Migrant Workers Research Articles

A dream of lies: stories of Bangladeshi maid migrants in the Middle East

ABSTRACT Being a socially conservative country, a number of Bangladeshi female migrant workers working in abroad are not as many as the male. However, in recent times, the number increased a lot, but still female migrant workers are very much under-researched and a minor in getting policy attention. This present study thus tries to fill that gap and to identify the influencing factors of female maid migration, their life as migrants and the reintegration processes of these migrant returnees. This is a qualitative study where interviews were conducted 20 female who worked in middle east as the housemaid and who were registered as migrant returnees at different government and non-government organizations. A thematic analytical procedure was used to analyse the data. The study finds that female workers migrate to Middle East mostly for economic purposes to overcome their economic challenges in home country; however, they face a number of violences such as physical abuse, socio-psychological torture which put their dream in challenge. The result of the study also shows that as the returnees, these female workers faced reintegration challenges too. To make their dream come true, with many other policies, government should introduce functional monitoring cells in the respective countries.

Study Habits and English Learning Achievement of Left-behind Children in a Selected Rural Primary School: A Correlation Study

In the process of urbanization, a large number of migrant workers have appeared. Such migration often leads to the migration of rural youth to cities, leaving their children to the care of older relatives due to various restrictions. This situation requires social attention to the overall well-being of left-behind children, especially in their education. Lack of parental guidance and support due to long-term separation often leads to unbalanced academic and personal life, leading to problems such as passive participation, disinterest in learning, inattention in class and poor note-taking. This paper aims to explore the influence of learning habits and English learning performance of left-behind children in rural primary schools in Shandong Province. This provides comprehensive support for left-behind children in rural areas and cultivates their ability to learn independently.

Developing and Validating the Health Literacy Scale for Migrant Workers: Instrument Development and Validation Study.

Research concerning health literacy among migrant workers in South Korea has been limited, especially given the lack of validated instruments and the lack of focus on the cultural diversity of migrant workers. This study aimed to develop and validate a health literacy scale for unskilled migrant workers (HLS-MW) in South Korea. We first generated a pool of potential items based on a literature review and in-depth interviews with 23 migrant workers. Subsequently, we reviewed empirical referents from the first step to select relevant medical terminologies and passages, ultimately choosing 709 words. The study team initially generated 35 items with 709 health-related terms through empirical referent reviews. After content validity testing by an expert panel, 28 items comprising 89 terms on the 2 subscales of prose and documents were selected for psychometric testing. Overall, 402 unskilled migrant workers in South Korea completed a web-based survey between August and September 2021, with 334 responses included in the final analysis. We used multiple analytic approaches, including exploratory factor analysis, Rasch analysis (item response theory), and descriptive analysis, to examine the new scale's validity and reliability. The final sample primarily included young male workers from South Asian countries. The HLS-MW yielded 2 factors: prose and documents. The item difficulty scores ranged from -1.36 to 2.56. The scale was reduced to 13 items (10 prose and 3 document items), with the final version exhibiting good internal reliability (Kuder-Richardson index=0.88; intraclass correlation coefficient=0.94, 95% CI 0.93-0.95) and test-retest reliability (r=0.74, 95% CI 0.57-0.92). HLS-MW scores differed significantly by Korean language proficiency (F2,331=3.54, P=.004). The HLS-MW is a reliable and valid measure to assess health literacy among migrant workers in South Korea. Further studies are needed to test the psychometric properties of the HLS-MW in diverse migrant groups in South Korea while also establishing cutoffs to help identify those in need of health literacy support.

Highly educated Ukrainian migrants in Poland prior to 2022: education, work and integration efforts

ABSTRACT Drawing on recent original qualitative research, this paper focuses on the under-researched area of highly skilled migration in the relatively new migratory context of Ukrainian migrants to Poland. Commonly, migrants from Ukraine have been found to work in basic low-paid jobs and in an informal, non-regulated capacity; thus, often falling prey to precarious and insecure employment. However, this article focuses on career pathways of highly educated migrants from Ukraine in Poland and explores how they take advantage of their education and qualifications. The analysis is focused on individual-level factors. The paper discusses the findings of 29 individual in-depth interviews. Among the respondents, 15 were working in occupations requiring higher education, and 14 worked below their education. This article contributes to the literature on the use of qualifications of migrant workers from Ukraine in Poland. We found that knowledge of the Polish language, and individual attitudes influence migrants’ use of education/qualifications. The relationship between family composition and the labour market situation of people with higher education is not clearly established in this research. We hope these findings will support the integration efforts of the newly arrived forced migrants from Ukraine in Poland and beyond.

Strengthening Tuberculosis Control Among Migrant Workers

Tuberculosis (TB) is a serious infectious disease accounting for a significant number of deaths due to the infectious nature of the disease on the global platform. Migrant workers need special attention as these population groups live in substandard and crowded environmental conditions with poor ventilation, which play a crucial role in augmenting the risk of acquisition of infection. The global vision to ensure the delivery of effective TB control-related services for migrant workers has been influenced by a wide range of barriers. This issue is further complicated by the limited knowledge of migrant workers about tuberculosis, their rights, the kind of services available in healthcare facilities, and the ways to prevent the acquisition and transmission of infectious disease. By acknowledging the role of predisposing factors and the potential barriers that impact accessing timely healthcare services, it can be seen that the need of the hour is to plan and implement a comprehensive package of services for the benefit of migrant workers.

Time–space control: explaining subnational variation in Thailand’s guestwork regimes

Abstract How do states control labor migration? Furthering global trends, nation states increasingly seek to include foreigners in labor markets while excluding them from settling. Yet, dominant theories maintain a limited conception of migration control as primarily immigrant restriction, especially in the global North. Thailand offers a paradigmatic case for understanding labor migration control and the dual goal of inclusion–exclusion it entails. While migrants generally face rigid limits on their immigration status, the Thai state shows internal variation in how it manages their inclusion as workers: in some places, authorities more strictly regulate time limits of documents, while in others, they focus on control of boundaries around migrant spatial access. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in two sites, this article examines this regulatory variation to inform a more general understanding of guestwork control in global context. Comparing two subnational regimes, I show that the state must respond to multiple forces from above and below when controlling labor migration, requiring subnational regulatory differences, and fostering contrasting means of labor reproduction. Findings suggest that differential subnational incorporation into regional and global economies can shape differences in the time–space control of migrant workers and the conditions of noncitizenship that come with it.

Rural Boy Groups: Awkward (Ga) Dance, Reflexive Gimmick, and the Livestreaming Craze in China

Abstract This article examines the recent emergence on Chinese livestreaming platforms of what I call ‘rural boy groups’. Mostly self-employed and self-trained, the members of rural boy groups capitalize on the most accessible resources that they have – their own bodies – to become digital entrepreneurs, instead of following the conventional path as migrant workers or manual laborers in urban cities. Engaging with Sianne Ngai’s concept of the gimmick, the article investigates what makes their performance gimmicky: namely, ‘earthy taste’ (tuwei) aesthetic, ‘awkwardness’ (ga), and atmospheric interaction. It shows that this gimmicky entertainment by rural boy groups simultaneously exposes and exploits the underlying conditions of their labor, such as class divides and platform exploitation, which ends up perpetuating their precarious situation.

Flexible sovereignty and contested legality: The overseas employment and legal struggles of Chinese workers

The surge in Chinese overseas investments has increased the transnational movement of Chinese workers. While much literature explores the interactions between Chinese managers and local workers in host countries, the dynamics between Chinese employers and Chinese workers abroad remain under-examined. This paper employs the conceptual frameworks of flexible sovereignty and contested legality to examine the distinctive norms and practices in labor recruitment, management, and dispute resolution emerged through overseas employment. Through a critical review of lawsuits between returned Chinese workers and their Chinese employers in Chinese courts – originating from the top five African countries receiving Chinese labor (Algeria, Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Equatorial Guinea) – the analysis reveals new spatialities and temporalities of sovereign control exerted by globalized Chinese companies over overseas workplaces and migrant workers. Overseas employment marks a complex process of coupling and decoupling among various forms of Chinese capital and labor. Three mechanisms of corporate sovereign control are identified: the delineation of workplaces and workers' bodies as spaces of exception, the flexibilization of working hours and job tenure, and the politics of delays in wage disbursement and dispute resolution. These mechanisms provoke contentious debates during court proceedings and result in uneven judicial outcomes for Chinese workers.

Land rights, resource allocation and urban settlement choices of migrant workers in Yunnan, Western China

Using the cross-sectional data from the 2015 and 2021 Yunnan Migrant Workers Urban Integration Survey, this study assesses the different effects of the three types of land rights that migrant workers possess in their rural hometowns on their urban settlement choices in Yunnan, western China. Specifically, it examined the existence of migrant workers moving between urban and rural areas in response to the importance of land rights for rural migrant workers, in western China, a region with the lower level of economic development and fastest growing number of migrant workers in China. After controlling for the impact of other variables, the multinomial Probit model was used to estimate the impact of the migrant workers' land rights in their rural hometowns on their settlement choices in urban areas. We found that rural land rights significantly increased migrant workers' willingness to return to their hometowns. This indicates that land right security is a key factor affecting Yunnan migrant workers' urban settlement intentions, although it is conditional in terms of age groups and places of origin. Importantly, we found that migrant workers in western China are more inclined to keep their dual identities as both urban migrant workers and rural residents. They, hence, are more inclined to rationally allocate their resources between urban and rural areas to maximize their economic outputs. Particularly, they prefer to only working - rather than settling - in urban areas, while retaining their rural land as assets and income sources. Instead of settling in either urban or rural areas, the older migrant workers who migrate to smaller and economically underdeveloped cities are more inclined to drift between urban and rural areas without permanent settlement. This confirms the argument of livelihood resource maximization and migratory bird-type migration as important mechanisms via which land right ownership affects migrant workers’ urban settlement intentions. This study suggests that policymakers should consider the land rights of rural migrant workers when making urban settlement policies, especially for small and medium-sized cities, where migrant settlement intention is weaker. Policymakers should also promote the flexibility of rural land use rights transfer and explore reforms concerning the separation of the three types of land rights to achieve a balance between urbanization and land use efficiency, particularly in small and medium-sized cities.

The gendered crisis of care in the UK through the lens of immigration policy impacts on migrant workers

The gendered crisis of care in the UK through the lens of immigration policy impacts on migrant workers

Female Migrant Workers in Conflict with Life and Livelihood Amid COVID-19: Violence and Gendered Crisis

This article explores the gendered impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women migrant workers and their families in terms of loss of livelihood resulting in a debt trap while endangering life, responsibility stress, restricted geographic moves, shattered access and scarce support. Employing the quantitative research method, a survey of 122 women migrant workers from five underprivileged districts of West Bengal, India, was conducted. The analysis revealed that there has been a significant variation in women migrant workers’ income level as well as in the level of violence they were exposed to during the pandemic in comparison to the pre-pandemic phase. The level of violence also has a negative monotonic relationship with their husbands’ income. The findings of the study also confirm that income, family structure, financial support and so on. significantly influence violence towards women. These findings have implications for developing policies and programmes to ensure the secured employment for and safety of women.

Undocumented migrant workers as activist citizens: resisting citizenship exclusion through photovoice

ABSTRACT This article discusses the foregrounding of migrant activism through a photovoice project that emerged organically from groups of undocumented South Asian migrant men in Greece. It argues that this collective creative action against the criminalization of migrant ‘illegality’ constitutes an active act of citizenship that contests, from below, exclusionary citizenship rights and formal modes of inclusion into the body politic of a nation state. Isin’s concept of ‘activist citizen’ (2008) allows us to interpret migrant participation as a creative political mobilization that challenged their formal citizenship exclusion. The act of becoming intentionally visible through photo-taking and the multimedia installation allowed them to undertake constructive resistance against their forced invisibility and migrant abjectness. By representing themselves as empowered activist-citizens, and by using their photos, videos, and texts as evidentiary material, the undocumented migrant workers sought to destabilize dominant imaginaries and discourses that present them as fearful, deviant masculine others.

Migration, Urbanism and Health: Moving Toward Systems-Informed Policy and Practice

Migration and displacement are pivotal determinants of urban health, influencing both direct and indirect health outcomes. Migrants may face unique health risks, often exacerbated by economic, social, and environmental factors encountered during transit or upon resettlement. As migration patterns shift due to geopolitical, climatic, and economic pressures, they reshape the global and urban policy landscapes in unpredictable ways, presenting challenges that will continue to evolve in the coming decades. Current legal frameworks, in many cases, do not adequately account for migrant populations, hindering policy responses and complicating the protection of migrant health. Therefore, effective urban health interventions must be inclusive of migrant populations and expand beyond healthcare services. A systems-thinking approach that recognizes the broader determinants of health—including housing, employment, social services, and urban infrastructure—is essential to address the intersecting challenges migrants face. Despite these challenges, migration remains crucial to the functioning of urban environments. Migrant workers consistently contribute to the healthy operation of cities, underpinning key infrastructure and services. However, to optimize policy responses and improve urban health outcomes, more robust data and evidence on the health risks and outcomes of migrants, as well as the structural drivers of migration, are needed. Moreover, macro factors such as climate change, future pandemics, and geopolitical shifts are likely to influence both migration dynamics and migrant health. To anticipate and respond to these evolving challenges, a systems-informed and holistic vision of urban health is required—one that integrates migration into the broader urban policy and planning frameworks to foster healthier, more resilient cities.

The Impact of Urbanization on the Socio-Economic Status of Rural Migrants in China - A Comparison and Analysis for the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta Regions

The Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta regions in China are two key areas of rapid economic development, and research has found that a large number of migrants from rural areas have been formed as a result of the rapid development of the urban agglomerations in the region, however, there is still a certain research gap on the comparison of the rural labour force populations of the two regions due to the different attractiveness of the rural transfer population in the two regions as well as the differences in the various local policies. Therefore, this paper reads the literature to compare the impact of the progress of urbanization in the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta on the economic status of rural migrants in China. The study finds that the Yangtze River Delta mainly attracts high-end technical talents while the Pearl River Delta attracts more migrant workers. Therefore, the governments of the two regions need to implement practical policies to provide migrants with corresponding protection.

Moving the goalposts in Qatar: Tracing the labour reform process by and through transnational players

This article traces the process which led the state of Qatar to take steps towards reforming its labour laws that had historically severely restricted the rights and freedoms of migrant workers who make up the majority of its workforce. Our premise is that the 2022 World Cup served as a catalyst for Qatar to enact significant labour reforms due to a complex array of events harnessed by the actions of key actors, notably the global labour movement. We use political process theory which we operationalise in a novel manner, that is, through the process tracing methodology which allows us to demonstrate that it was a combination of internal and external factors (events, actors, strategies) which ultimately pushed Qatar to rapidly introduce legal and policy changes as well as taking steps to amend its hostile institutional environment.

A dynamic relationship between discrimination and psychological distress among rural migrant workers in China

A dynamic relationship between discrimination and psychological distress among rural migrant workers in China

A Review of the Links Between Work and Heart Disease in the 21st Century.

This review explores the multifaceted exposures in the workplace that contribute to cardiovascular diseases (CVD), including physical, ergonomics, chemical, biological, psychosocial, and emerging occupational hazards. These well-documented occupational hazards have long been linked to heart disease. Exposures arising from these hazards present significant concerns for worker health and safety. Moreover, heat stress is an emerging and increasingly pervasive threat, exacerbated by climate change, particularly in outdoor, high-exposure industries like agriculture and construction. While the epidemiological links between heat and CVD are well established, there is a critical gap in research on the physiological impacts of heat on workers' cardiovascular health. In particular, migrant workers are especially vulnerable to these occupational hazards, particularly in the absence of targeted, equitable interventions. As global temperatures rise, addressing these occupational exposures is important for protecting the cardiovascular health of the workforce and the expanding field of occupational cardiology.

Учебник РКИ делового (профессионального) общения: принципы моделирования

In the conditions of the new government demand for training foreign specialists of various profiles in Russian higher education, the task of optimising the existing educational paradigm in the field of teaching Russian as a foreign language for special purposes is actualised, the most important link of which is the methodological goal set for the formation of the learners' (foreign or Russian universities’ students) ability to overcome the ideological threshold in professional interethnic (intercultural) communication. The analysis of research and methodological literature gives grounds to assert that Russian linguodidactics is ready to ensure the convergence of the pedagogical process, in which formal language teaching, professional training and education in line with the Russian culture and value paradigm can be presented syncretically within the framework of problem-based and / or interactive approaches in one (unified) teaching tool — a textbook / workbook / training manual / training course / educational-methodical complex. As one of the possible strategies for a comprehensive solution to the problem of compliance of educational resources with the latest social challenges, the potential of a new method of creating teaching tools — the method of casual illustrated narrative (CIN), which provides synergetic presentation of the language and culture of business (professional) communication in the framework of the scenario form and thus determines the possibility of building a model of the space-time continuum of professional communication, is substantiated. As a proof of the success and practical significance of the proposed strategy — the SIN method — we present the online course "Russian for Life and Work" developed in 2024 for migrant workers from CIS countries (SPbU, Uzbek national version), the results of the approbation of which led the Russian government to instruct a number of Russian universities to create additional national versions.

Social Security Protection of Immigrants in Brazil

Objective: The objective of this study is to analyze the social security protection of immigrants in Brazil, focusing on international social security agreements and their effectiveness in ensuring rights comparable to those of Brazilian beneficiaries. Theoretical Framework: The research is based on concepts of social protection, social security rights, and international treaties, emphasizing the relevance of social security agreements as mechanisms to guarantee equitable rights for migrant workers. Method: The methodological approach adopted is exploratory and descriptive, comprising a literature review and documentary analysis of international social security agreements and relevant legislation. Results and Discussion: The results indicate that international agreements play an essential role in the social security protection of immigrants, allowing the totalization of contribution periods and facilitating access to benefits. However, challenges such as legislative harmonization and the simplification of administrative procedures remain, although some agreements satisfactorily address these issues. Research Implications: This research provides insights into the importance of international cooperation to ensure equitable social security protection, highlighting the need for effective practical implementation of agreements and coordination among signatory countries. Originality/Value: This study enriches the literature on social security protection by highlighting the effectiveness and challenges of international social security agreements, offering an analysis that can guide policies and practices for the protection of immigrants in Brazil.

Determinants of the effectiveness of education and training in Indonesian migrant workers

This study explores the effectiveness of education and training programs for Indonesian migrant workers, who often seek employment abroad due to limited opportunities and low wages in their home country. The increasing numbers of migrant workers, combined with their significant economic contributions, highlight the need for effective training to enhance their self-reliance and reduce the likelihood of returning to overseas work. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the research identifies key determinants of program success, including financial literacy, self-management, motivation, and social support. The findings reveal that while macro-level policies are still insufficient, effective mapping and guidance at the micro level show promising results. Successful training programs positively impact the workers' independence, with those who acquire essential skills more likely to pursue entrepreneurship upon returning to Indonesia, rather than seeking further employment abroad. The study underscores the importance of incorporating financial and digital literacy, along with entrepreneurship training, into the curriculum to foster long-term economic independence for Indonesian migrant workers.