Abstract
This paper argues that concerns about the resilience of essential services require a reassessment of the impacts of migrant workers and the design of labour migration and related public policies. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the high share of migrants among ‘key workers’ who deliver essential services, notably in agriculture and food production, health services and social care. We review existing insights on the role of migrant workers in essential services, which emphasise employers’ incentives as well as different national policies and institutional settings. We introduce the notion of systemic resilience to this context and outline key determinants of systemic resilience that have been identified in several disciplines but not yet applied in the field of labour migration. Given the importance of essential services, the paper argues that bolstering resilience should be a key objective for policy makers, and systemic resilience should be a criterion in impact assessments of migrant workers and in the design of labour migration and related policies. We find that this requires broader approaches to consider entire systems for the provision of essential goods and services, more attention to the medium and long run, and thinking beyond the protection of domestic workers. As an agenda for new migration research, we discuss three types of comparative analysis needed to examine the various ways in which migrant workers might affect systemic resilience.
Highlights
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 agriculture and food production, health services and social care, as well as key digital and non-digital infrastructure including transport and logistics
While research on systemic resilience has been largely disconnected from migration analyses and policies, some of its basic concepts and insights are highly relevant to debates about the resilience of essential services, and how it may be shaped by migrant labour, during and after Covid-19
In a post-Covid-19 world, debates and decisions on these trade-offs need to go beyond the conventional short-term focus on efficiency, welfare and distribution and consider longer-term concerns including systemic resilience in the provision of essential goods and services
Summary
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 agriculture and food production, health services and social care, as well as key digital and non-digital infrastructure including transport and logistics. The United Kingdom announced the automatic extension of expiring visas of migrant doctors, nurses, and paramedics These measures were widely accepted as necessary responses to the Covid-19 emergency but they raise important questions about whether, why, and to what extent migrant workers are ‘needed’ to provide essential services – questions that have been the focus of research interest in recent years – and migrants’ role in ensuring longer term resilience. Except for resilience of destination country institutions in the case of irregular migration flows (Geddes 2015, Paul and Roos 2019), the concept of systemic resilience has been notably absent from research on migration and migration policy (Bourbeau, 2015) This paper addresses this gap by beginning to build a theoretical basis for a new research agenda and policy debates about the role of migrant workers in the provision and resilience of essential services during the current pandemic and similar future shocks. Other types of shocks such as financial and economic shocks raise different issues (e.g. Strauss-Kahn 2020) and require different policy responses with their own specific implications for the role of migrant labour in supporting systemic resilience
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