MigResHub

Overview

Aims of MigResHub

The primary aim of MigResHub is to facilitate research and policy debates on how migrant labour shapes the resilience of the provision of essential goods and services to the current Covid-19 pandemic and to similar shocks in the future. The Hub concentrates on three essential goods and services around the world: food and agriculture; health services; and social care. MigResHub aims to take a comparative and transnational approach that includes countries and supply chains covering all major regions of the world. A particular focus will be on exploring how the relationships between reliance on migrant workers and the systemic resilience of the provision of food, health, and social care vary across countries with different institutional and policy frameworks for the provision of these essential services.

Existing studies have shown that institutional and regulatory frameworks of the labour market and wider public policies can play an important role in “producing” domestic labour shortages and employer demand for migrant labour (e.g. Ruhs and Anderson 2010). However, this existing research has primarily focused on employers’ incentives and has not yet explored the potential effects of broader considerations of systemic resilience on the demand for migrant workers. Research on the regulation of labour migration has remained separate from research on systemic resilience, and the current crisis highlights potential gains from bringing these two approaches together.

MigResHub aims to engage researchers and policy experts from different regions of the world, bringing together theories and insights from various academic disciplines, research literatures, and policy debates. If you want to contribute your thinking and analysis to MigResHub, please see “How to contribute”.

Policy Context: Rethinking the impacts of migrant workers and labour migration policies

One of the central policy challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic has been how to protect and maintain essential economic activities and public services such as the provision of food, health services, and social care. The health emergency and associated bans on movement within and across countries have led to severe labour market shocks, including a sharp increase in the demand for health professionals and a reduction in the supply of agricultural and social care workers, thus threatening the resilience of essential services during the pandemic. Resilience can be broadly understood as the ability to withstand, recover, and adapt to unexpected external shocks (OECD 2020).

Despite considerable variations in national food, health, and care systems and their interlinkages with global supply chains, migrants play an important role in these sectors in many countries. As a consequence, migrants doing essential work – including those typically considered ‘low-skilled’ labourers such as fruit-pickers, care assistants, and cleaners in hospitals – have in many countries been included in designations of ‘key workers’ whose supply needs to be protected and in some cases even expanded during the current health emergency. This public re-evaluation and greater appreciation of the contributions of migrant workers as an immediate and widespread response to the outbreak of the pandemic raises important questions about whether and under what conditions Covid-19 will lead to a fundamental re-think of labour migration policies and the rights of migrant workers, especially of those working in low-paid but ‘essential’ jobs. Through its transnational and comparative research, MigResHub aims to inform policy debates about these questions and encourage policy learning both within and across countries.

Coordinators of MigResHub

Based at the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) of the European University Institute (EUI), MigResHub is a joint initiative of the MPC and Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB), a Specialist Research Institute at the University of Bristol. MigResHub is led and coordinated by Martin Ruhs (MPC), Bridget Anderson (MMB), Nikolaj Broberg (MPC). Friedrich Poeschel (previously MPC and now EASO) played a central role in the development phase of MigResHub in 2020.