked labor shortage and strain on the agricultural sector caused by COVID-19 demonstrates the vital role migrant agricultural workers play in the food supply and security of all countries. Thailand, Italy, and Canada were all unable to replace the vital labor supply migrant agricultural workers typically fill. Unfortunately, despite the recognized importance of migrant agricultural workers, COVID-19 only seems to have exacerbated the abuses and exploitation they already faced in each country (Marschke et al. 2021 ; Migrant Workers Alliance for Change 2020 ; Palumbo and Corrado 2020 ).

In Canada, migrant agricultural workers reported more complaints and abuses, including working excessive hours at an increased pace (Migrant Workers Alliance for Change 2020 ), likely a result of farmers being short-handed. Additionally, some employers pressured migrants to sign documents restricting their movement and requiring them to stay on the farm at all times (Thomas 2020 ) in an attempt to slow COVID’s spread. Moreover, cramped living conditions in bunkhouses made social distancing impossible and increased the possibility of contracting COVID-19. Similar to Canada, close living quarters, poor sanitation, and lack of PPE greatly increased the risk of contracting COVID-19 in Italy (Palumbo and Corrado 2020 ). In Thailand, migrant agricultural workers were confined to their living quarters, but COVID-19-negative and positive workers were forced to live together (Marschke et al. 2021 ). Additionally, many migrant agricultural workers in all three countries complained of insufficient or lack of PPE to protect them (Gilmour and Lin 2021 ; MacLeod 2021 ; Palumbo and Corrado 2020 ). These conditions led to infection and death among migrant agricultural workers, both legal and irregular. Given the critical role migrant agricultural workers play in Thailand, Italy, and Canada, each country needs to enact policy changes, in line with the ILO recommendations (ILO 2020 ), that provide migrant workers in agriculture with the rights and conditions they deserve.

Limitations and future research

Future research should extend the documentary method employed here with surveys and/or focus groups in Thailand, Italy, and Canada. Given the fast-evolving nature of COVID-19, we felt the documentary method was a timely way of capturing the discourse in available documents on migrant agricultural workers during the first several years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the documentary method is a worthy endeavor on its own (Payne and Payne 2004 ), further methodological approaches to extend this important topic would be valuable.

There are several potential limitations with the documentary method. First, there is a risk that the documents reviewed are not exhaustive or that the publicly accessible documents may only be a sub-sample of the information on the subject (Payne and Payne 2004 ). On a similar note, there is a risk of subjectivity in both the selection of documents or data to be analyzed and the analysis itself (Reischl and Plotz 2020 ). However, for this reason, we rely heavily on credible documents WHO, ILO, and IOM, as well as peer-reviewed research.

International migrants continue to play an increasingly critical role in agricultural production and security across the world (Popova and Özel 2018 ). Using the documentary method, we summarized and compared the migrant agricultural worker policies of Thailand, Italy, and Canada, while also analyzing each country’s COVID-19 response and impact on the treatment of migrant agricultural workers. This research makes an important contribution to the fields of labor mobility and international migration by exploring both the Global North and South in analyzing Thailand, Italy, and Canada and bringing awareness to labor mobility policies, and the treatment of migrant agricultural workers during COVID-19 in vastly different regions and countries in stages of economic development.

Unfortunately, migrant agricultural workers in all three countries face abuses, stemming from large power imbalances between migrant agricultural workers and employers and also the precarious employment created by policies. COVID-19 only worsened the abuses faced by migrant agricultural workers, while simultaneously demonstrating just how vital migrant agricultural workers are in food production and security in each country. This paper has identified numerous policy failures by the Thai, Italian, and Canadian governments to protect the rights of agricultural migrant workers both prior and during COVID-19. Additionally, through using a comparative analysis it has been able to identify similar policy failures and consequences on migrant agricultural workers in each country despite their socio-political and geographic differences. This should create an urgency for countries to use greater cooperation in order to create policies that protect the rights of migrant agricultural workers. Moving forward, countries need to re-evaluate their current labor mobility policies, but with a particular focus on removing the power imbalance between employer and migrant, decreasing precarity, and ensuring the rights of all migrant agricultural workers are upheld as recommended in the ILO (ILO 2020 ). As Thailand, Italy, and Canada all face similar challenges, building stronger multilateral partnerships to share knowledge and create best policy practices could be valuable for each country despite their regional and economic differences.

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Best Immigration Essay Examples

Migrant workers.

441 words | 2 page(s)

A migrant worker is anyone who is absent from their permanent place of residence in order to seek employment in agriculture. It is estimated that there are between one and three million migrant agricultural workers in the United States (Fleisher, et al., 2014).

Due to population movements, agricultural migrants are at risk for greater stress and hazards that arises from being displaced and inserted into a new environment. (Fleisher, et al., 2014) and also deal with being marginalized and suffering from poverty. Access to healthcare for migrant workers is scarce and results in poor continuity of care and they are more likely to contract specific health issues and diseases due to the nature of their work and are at increased risk of infectious diseases, diarrhea, infections from parasites, and tuberculosis. In addition, Hispanics, which make up the majority of migrant workers in the United States, are one and half times more likely to be diagnosed with type-2 diabetes as compared to non-Hispanic individuals (Fleisher, et al., 2014).

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Most migrant workers in the United States live in substandard housing which are crowded, unsanitary and often do not have basic utilities (Ratha, et al., 2015). They are also isolated from such services like public transportation, grocery stores, and health care facilities. Some migrants are eligible for government housing, but to qualify they must be documented, however more than 60% of migrant workers in the US are undocumented.

The Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Workers Protection Act of 1983 is a federal law that provides labor protections concerning labor contracting, wages, housing, working conditions, and compliance (Loue & Quill, 2014). The act provides migrant workers with protections against work-related hazards to ensure better working conditions. The Migrant Health Act of 1962 authorizes primary and supplemental healthcare delivery services to migrant workers which resulted in the Migrant Health Center program. The program emphasizes comprehensive preventive healthcare to migrant workers and their families and also emphasizes the health and safety of these workers.

Case findings and outreach are significant in the context of migrant workers because this population is underserved and largely invisible to many Americans. Outreach programs have the potential to improve the health outcomes of this population because migrant workers are less likely to use preventive health services. Outreach programs provide case management, health screenings, and health education.

• Fleischer, N. L., Tiesman, H. M., Sumitani, J., Mize, T., Amarnath, K. K., Bayakly, A. R., & Murphy, M. W. (2013). Public health impact of heat-related illness among migrant farmworkers. American journal of preventive medicine, 44(3), 199-206.
• Loue, S., & Quill, B. E. (Eds.). (2013). Handbook of rural health. Springer Science & Business Media.
• Ratha, D., Yi, S., & Yousefi, S. R. (2015). Migration and development. Routledge Handbook of Immigration and Refugee Studies, 1(3), 260.

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Migrant workers who helped build modern China have scant or no pensions, and can’t retire

Duan Shuangzhu, 68, a waste collector who moved to Beijing in late 1990s from a small village in central China’s Shanxi, stands next to a rubbish bin while working in Beijing on March 1, 2024. China’s first generation of migrant workers played an integral role in the country’s transformation from an impoverished nation to an economic powerhouse. Now, they’re finding it hard to find work, both because they’re older and the economy is slowing. (AP Photo)

Duan Shuangzhu, 68, a waste collector who moved to Beijing in late 1990s from a small village in central China’s Shanxi, stands near a rubbish cart while working in Beijing on March 1, 2024. China’s first generation of migrant workers played an integral role in the country’s transformation from an impoverished nation to an economic powerhouse. Now, they’re finding it hard to find work, both because they’re older and the economy is slowing. (AP Photo)

A municipal worker rides a bicycle on a street in Beijing, China, Thursday, March 21, 2024. China’s first generation of migrant workers played an integral role in the country’s transformation from an impoverished nation to an economic powerhouse. Now, they’re finding it hard to find work, both because they’re older and the economy is slowing. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

A worker sits on a street in Beijing, China, March 21, 2024. China’s first generation of migrant workers played an integral role in the country’s transformation from an impoverished nation to an economic powerhouse. Now, they’re finding it hard to find work, both because they’re older and the economy is slowing. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

Municipal workers sit in a three-wheeled bike on the street in Beijing, China, March 21, 2024. China’s first generation of migrant workers played an integral role in the country’s transformation from an impoverished nation to an economic powerhouse. Now, they’re finding it hard to find work, both because they’re older and the economy is slowing. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

Workers sit on a three-wheeled bike on the street in Beijing, China, March 21, 2024. China’s first generation of migrant workers played an integral role in the country’s transformation from an impoverished nation to an economic powerhouse. Now, they’re finding it hard to find work, both because they’re older and the economy is slowing. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

A worker unloads bicycles for a bike-share service in Beijing, China, March 21, 2024. China’s first generation of migrant workers played an integral role in the country’s transformation from an impoverished nation to an economic powerhouse. Now, they’re finding it hard to find work, both because they’re older and the economy is slowing. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

Workers construct a steel structure as they build a column at a flyover construction site at Xiongan in northern China’s Hebei province on March 14, 2024. China’s first generation of migrant workers played an integral role in the country’s transformation from an impoverished nation to an economic powerhouse. Now, they’re finding it hard to find work, both because they’re older and the economy is slowing. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

A worker cleans the lawn at a park in Beijing, China, March 22, 2024. China’s first generation of migrant workers played an integral role in the country’s transformation from an impoverished nation to an economic powerhouse. Now, they’re finding it hard to find work, both because they’re older and the economy is slowing. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

A worker walks past steel pipes loaded on a truck in Xiongan in northern China’s Hebei province on March 14, 2024. China’s first generation of migrant workers played an integral role in the country’s transformation from an impoverished nation to an economic powerhouse. Now, they’re finding it hard to find work, both because they’re older and the economy is slowing. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

Municipal workers sweeps water off the street near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, on March 5, 2024. China’s first generation of migrant workers played an integral role in the country’s transformation from an impoverished nation to an economic powerhouse. Now, they’re finding it hard to find work, both because they’re older and the economy is slowing. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

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BEIJING (AP) — At 53, Guan Junling is too old to get hired at factories anymore. But for migrant workers like her, not working is not an option.

For decades, they have come from farming villages to find work in the cities. Toiling in sweatshops and building apartment complexes they could never afford to live in, they played a vital role in China’s transformation into an economic powerhouse.

As they grow older, the first generation of migrant workers is struggling to find jobs in a slowing economy . Many are financially strapped, so they have to keep looking.

“There is no such thing as a ‘retirement’ or ‘pensions’ for rural people. You can only rely on yourself and work,” Guan said. “When can you stop working? It’s really not until you have to lie in bed and you can’t do anything.”

She now relies on housecleaning gigs, working long days to squirrel away a little money in case of a health emergency. Migrant workers can get subsidized health care in their hometowns, but they have little or no coverage elsewhere. If Guan needs to go to hospital in Beijing, she has to pay out of pocket.

As China’s population ages , so are its migrant workers. About 85 million were over 50 in 2022, the latest year for which data is available, accounting for 29% of all migrant workers and up from 15% a decade earlier. With limited or no pensions and health insurance, they need to keep working.

About 75% said they would work beyond the age of 60 in a questionnaire distributed to 2,500 first-generation migrant workers between 2018 to 2022, according to Qiu Fengxian, a scholar on rural sociology who described her research in a talk last year. The first-generation refers to those born in the 1970s or earlier.

Older workers are being hit by a double whammy. Jobs have dried up in construction due to a downturn in the real estate market and in factories because of automation and the slowing economy. Age discrimination is common, so jobs tend to go to younger people.

“For young people, of course, you can still find a job, positions are available, though the wage is not high enough,” said Zhang Chenggang of Beijing’s Capital University of Economics and Business, where he directs a center researching new forms of employment.

“But for older migrant workers, there simply are no positions,” said Zhang, who conducted field studies at four labor markets across China late last year. “Now, the problem is that no matter how low the wage is, as long as someone pays, you will take the job.”

Some job recruiters contacted by AP said older workers don’t work well or have underlying illnesses. Others declined to answer and hung up.

Many are turning to temporary work. Zhang Zixing was looking for gigs on a cold winter day late last year at a sprawling outdoor labor market on the outskirts of Beijing.

He said he was fired from a job delivering packages because of his age about three years ago, when he reached 55. In December, he was earning 260 yuan (about $35) a day installing cables at construction sites.

Zhang Quanshou, a village official in Henan province and a delegate to China’s National People’s Congress, said some older migrant workers are just looking for work near their hometowns, while others still head to larger cities.

“Some older migrant workers are finding temporary jobs, so it is important to build the temporary job market and provide a better platform for such services,” Zhang, the Communist Party secretary of the village, said in an emailed response to questions during a recent annual meeting of the Congress.

Guan, who comes from a rice-farming region in the north, worked on a clothing factory assembly line until she was laid off when she was in her 40s. She then worked various jobs in different cities, winding up in Beijing in 2018.

She works seven days a week, partly because she’s afraid labor agencies won’t call again if she turns an offer down.

Over February’s Lunar New Year holiday, when migrant workers traditionally go home to visit their families, she stayed in Beijing as a caretaker for an elderly woman, because the woman needed help and she needed the money.

“People either want someone who’s educated or young, and I don’t meet either of those requirements,” said Guan, who dropped out after middle school because her parents had only enough money to educate their son. “But then I think, regardless of how other people look at me, I have to survive.”

Guan worries jobs will be even harder to find when she reaches 55. The retirement age for women in China is 50 or 55, depending on the company and type of work. For men, it is 60.

Lu Guoquan, a trade union official, has proposed relaxing age limits for jobs, judging workers by their physical condition instead of their age and making it easier for older people to find work through labor markets and online platforms.

“A large number of farmers have entered cities, making an important contribution to the modernization of our country,” said his proposal, made to an advisory body during the recent national congress and seen by the AP.

As workers grow older, “they are gradually becoming a relatively vulnerable group in the labor market and face a number of thresholds and problems in continuing to work,” it said.

Lu, director of the general office of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, declined an interview request.

Duan Shuangzhu has spent 25 years collecting trash in one Beijing neighborhood after giving up a life of raising sheep and cows in north China’s Shanxi province when he was in his 40s. He gets up at 3:30 a.m. seven days a week to make his rounds. For that, he earns 3,300 yuan ($460) a month and has a basement room to live in.

Duan’s wife stayed on the farm, where she looks after their grandchildren. Duan has managed to save money for himself, his children and his grandchildren, but never paid into a pension system, directing what little he earns to his family.

That fits the pattern Qiu found in her research, which she published in a book last year. Older migrant workers moved to the cities to improve the lives of their children and other relatives, not themselves, she found. Most have limited or no savings, and few have climbed the economic ladder. They hoped their children would, but most ended up as migrant workers, too.

Most migrant workers’ earnings were spent on their children’s marriages, homes and education, Qiu said in her talk. “Basically, they did not begin working for themselves and planning for their own late years until the age of 55.”

Duan, at 68, has no plans to quit.

“As long as I can work every day, it’s enough to survive,” he said, standing next to a set of community rubbish bins, color-coded for recycling. “I didn’t grow up in a wealthy family — just filling my stomach each day is enough for me.”

Associated Press researcher Wanqing Chen contributed to this story.

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• Entering and staying in the UK
• Immigration rules

New laws to cut migration and put British workers first in force

Changes that are now in force will slash migration and prevent the undercutting of British workers by employers looking to recruit cheap labour from overseas.

Photo: Getty Images

UK businesses are now required to pay overseas workers coming to the UK on a Skilled Worker visa significantly more, as the government clamps down on cut price foreign labour and continues to deliver on its commitment to drive down net migration.  

Part of a robust and fair package of measures announced by the Home Secretary in December, which will mean 300,000 people who arrived in the UK last year would now not be able to, the general salary threshold for those arriving in the UK on a Skilled Worker visa has now increased by 48%, from £26,200 to £38,700. 

This increase will help ensure the UK’s immigration system focuses on recruiting high-skilled workers, helping to grow the UK economy while bringing overall numbers down.  

The government is clear that no sector should be permanently reliant on immigration, so today, the shortage occupation list has also been abolished, with employers no longer able to pay migrants less than UK workers in shortage occupations.  

A new immigration salary list ( ISL ) has been created, following advice from the expert and independent Migration Advisory Committee ( MAC ). Roles on the list will only be included where they are skilled and in shortage, and if it is sensible to include them considering the efforts being made by sectors to invest in the resident workforce.  

Inclusion on the list must not serve to reduce pay and undermine the recruitment of British workers. Employers are encouraged to invest in training, upskilling, and hiring domestic workers first. 

It comes as the government takes decisive action to support British people into work, in one of the biggest employment interventions in a generation, through its £2.5 billion Back to Work plan. This will help break down barriers to work for over a million people who are long term unemployed, long term sick, or disabled.

Home Secretary James Cleverly said: 

It’s time to turn off the taps and end the flow of cheap workers from abroad. Mass migration is unsustainable and it’s simply not fair. It undercuts the wages of hard-working people who are just trying to make ends meet.  We are refocusing our immigration system to prioritise the brightest and best who have the skills our economy needs, while reducing overall numbers. I promised the British people an immigration system that serves their interests, and to bring numbers down - these tough measures deliver on that commitment. Employers must also play their part and put British workers first.

Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said: 

For too long we have relied on labour from abroad when there is great talent right here in the UK. I’m determined to give jobseekers the support they need to get on and get ahead through our £2.5 billion Back to Work Plan, while our network of Jobcentres are providing apprenticeships, bootcamps, and skills programmes to help even more people into work. The changes coming into force today coupled with my next generation of welfare reforms will unlock the huge potential of the great British workforce.

The government has put in place an accelerated and comprehensive programme of reforms to address unsustainable numbers of legal arrivals in the UK.  

In January, the government ended the ability of nearly all postgraduate students to bring dependants to the UK. A drastic fall in student dependant applications is expected this year, with early indications already of this downward trend.

Last month, reforms to restrict care workers from bringing family members came into force. An estimated 120,000 dependants accompanied 100,000 workers on the route in the year ending September 2023, who would now not be able to come. 

Care providers are also now required to register with the Care Quality Commission, the industry regulator, if they are sponsoring migrant care workers. This follows clear evidence that care workers have been offered visas under false pretences, having been recruited for jobs that don’t exist or being paid far below the minimum wage required for their work. 

The Home Secretary has also commissioned a review of the Graduate route for international students to prevent abuse, protect the integrity and quality of UK higher education, and ensure it works in the best interests of the UK. 

The Migration Advisory Committee ( MAC ) will review the demand for the Graduate route, through which a total of 213,250 visas have been granted since it was established, to ensure it is fit for purpose and focused on attracting the best and brightest to the UK. 

This follows concerns raised after analysis by the MAC revealed that the number of international postgraduate students attending institutions with the lowest UCAS entry requirements has increased by over 250% between 2018 and 2022. It is expected to report later this year. 

On 11 April, the first step in an incremental increase to the minimum income required for Family visas will come into force. By early 2025, this will have reached £38,700, helping to ensure dependants brought to the UK are supported financially. 

The government’s plan to tackle illegal migration is also working, with small boat crossings down by around a third last year. Illegal migration is an international challenge the government is tackling on all fronts, including working with international partners and clamping down on the criminal gangs with stepped-up enforcement.

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Texas National Guard Member Charged With Migrant Smuggling

The arrest marked at least the second time in the last year that National Guard members in Texas had been caught trying to transport migrants from the border.

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By J. David Goodman

A silver sport utility vehicle, driving at speeds of more than 100 miles per hour, led the police on a 15-mile chase over the weekend near the U.S. border with Mexico in an area that has long been popular with migrant smugglers.

The scene ended on Sunday afternoon as many such pursuits do, with a migrant fleeing on foot and a driver captured, forced to stop by spikes that the police had stretched across the highway.

But while the circumstances were familiar, the identity of the driver was much more unusual: He was a member of the Texas Army National Guard.

The arrest marked at least the second time in less than a year that soldiers had been caught trying to transport migrants from the border in Texas. Last June, two soldiers, including one from the Louisiana National Guard, were arrested and charged with trying to smuggle migrants through the same area of rural ranch land in Kinney County.

The man arrested on Sunday, Savion Amari Donovan Johnson, was described by law enforcement officials as a National Guard soldier, but it was not clear whether he had been deployed to the area as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security program known as Operation Lone Star.

“He was National Guard,” said Sheriff Brad Coe of Kinney County, whose deputies helped make the arrest. “I believe he was a public information officer. That’s what I was told.”

Sheriff Coe said that the migrant was being transported in an official vehicle with official equipment associated with the border security mission. “My understanding is that he did have his Operation Lone Star gear in the vehicle,” Mr. Coe said in an interview.

“It’s not a good thing. But he’s not the first one we’ve picked up that’s associated with the National Guard,” Mr. Coe added. “We’ve picked up attorneys. Preachers. Old ones, young ones, juveniles. The money is out there.”

A spokesman for the Texas Military Department would not discuss the case or confirm Mr. Johnson’s status with the organization.

The arrest recalled prior episodes in which federal Border Patrol agents have been charged with smuggling undocumented immigrants or illicit drugs at the border with Mexico.

The number of state law enforcement and National Guard members assigned to the border has jumped dramatically over the last two years as part of Mr. Abbott’s efforts to enhance border security. Thousands of National Guard members have been assigned to patrol positions along the border, and to construct fencing and concertina wire barriers to deter people trying to cross without authorization from Mexico.

“If the allegations are true, the accused is a traitor and criminal,” Andrew Mahaleris, Mr. Abbott’s press secretary, said in a statement. “The accused’s illegal smuggling may subject him to a mandatory minimum prison sentence of at least 10 years. He deserves more.”

Mr. Johnson, 26, was arrested by Texas Department of Public Safety officers, assigned to the border as part of Operation Lone Star, and sheriff’s deputies from Kinney County. He was charged with human smuggling, felony evading arrest and unlawful weapons possession.

According to a police affidavit, a state trooper tried to pull Mr. Johnson over in a silver GMC sport utility vehicle for going over the speed limit on a local farm road. At that point, around 3:40 p.m. on Sunday, the GMC sped away and the trooper drove after it. After the vehicles turned onto a state highway, the chase reached speeds above 100 miles an hour, according to the affidavit.

At one point, the S.U.V. slowed and stopped so that a man could run away on foot, and then continued. It finally stopped after hitting spikes that had been put across the road by the police, according to the affidavit. The affidavit noted that the police had made contact with Mr. Johnson’s sergeant to alert him of the arrest.

Mr. Johnson could not immediately be reached for comment, and it was not clear whether he had retained a lawyer as of Wednesday. The migrant who fled was later captured, officials said.

Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.

J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma. More about J. David Goodman

Armani company put in receivership amid labour exploitation probe

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WORKERS FORCED TO EAT AND SLEEP IN FACTORIES

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Greg abbott accuses biden of using migrants as “political pawns”, the accusation comes after texas’ governor grabbed headlines by bussing thousands north..

Julianne McShane

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Eric Gay/AP

It seems like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott  could use a dictionary. 

Why? Because on Sunday, the Republican went on Fox News and accused President Joe Biden of “using illegal immigrants as political pawns.” And given his own record, it is unclear if understands what the word means. 

Chessboards aside, Oxford Languages says a pawn is “a person used by others for their own purposes.” This, of course, describes how Abbott has himself treated migrants who have crossed the border into Texas.

Since 2022, he bussed thousands of them to Democratic-controlled New York City and Washington, D.C. The arrival of more than 150,000 migrants in New York since that time has created a humanitarian crisis that the city government has struggled to adequately manage, leaving many migrants bearing harsh conditions and stuck in shelters.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has sued more than a dozen charter bus contractors that helped transport the migrants to the city under Abbott’s direction, alleging that the companies violated the city’s Social Services Law, which requires that anyone who brings “a needy person from out of state” to New York City to cover the resulting expenses. Last month, one of the bus companies agreed in court papers to halt transporting migrants from the southern border to the city, Politico reported . 

But this week, when Abbott came to New York for a Republican fundraiser, he made it clear he has no plans to stop sending migrants to New York for his own purposes—at least for as long as Biden remains president. “We are going to have to maintain this process until we get a new president this next November who will secure the border for the United States of America,” the governor told the gathering, according to Gothamist .

Late last year, Abbott signed a law making undocumented immigration into Texas a state crime and allowing state law enforcement officials to arrest undocumented immigrants anywhere inside its boundaries. The issue is wrapped up in litigation , with Biden’s Department of Justice arguing that the law violates the Constitution, which “assigns the federal government the authority to regulate immigration and manage our international borders.”

The reason behind Abbott’s rhetoric isn’t hard to pin down: Draconian anti-immigration policies—including separating children from their parents—have become a cornerstone of today’s GOP , who don’t actually seem interested in funding border security, given that Republican lawmakers recently blocked a bipartisan bill to do just that. 

While Abbott’s threat to keep busing immigrants north could further burnish his anti-immigrant credentials, it pales when compared to another he made earlier this year. As I reported in January, he told a right-wing radio host that “the only thing that we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border—because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

That’s what we’d call using immigrants as political pawns. 

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