labor migration essay

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Global migration: causes and consequences.

• Benjamin Helms Benjamin Helms Department of Politics, University of Virginia
• , and  David Leblang David Leblang Department of Politics, Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, University of Virginia
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.631
• Published online: 25 February 2019

International migration is a multifaceted process with distinct stages and decision points. An initial decision to leave one’s country of birth may be made by the individual or the family unit, and this decision may reflect a desire to reconnect with friends and family who have already moved abroad, a need to diversify the family’s access to financial capital, a demand to increase wages, or a belief that conditions abroad will provide social and/or political benefits not available in the homeland. Once the individual has decided to move abroad, the next decision is the choice of destination. Standard explanations of destination choice have focused on the physical costs associated with moving—moving shorter distances is often less expensive than moving to a destination farther away; these explanations have recently been modified to include other social, political, familial, and cultural dimensions as part of the transaction cost associated with migrating. Arrival in a host country does not mean that an émigré’s relationship with their homeland is over. Migrant networks are an engine of global economic integration—expatriates help expand trade and investment flows, they transmit skills and knowledge back to their homelands, and they remit financial and human capital. Aware of the value of their external populations, home countries have developed a range of policies that enable them to “harness” their diasporas.

• immigration
• international political economy
• factor flows
• gravity models

Introduction

The steady growth of international labor migration is an important, yet underappreciated, aspect of globalization. 1 In 1970 , just 78 million people, or about 2.1% of the global population, lived outside their country of birth. By 1990 , that number had nearly doubled to more than 150 million people, or about 2.8% of the global population (United Nations Population Division, 2012 ). Despite the growth of populist political parties and restrictionist movements in key destination countries, the growth in global migration shows no signs of slowing down, with nearly 250 million people living outside their country of birth as of 2015 . While 34% of all global migrants live in industrialized countries (with the United States and Germany leading the way), 38% of all global migration occurs between developing countries (World Bank, 2016 ).

Identifying the causes and consequences of international labor migration is essential to our broader understanding of globalization. Scholars across diverse academic fields, including economics, political science, sociology, law, and demography, have attempted to explain why individuals voluntarily leave their homelands. The dominant thread in the labor migration literature is influenced by microeconomics, which posits that individuals contemplating migration are rational, utility-maximizing actors who carefully weigh the potential costs and benefits of leaving their country of origin (e.g., Borjas, 1989 ; Portes & Böröcz, 1989 ; Grogger & Hanson, 2011 ). The act of migration, from this perspective, is typically conceptualized as an investment from which a migrant expects to receive some benefit, whether it be in the form of increased income, political freedom, or enhanced social ties (Schultz, 1961 ; Sjaastad, 1962 ; Collier & Hoeffler, 2014 ).

In this article we go beyond the treatment of migration as a single decision and conceive of it as a multifaceted process with distinct stages and decision points. We identify factors that are relevant at different stages in the migration process and highlight how and when certain factors interact with others during the migration process. Economic factors such as the wage differential between origin and destination countries, for example, may be the driving factor behind someone’s initial decision to migrate (Borjas, 1989 ). But when choosing a specific destination, economic factors may be conditioned by political or social conditions in that destination (Fitzgerald, Leblang, & Teets, 2014 ). Each stage or decision point has distinguishing features that are important in determining how (potential) migrants respond to the driving forces identified by scholars.

This is certainly not a theoretical innovation; migration has long been conceived of as a multi-step process, and scholars often identify the stage or decision point to which their argument best applies. However, most interdisciplinary syntheses of the literature on international labor migration do not provide a systematic treatment of this defining feature, instead organizing theoretical and empirical contributions by field of study, unit or level of analysis, or theoretical tradition (e.g., Portes & Böröcz, 1989 ; Massey et al., 1993 ; European Asylum Support Office, 2016 ). Such approaches are undoubtedly valuable in their own right. Our decision to organize this discussion by stage allows us to understand this as a process, rather than as a set of discrete events. As a result, we conceptualize international labor migration as three stages or decision points: (a) the decision to migrate or to remain at home, (b) the choice of destination, and (c) the manner by which expatriates re-engage—or choose not to re-engage—with their country of origin once abroad. We also use these decision points to highlight a number of potential new directions for future research in this still-evolving field.

Figure 1. Global migration intentions by educational attainment, 2008–2017.

Should I Stay or Should I Go, Now?

The massive growth in international labor migration in the age of globalization is remarkable, but the fact remains that over 95% of the world’s population never leave their country of origin (United Nations Population Division, 2012 ). Figure 1 shows the percentage of people who expressed an intention to move abroad between 2008 and 2017 by educational attainment, according to data from the Gallup World Poll. Over this time period, it appears that those who were highly educated expressed intent to migrate in greater numbers than those who had less than a college education, although these two groups have converged in recent years. What is most striking, however, is that a vast majority of people, regardless of educational attainment, expressed no desire to move abroad. Even though absolute flows of migrants have grown at a near-exponential rate, relative to their non-migrating counterparts, they remain a small minority. What factors are important in determining who decides to migrate and who decides to remain at home? 2

From Neoclassical Economics to the Mobility Transition

Neoclassical economic models posit that the primary driving factor behind migration is the expected difference in wages (discounted future income streams) between origin and destination countries (Sjaastad, 1962 ; Borjas, 1989 ; Clark, Hatton, & Williamson, 2007 ). All else equal, when the wage gap, minus the costs associated with moving between origin and destination, is high, these models predict large flows of labor migrants. In equilibrium, as more individuals move from origin to destination countries, the wage differential narrows, which in turn leads to zero net migration (Lewis, 1954 ; Harris & Todaro, 1970 ). Traditional models predict a negative monotonic relationship between the wage gap and the number of migrants (e.g., Sjaastad, 1962 ). However, the predictions of neoclassical models are not well supported by the empirical record. Empirical evidence shows that, at least in a cross-section, the relationship between economic development and migration is more akin to an inverted U. For countries with low levels of per capita income, we observe little migration due to a liquidity constraint: at this end of the income distribution, individuals do not have sufficient resources to cover even minor costs associated with moving abroad. Increasing income helps to decrease this constraint, and consequently we observe increased levels of emigration as incomes rise (de Haas, 2007 ). This effect, however, is not monotonic: as countries reach middle-income status, declining wage differentials lead to flattening rates of emigration, and then decreasing rates as countries enter later stages of economic development. 3

Some research explains this curvilinear relationship by focusing on the interaction between emigration incentives and constraints : for example, increased income initially makes migration more affordable (reduces constraints), but also simultaneously reduces the relative economic benefits of migrating as the wage differential narrows (as potential migrants now have the financial capacity to enhance local amenities) (Dao, Docquier, Parsons, & Peri, 2016 ). The theoretical underpinnings of this interaction, however, are not without controversy. Clemens identifies several classes of theory that attempt to explain this curvilinear relationship—a relationship that has been referred to in the literature as the mobility transition (Clemens, 2014 ). These theories include: demographic changes resulting from development that also favor emigration up to a point (Easterlin, 1961 ; Tomaske, 1971 ), the loosening of credit restraints on would-be migrants (Vanderkamp, 1971 ; Hatton & Williamson, 1994 ), a breakdown of information barriers via the building of transnational social networks (Epstein, 2008 ), structural economic changes in the development process that result in worker dislocation (Zelinsky, 1971 ; Massey, 1988 ), the dynamics of economic inequality and relative deprivation (Stark, 1984 ; Stark & Yitzhaki, 1988 ; Stark & Taylor, 1991 ), and changing immigration policies in destination countries toward increasingly wealthy countries (Clemens, 2014 ). While each of these play some role in the mobility transition curve, Dao et al. ( 2016 ) run an empirical horse race between numerous explanations and find that changing skill composition resulting from economic development is the most substantively important driver. Economic development is correlated with an increase in a country’s level of education; an increase in the level of education, in turn, is correlated with increased emigration. However, traditional explanations involving microeconomic drivers such as income, credit constraints, and economic inequality remain important factors (Dao et al., 2016 ). The diversity of explanations offered for the mobility transition curve indicates that while most research agrees the inverted-U relationship is an accurate empirical portrayal of the relationship between development and migration, little theoretical agreement exists on what drives this relationship. Complicating this disagreement is the difficulty of empirically disentangling highly correlated factors such as income, skill composition, and demographic trends in order to identify robust causal relationships.

Political Conditions at the Origin

While there is a scholarly consensus around the mobility transition and the role of economic conditions, emerging research suggests that the political environment in the origin country may also be salient. We do not refer here to forced migration, such as in the case of those who leave because they are fleeing political persecution or violent conflict. Rather, we focus on political conditions in the homeland that influence a potential migrant’s decision to emigrate voluntarily. Interpretations of how, and the extent to which, political conditions in origin countries (independent of economic conditions) influence the decision to migrate have been heavily influenced by Hirschman’s “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” framework (Hirschman, 1970 , 1978 ). Hirschman argues that the opportunity to exit—to exit a firm, an organization, or a country—places pressure on the local authorities; voting with one’s feet forces organizations to reassess their operations.

When applied to the politics of emigration, Hirschman’s framework generates two different hypotheses. On the one hand, politicians may allow, encourage, or force the emigration of groups that oppose the regime as a political safety valve of sorts. This provides the government with a mechanism with which to manage potential political challengers by encouraging their exit. On the other hand, politicians—especially those in autocracies—may actively work to prevent exit because they fear the emigration of economic elites, the highly skilled, and others who have resources vital to the survival of the regime. 4

A small number of studies investigate how local-level, rather than national, political circumstances affect a potential migrant’s calculus. The limited empirical evidence currently available suggests that local conditions are substantively important determinants of the emigration decision. When individuals are highly satisfied with local amenities such as their own standard of living, quality of public services, and overall sense of physical security, they express far less intention to migrate compared with highly dissatisfied individuals (Dustmann & Okatenko, 2014 ). Furthermore, availability of public transport and access to better education facilities decreases the propensity to express an intention to emigrate (Cazzuffi & Modrego, 2018 ). This relationship holds across all levels of wealth and economic development, and there is some evidence that satisfaction with local amenities matters as much as, or even more than, income or wealth (Dustmann & Okatenko, 2014 ).

Political corruption, on both national and local levels, also has substantively important effects on potential migrants, especially those who are highly skilled. Broadly defined as the use of public office for political gain, political corruption operates as both a direct and an indirect factor promoting emigration. 5 Firstly, corruption may have a direct effect on the desire to emigrate in that it can decrease the political and economic power of an individual, leading to a lower standard of living and poorer quality of life in origin countries. If the reduction in life satisfaction resulting from corruption is sufficiently high—either by itself or in combination with other “push” factors—then the exit option becomes more attractive (Cooray & Schneider, 2016 ). Secondly, corruption also operates through indirect channels that influence other push factors. Given the large literature on how political corruption influences a number of development outcomes, it is conceivable that corruption affects the decision-making process of a potential migrant through its negative effect on social spending, education, and public health (Mo, 2001 ; Mauro, 1998 ; Gupta, Davoodi, & Thigonson, 2001 ).

The combination of its direct and indirect impacts means that corruption could be a significant part of a migrant’s decision-making process. At present there is limited work exploring this question, and the research does not yield a consensus. Some scholars argue that political corruption has no substantive effect on total bilateral migration, but that it does encourage migration among the highly skilled (Dimant, Krieger, & Meierrieks, 2013 ). This is the case, the argument goes, because corruption causes the greatest relative harm to the utility of those who have invested in human capital, who migrate to escape the negative effect on their fixed investment. In contrast, others find that a high level of corruption does increase emigration at the aggregate level (Poprawe, 2015 ). More nuanced arguments take into account the intensity of corruption: low to moderate levels of corruption lead to increased emigration of all groups, and especially of the highly skilled. But at high levels of corruption, emigration begins to decrease, indicating that intense corruption can act as a mobility constraint (Cooray & Schneider, 2016 ). All of these existing accounts, however, employ state-level measures of corruption by non-governmental organizations, such as those produced by Transparency International. Scholars have yet to harness micro-level survey data to explore the influence of personal corruption perception on the individual’s decision-making process.

The Land of Hopes and Dreams

Given that an individual has decided to emigrate, the next decision point is to choose a destination country. Advanced industrial democracies, such as those in the OECD, are major migrant-receiving countries, but so are Russia and several Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (World Bank, 2016 ). A country’s constellation of political, economic, and social attributes is crucial to understanding an emigrant’s choice of destination. Potential migrants weigh all of these factors simultaneously when choosing a destination: will the destination allow political rights for the migrant and their children, is access to the labor market possible, and does the destination provide an opportunity for reunification with friends and family? In this section we focus on the non-economic factors that draw migrants to certain countries over others. In addition, we emphasize how skill level adds layers of complexity to a migrant’s calculus.

Political Environment, Both Formal and Informal

As noted earlier, traditional neoclassical models and their extensions place wage differentials and associated economic variables at the heart of a migrant’s choice. Gravity models posit that migrants choose a destination country based on their expected income—which itself is a function of the wage rate and the probability of finding employment in the destination—less the costs associated with moving (Ravenstein, 1885 ; Todaro, 1969 ; Borjas, 1989 ). A rigid focus on economic factors, however, blinds us to the empirical reality that a destination country’s political environment influences what destination a migrant chooses (Borjas, 1989 ). A country’s legal and political rights structure for migrants, as well as its level of tolerance for newcomers, is critical to migrants discriminating between an array of potential destinations. Fitzgerald, Leblang, and Teets ( 2014 ) argue, for example, that states with restrictive citizenship policies and strong radical right anti-immigrant parties will receive fewer migrants, while states with relatively liberal citizenship requirements and weak radical right political movements will receive more migrants. In the rational actor framework, migrants seek countries with hospitable political environments to maximize both their political representation in government and their access to labor market opportunities as a result of citizenship rights and social acceptance (Fitzgerald et al., 2014 ).

Using a broad sample of origin countries and 18 destination countries, they find that relative restrictiveness of citizenship policies and level of domestic support for the radical right are substantively important determinants of global migratory flows. Further, they find that these political variables condition a migrant’s choice of destination: the relative importance of economic factors such as the unemployment rate or the wage differential diminishes as a destination country’s political environment becomes more open for migrants. In other words, when migrants are choosing a destination country, political considerations may trump economic ones—a finding that is an important amendment to the primarily economics-focused calculus of the initial stage of the immigration decision.

However, prior to choosing and entering a destination country, a migrant must also navigate a country’s immigration policy—the regulation of both migrant entry and the rights and status of current migrants. While it is often assumed that a relatively more restrictive immigration policy deters entry, and vice versa, a lack of quantitative data has limited the ability of scholars to confirm this intuition cross-nationally. Money ( 1999 ) emphasizes that the policy output of immigration politics does not necessarily correlate with the outcome of international migrant flows. There are a number of unanswered questions in this field, including: is immigration policy a meaningful determinant of global flows of migration? Do certain kinds of immigration policies matter more than others? How does immigration policy interact with other political and economic factors, such as unemployment and social networks?

Only a handful of studies analyze whether or not immigration policy is a significant determinant of the size and character of migratory flows. Perhaps the most prominent answer to this question is the “gap hypothesis,” which posits that immigration rates continue to increase despite increasingly restrictive immigration policies in advanced countries (Cornelius & Tsuda, 2004 ). Some subsequent work seems to grant support to the gap hypothesis, indicating that immigration policy may not be a relevant factor and that national sovereignty as it relates to dictating migrant inflows has eroded significantly (Sassen, 1996 ; Castles, 2004 ). The gap hypothesis is not without its critics, with other scholars arguing that the existing empirical evidence actually lends it little or no support (Messina, 2007 ).

A more recent body of literature does indicate that immigration policy matters. Brücker and Schröder ( 2011 ), for example, find that immigration policies built to attract highly skilled migrants lead to higher admittance rates. They also show that diffusion processes cause neighboring countries to implement similar policy measures. Ortega and Peri ( 2013 ), in contrast to the gap hypothesis literature, find that restrictive immigration policy indeed reduces migrant inflows. But immigration policy can also have unintended effects on international migration: when entry requirements increase, migrant inflows decrease, but migrant outflows also decrease (Czaika & de Haas, 2016 ). This indicates that restrictive immigration policy may also lead to reduced circular migrant flows and encourage long-term settlement in destination countries.

Disaggregating immigration policy into its different components provides a clearer picture of how immigration policy may matter, and whether certain components matter more than others. Immigration policy is composed of both external and internal regulations. External regulations refer to policies that control migrant entry, such as eligibility requirements for migrants and additional conditions of entry. Internal regulations refer to policies that apply to migrants who have already gained status in the country, such as the security of a migrant’s legal status and the rights they are afforded. Helbling and Leblang ( 2017 ), using a comprehensive data set of bilateral migrant flows and the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) data set, find that, in general, external regulations prove slightly more important in understanding migrant inflows (Helbling, Bjerre, Römer, & Zobel, 2017 ). This indicates that potential migrants focus more on how to cross borders, and less on the security of their status and rights once they settle. They do find, however, that both external and internal components of immigration are substantively important to international migrant flows.

The effects of policy, however, cannot be understood in isolation from other drivers of migration. Firstly, poor economic conditions and restrictive immigration policy are mutually reinforcing: when the unemployment rate is elevated, restrictive policies are more effective in deterring migrant flows. An increase in policy effectiveness in poor economic conditions suggests that states care more about deterring immigration when the economy is performing poorly. Secondly, a destination country’s restrictive immigration policy is more effective when migrants come from origin countries that have a common colonial heritage. This suggests that cultural similarities and migrant networks help to spread information about the immigration policy environment in the destination country. Social networks prove to be crucial in determining how much migrants know about the immigration policies of destination countries, regardless of other cultural factors such as colonial heritage or common language (Helbling & Leblang, 2017 ). In summary, more recent work supports the idea that immigration policy of destination countries exerts a significant influence on both the size and character of international migration flows. Much work remains to be done in terms of understanding the nuances of specific immigration policy components, the effect of policy change over time, and through what mechanisms immigration policy operates.

Transnational Social Networks

None of this should be taken to suggest that only political and economic considerations matter when a potential migrant contemplates a potential destination; perhaps one of the biggest contributions to the study of bilateral migration is the role played by transnational social networks. Migrating is a risky undertaking, and to minimize that risk, migrants are more likely to move to destinations where they can “readily tap into networks of co-ethnics” (Fitzgerald et al., 2014 , p. 410). Dense networks of co-ethnics not only help provide information about economic opportunities, but also serve as a social safety net which, in turn, helps decrease the risks associated with migration, including, but not limited to, finding housing and integrating into a new community (Massey, 1988 ; Portes & Böröcz, 1989 ; Portes, 1995 ; Massey et al., 1993 ; Faist, 2000 ; Sassen, 1995 ; Light, Bernard, & Kim, 1999 ). Having a transnational network of family members is quite important to destination choice; if a destination country has an immigration policy that emphasizes family reunification, migrants can use their familial connections to gain economically valuable permanent resident or citizenship status more easily than in other countries (Massey et al., 1993 , p. 450; Helbing & Leblang, 2017 ). When the migrant is comparing potential destinations, countries in which that migrant has a strong social network will be heavily favored in a cost–benefit analysis.

Note, however, that even outside of a strict rational actor framework with perfect information, transnational social networks still may be quite salient to destination choice. An interesting alternative hypothesis for the patterns we observe draws on theories from financial market behavior which focus on herding. Migrants choosing a destination observe the decisions of their co-ethnics who previously migrated and assume that those decisions were based on a relevant set of information, such as job opportunities or social tolerance of migrants. New migrants then choose the same destination as their co-ethnics not based on actual exchanges of valuable information, but based solely on the assumption that previous migration decisions were based on rational calculation (Epstein & Gang, 2006 ; Epstein, 2008 ). This is a classic example of herding, and the existing empirical evidence on the importance of transnational social networks cannot invalidate this alternative hypothesis. One could also explain social network effects through the lens of cumulative causation or feedback loops: the initial existence of connections in destination countries makes the act of migration less risky and attracts additional co-ethnics. This further expands migrant networks in a destination, further decreasing risk for future waves of migrants, and so on (Massey, 1990 ; Fussel & Massey, 2004 ; Fussel, 2010 ).

No matter the pathway by which social networks operate, the empirical evidence indicates that they are one of the most important determinants of destination choice. Potential migrants from Mexico, for example, who are able to tap into existing networks in the United States face lower direct, opportunity, and psychological costs of international migration (Massey & Garcia España, 1987 ). This same relationship holds in the European context; a study of Bulgarian and Italian migrants indicates that those with “social capital” in a destination community are more likely to migrate and to choose that particular destination (Haug, 2008 ). Studies that are more broadly cross-national in nature also confirm the social network hypothesis across a range of contexts and time periods (e.g., Clark et al., 2007 ; Hatton & Williamson, 2011 ; Fitzgerald et al., 2014 ).

Despite the importance of social networks, it is, again, important to qualify their role in framing the choice of destinations. It seems that the existence of co-ethnics in destination countries most strongly influences emigration when they are relatively few in number. Clark et al. ( 2007 ), in their study of migration to the United States, find that the “friends and relatives effect” falls to zero once the migrant stock in the United States reaches 8.3% of the source-country population. In addition, social networks alone cannot explain destination choice because their explanatory power is context-dependent. For instance, restrictive immigration policies limiting legal migration channels and family reunification may dampen the effectiveness of networks (Böcker, 1994 ; Collyer, 2006 ). Social networks are not an independent force, but also interact with economic and political realities to produce the global migration patterns we observe.

The Lens of Skill

For ease of presentation, we have up to now treated migrants as a relatively homogeneous group that faces similar push and pull factors throughout the decision-making process. Of course, not all migrants experience the same economic, political, and social incentives in the same way at each stage of the decision-making process. Perhaps the most salient differentiating feature of migrants is skill or education level. Generally, one can discuss a spectrum of skill and education level for current migrants, from relatively less educated (having attained a high school degree or less) to relatively more educated (having attained a college or post-graduate degree). The factors presented here that influence destination choice interact with a migrant’s skill level to produce differing destination choice patterns.

A migrant’s level of education, or human capital, often serves as a filter for the political treatment he or she anticipates in a particular destination country. For instance, the American public has a favorable view of highly educated migrants who hold higher-status jobs, while simultaneously having an opposite view of migrants who have less job training and do not hold a college degree (Hainmueller & Hiscox, 2010 ; Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2015 ). Indeed, the political discourse surrounding migration often emphasizes skill level and education as markers of migrants who “should be” admitted, across both countries and the ideological spectrum. 6 While political tolerance may be a condition of entry for migrants in the aggregate, the relatively privileged status of highly educated and skilled migrants in most destination countries may mean that this condition is not as salient.

While it is still an open question to what extent immigration policy influences international migration, it is clear that not all migrants face evenly applied migration restrictions. Most attractive destination countries have policies that explicitly favor highly skilled migrants, since these individuals often fill labor shortages in advanced industries such as high technology and applied science. Countries such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand all employ so-called “points-based” immigration systems in which those with advanced degrees and needed skills are institutionally favored for legal entry (Papademetriou & Sumption, 2011 ). Meanwhile, the United States maintains the H-1B visa program, which is restricted by educational attainment and can only be used to fill jobs in which no native talent is available (USCIS). Even if destination countries decide to adopt more restrictive immigration policies, the move toward restriction has typically been focused on low-skilled migrants (Peters, 2017 ). In other words, even if immigration policy worldwide becomes more restrictive, this will almost certainly not occur at the expense of highly skilled migrants and will not prevent them choosing their most preferred destination.

Bring It on Home to Me

This article began by asserting that international labor migration is an important piece of globalization, as significant as cross-border flows of capital, goods, and services. This section argues that migrant flows enhance flows of capital and commodities. Uniquely modern conditions such as advanced telecommunications, affordable and efficient international travel, and the liberalization of financial flows mean that diasporas—populations of migrants living outside their countries of origin—and home countries often re-engage with each other (Vertovec, 2004 ; Waldinger, 2008 ). This section reviews some of the newest and most thought-provoking research on international labor migration, research that explores diaspora re-engagement and how that re-engagement alters international flows of income, portfolio and foreign direct investment (FDI), trade, and migratory flows themselves.

Remittances

As previously argued, migration is often driven by the prospect of higher wages. Rational, utility-maximizing migrants incur the cost of migration in order to earn increased income that they could not earn at home. But when migrants obtain higher wages, this additional increment to income is not always designated for individual consumption. Often, migrants use their new income to send remittances, direct transfers of money from one individual to another across national borders. Once a marginal financial flow, in 2015 remittances totaled $431 billion, far outpacing foreign aid ($135 billion) and nearly passing private debt and portfolio equity ($443 billion). More than 70% of total global remittances flow into developing countries (World Bank, 2016 ). In comparison with other financial flows such as portfolio investment and FDI, remittances are more impervious to economic crises, suggesting that they may be a countercyclical force to global downturns (Leblang, 2017 ).

Remittances represent one of the most common ways in which migrants re-engage with their homeland and alter both global income flows and distribution. Why do migrants surrender large portions of their new income, supposedly the very reason they migrated in the first place, to their families back home? New economics of labor migration (NELM) theory argues that immigration itself is motivated by a family’s need or demand for remittances—that remittances are an integral part of a family’s strategy for diversifying household financial risk (Stark & Bloom, 1985 ). Remittances “are a manifestation of informal contractual agreements between migrants and the households from which they move,” indicating that remitting is not an individual-level or purely altruistic action but rather occurs in a larger social context, that of one’s immediate or extended family (European Asylum Support Office, 2016 , p. 15).

The impact of migrant remittances on countries of origin is multifaceted yet somewhat ambiguous. Most scholarly work focuses on whether remittances positively or negatively influence existing economic conditions. A number of studies find that remittances modestly reduce poverty levels in developing countries (Adams & Page, 2005 ; Yang & Martinez, 2006 ; Acosta, Calderon, Fajnzybler, & Lopez, 2008 ; Lokshin, Bontch-Osmolovski, & Glinskaya, 2010 ). On other measures of economic well-being, such as growth, inequality, and health, the literature is quite mixed and no definitive conclusions can be drawn. For instance, some studies find that remittances encourage investment in human capital (Yang, 2008 ; Adams & Cuecuecha, 2010 ), while others find no such effect and suggest that families typically spend remittances on non-productive consumption goods (Chami, Fullenkamp, & Jahjah, 2003 ). Here we can only scratch the surface of the empirical work on remittances and economic outcomes. 7

Some of the most recent research in the field argues that remittances have a distinct political dimension, affecting regime support in developing countries and altering the conditions in which elections are held. Ahmed ( 2012 ), grouping remittances with foreign aid, argues that increased remittances allow autocratic governments to extend their tenure in office. These governments can strategically channel unearned government and household income to finance political patronage networks, which leads to a reduced likelihood of autocratic turnover, regime collapse, and mass protests against the regime. More recent research posits nearly the exact opposite: remittances are linked to a greater likelihood of democratization under autocratic regimes. Escriba-Folch, Meseguer, and Wright ( 2015 ) argue that since remittances directly increase household incomes, they reduce voter reliance on political patronage networks, undermining a key tool of autocratic stability.

Remittances may also play an important role in countries with democratic institutions, yet more research is needed to fully understand the conditions under which they matter and their substantive impact. Particularly, remittances may alter the dynamics of an election as an additional and external financial flow. There is evidence of political remittance cycles : the value of remittances spikes in the run-up to elections in developing countries. The total value of remittances to the average developing country increases by 6.6% during election years, and by 12% in elections in which no incumbent or named successor is running (O’Mahony, 2012 ). The effect is even larger in the poorest of developing countries. Finer-grained tests of this hypothesis provide additional support: using monthly and quarterly data confirms the existence of political remittance cycles, as well as using subnational rather than cross-national data (Nyblade & O’Mahony, 2014 ). However, these studies do not reveal why remittances spike, or what the effects of that spike are on electoral outcomes such as vote share, campaign financing, and political strategy.

Remittances represent a massive international financial flow that warrants more scholarly attention. While there are numerous studies on the relationship between remittances and key economic indicators, there remains much room for further work on their relationship to political outcomes in developing countries. Do remittances hasten the downfall of autocratic regimes, or do they contribute to autocratic stability? In democratic contexts, do remittances substantively influence electoral outcomes, and if so, which outcomes and how? Finally, do remittances prevent even more migration because they allow one “breadwinner from abroad” to provide for the household that remains in the homeland? While data limitations are formidable, these questions are important to the study of both international and comparative political economy.

Bilateral Trade

The argument that migrant or co-ethnic networks play an important role in international economic exchange is not novel. Greif ( 1989 , 1993 ) illustrates the role that the Maghrebi traders of the 11th century played in providing informal institutional guarantees that facilitated trade. This is but a single example. Cowen’s historical survey identifies not only the Phoenicians but also the “Spanish Jews [who] were indispensable for international commerce in the Middle Ages. The Armenians controlled the overland route between the Orient and Europe as late as the nineteenth century . Lebanese Christians developed trade between the various parts of the Ottoman empire” (Cowen, 1997 , p. 170). Rauch and Trindade ( 2002 ) provide robust empirical evidence linking the Chinese diaspora to patterns of imports and exports with their home country.

A variety of case studies document the importance of migrant networks in helping overcome problems of information asymmetries. In his study of Indian expatriates residing in the United States, Kapur ( 2014 ) documents how that community provides U.S. investors with a signal of the work ethic, labor quality, and business culture that exists in India. Likewise, Weidenbaum and Hughes ( 1996 ) chronicle the Bamboo Network—the linkages between ethnic Chinese living outside mainland China and their homeland—and how these linkages provide superior access to information and opportunities for investment.

Connections between migrant communities across countries affect cross-national investment even when these connections do not provide information about investment opportunities. In his work on the Maghrebi traders of the 11th century , Greif argues that this trading network was effective because it was able to credibly threaten collective punishment by all merchants if even one of them defected (Greif, 1989 , 1993 ). Grief shows that this co-ethnic network was able to share information regarding the past actions of actors (they could communicate a reputation)—something that was essential for the efficient functioning of markets in the absence of formal legal rules. Weidenbaum and Hughes reach a similar conclusion about the effectiveness of the Bamboo Network, remarking that “if a business owner violates an agreement, he is blacklisted. This is far worse than being sued, because the entire Chinese networks will refrain from doing business with the guilty party” (Hughes, 1996 , p. 51).

Migrants not only alter the flow of income by remitting to their countries of origin, but also influence patterns of international portfolio investment and FDI. Most existing literature on international capital allocation emphasizes monadic factors such as the importance of credible commitments and state institutional quality, failing to address explicitly dyadic phenomena that may also drive investment. Diaspora networks, in particular, facilitate cross-border investment in a number of ways. They foster a higher degree of familiarity between home and host countries, leading to a greater preference for investment in specific countries. Diaspora networks can also decrease information asymmetries in highly uncertain international capital markets in two ways. Firstly, they can provide investors with salient information about their homeland, such as consumer tastes, that can influence investment decision-making. Secondly, they can share knowledge about investment opportunities, regulation and procedures, and customs that decrease transaction costs associated with cross-border investment (Leblang, 2010 ). This place of importance for migrants suggests to the broader international political economy literature the importance of non-institutional mechanisms for channeling economic activity.

Although the hypothesized link between migrants and international investment has only recently been identified, the quantitative evidence available supports that hypothesis. Leblang ( 2010 ), using dyadic cross-sectional data, finds that diaspora networks “have both a substantively significant effect and a statistically significant effect on cross-border investment,” including international portfolio investment and FDI (p. 584). The effect of bilateral migratory flows correlates positively with the degree of information asymmetry: when informational imperfections are more pervasive in a dyad, migrants (especially the highly skilled) play a disproportionately large role in international capital allocation (Kugler, Levinthal, & Rapoport, 2017 ). Other quantitative studies find substantively similar results for FDI alone (e.g., Javorcik, Özden, Spatareanu, & Neagu, 2011 ; Aubry, Rapoport, & Reshef, 2016 ).

Many questions still remain unanswered. Firstly, does the effect of migrants on investment follow the waves of the global economy, or is it countercyclical as remittances have been shown to be? Secondly, how does this additional investment, facilitated by migrants, affect socioeconomic outcomes such as inequality, poverty, and economic development (Leblang, 2010 )? Does the participation of migrants lead to more successful FDI projects in developing countries because of their ability to break down information barriers? Within portfolio investment, do migrants lead to a preference for certain asset classes over others, and if so, what are the effects on bilateral and international capital markets? These are just a few directions in an area ripe for additional research.

Return Migration and Dual Citizenship

Besides financial flows, migrants themselves directly contribute to global flows of capital by returning to their countries of origin in large numbers. This phenomenon of return migration—or circular migration—can come in a few temporal forms, including long-term migration followed by a permanent return to a country of origin, or repeat migration in which a migrant regularly moves between destination and origin countries (Dumont & Spielvogel, 2008 ). While comparable data on return migration is scarce, some reports suggest that 20% to 50% of all immigrants leave their destination country within five years after their arrival (e.g., Borjas & Bratsberg, 1996 ; Aydemir & Robinson, 2008 ; Bratsberg, Raaum, & Sørlie, 2007 ; Dustmann & Weiss, 2007 ). An independent theoretical and empirical account of return migration does not yet exist in the literature and is beyond the scope of this paper. But in the rational actor framework, motivations to return home include a failure to realize the expected benefits of migration, changing preferences toward a migrant’s home country, achievement of a savings or other economic goal, or the opening of additional employment opportunities back home due to newly acquired experience or greater levels of economic development (Dumont & Spielvogel, 2008 ).

While most migration literature treats the country of origin as a passive actor that only provides the conditions for migration, new literature on return migration gives home country policies pride of place. Origin countries can craft policies that encourage diaspora re-engagement, incentivizing individuals to return home. Dual citizenship, for example, is an extension of extraterritorial rights, allowing migrants to retain full legal status in their home country. Dual citizenship “decreases the transaction costs associated with entering a host country’s labor market and makes it easier for migrants to return home” (Leblang, 2017 , p. 77). This leads migrants to invest their financial resources in the form of remittances back home as well as their valuable human capital. When states provide such extraterritorial rights, expatriates are 10% more likely to remit and 3% more likely to return home. Dual citizenship is also associated with a doubling of the dollar amount of remittances received by a home country (Leblang, 2017 ). These striking results suggest that in addition to the power of migrants to affect cross-border flows of money and people, countries of origin can also play a significant role.

Conclusion and Future Directions

This brief article has attempted to synthesize a broad range of literature from political science, economics, sociology, migration studies, and more to construct an account of international labor migration. To do so, the migratory process was broken down into distinct stages and decision points, focusing particularly on the decision to migrate, destination choice, and the re-engagement of migrants with their homeland. In doing so, the article also discussed the interlinkages of international migration with other fields of study in international political economy, including cross-border financial flows, trade, and investment. Through a multiplicity of approaches, we have gained a greater understanding of why people decide to move, why they decide to move to one country over another, and how and why they engage with the global economy and their homeland. Despite this intellectual progress, there remain many paths for future research at each stage of the migratory process; we highlight just a few of them here.

We know that income differentials, social ties, and local political conditions are important variables influencing the migration process. Yet the question remains: why do a small but growing number of people choose to leave while the overwhelming majority of people remain in their country of birth? Here, individual- or family-level subjective characteristics may be significant. There are a handful of observational studies that explore the relationship between subjective well-being or life satisfaction and the intention to migrate, with the nascent consensus being that life dissatisfaction increases the intention to migrate (Cai, Esipova, Oppenheimer, & Feng, 2014 ; Otrachshenko & Popova, 2014 ; Nikolova & Graham, 2015 ). But more research on intrinsic or subjective measures is needed to understand (a) their independent importance more fully and (b) how they interact with objective economic, political, and social factors. For instance, do those who are more optimistic migrate in larger numbers? Do minority individuals who feel they live in an environment in which diversity is not accepted feel a greater urge to leave home? Synthesizing these types of subjective variables and perceptions with the more prominent gravity-style models could result in a more complete picture of the international migration process.

For the “typical” migrant, one who is relatively less educated than the population in the chosen destination and does not have specialized skills, social networks are key to minimizing the risk of migrating and quickly tapping into economic opportunities in destination countries. Does this remain true for those who are highly educated? Although little empirical research exists on the topic, greater human capital and often-accompanying financial resources may operate as a substitute for the advantages offered by social networks, such as housing, overcoming linguistic barriers, and finding gainful employment. This would indicate that the “friends and family effect” is not as influential for this subset of migrants. Economic considerations, such as which destination offers the largest relative wage differential, or political considerations, such as the ease of quickly acquiring full citizenship rights, may matter more for the highly skilled. Neoclassical economic models of migration may best capture the behavior of migrants who hold human capital and who have the financial resources to independently migrate in a way that maximizes income or utility more broadly.

Since we have focused on international migration as a series of discrete decision points in this article, we have perhaps underemphasized the complexity of the physical migration process. In reality, migrants often do not pick a country and travel directly there, but travel through (perhaps several) countries of transit such as Mexico, Morocco, or Turkey along the way (Angel Castillo, 2006 ; Natter, 2013 ; Icduygu, 2005 ). There is little existing theoretical work to understand the role of transit countries in the migratory process, with much of it focusing on the potential for cooperation between destination and transit countries in managing primarily illegal immigration (Kahana & Lecker, 2005 ; Djajic & Michael, 2014 ; Djajic & Michael, 2016 ). Another related strand of the literature focuses on how wealthy destination countries are “externalizing” their immigration policy, encompassing a broader part of the migratory process than simply crossing a physically demarcated border (Duvell, 2012 ; Menjivar, 2014 ). But many questions remain, such as the following: how do we understand those who desire to enter, say, the United States, but instead relocate permanently to Mexico along the way? How do countries of transit handle the pressure of transit migrants, and how does this affect economic and political outcomes in these countries?

Finally, the focus of nearly all literature on international migration (and this article as a byproduct) implicitly views advanced economies as the only prominent destinations. However, this belies the fact that 38% of all migration stays within the “Global South” (World Bank, 2016 ). While there is certainly some literature on this phenomenon (see Ratha & Shaw, 2007 ; Gindling, 2009 ; Hujo & Piper, 2007 ), international political economy scholars have yet to sufficiently tackle this topic. The overarching research question here is: do the same push and pull factors that influence the decision to migrate and destination choice apply to those who migrate within the Global South? Do we need to construct new theories of international migration with less emphasis on factors such as wage differentials and political tolerance, or are these sufficient to understand this facet of the phenomenon? If we fail to answer these questions, we may miss explaining a significant proportion of international migration with its own consequences and policy implications.

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1. Our use of the term international labor migration follows academic and legal conventions; we use the term migration to refer to the voluntary movement of people across national borders, either in a temporary or permanent fashion. This excludes any discussion of refugees, asylum seekers, or any other groups that are forced to migrate.

2. We do not have space in this article to delve into the theoretical and empirical work unpacking the effect of demographic characteristics—age, gender, marital status, household size, and so forth on the migration decision and on subsequent flows of migrants. For comprehensive reviews, see Lichter ( 1983 ), Morrison and Lichter ( 1988 ); United Nations Population Division ( 2013 ); and Zaiceva and Zimmerman ( 2014 ).

3. Zelinsky ( 1971 ) originally identified this relationship and termed it mobility transition curve . A wealth of empirical work supports Zelinsky’s descriptive theory in a number of contexts (see Akerman, 1976 ; Gould, 1979 ; Hatton & Williamson, 1994 ; and Dao et al., 2016 ).

4. For a review of the arguments as well as some empirical tests, see Miller and Peters ( 2018 ) and Docquier, Lodigiani, Rapoport, and Schiff ( 2018 ).

5. Transparency International. “What is corruption?”

6. For example, former United Kingdom Independence Party leader Nigel Farage has called for the United Kingdom to adopt an immigration system that only allows in highly skilled migrants (“UKIP launches immigration policy”). In 2014, US President Barack Obama emphasized that he wanted to attract international students to American universities and that they “create jobs, businesses, and industries right here in America” (USA Today: “Full text: Obama’s immigration speech”). A key issue in Germany’s 2018 government formation was the creation of skill-based migration laws (Severin & Martin, 2018 ).

7. For a more comprehensive review, see Rapoport and Docquier ( 2006 ); and Adams ( 2011 ).

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Article Contents

1. introduction, 2. a (reconstructed) legal insitutionalist view of labour markets, 3. migration and british labour markets from 1945 to the present, 4. conclusion.

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Determining the Impact of Migration on Labour Markets: The Mediating Role of Legal Institutions

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Manoj Dias-Abey, Determining the Impact of Migration on Labour Markets: The Mediating Role of Legal Institutions, Industrial Law Journal , Volume 50, Issue 4, December 2021, Pages 532–557, https://doi.org/10.1093/indlaw/dwab030

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Critics of migration often claim that migrant workers displace local workers from jobs and apply downward pressure on wages. This article begins from the premise that it is impossible to understand the impact of migrant workers on labour markets without considering the functioning of law. Drawing on a reconstructed version of legal institutionalism, one that attends to the structuring influences of capitalist political economy and racism, this article considers the mediating role played by labour market institutions, such as collective bargaining and the contract of employment. An analysis of the historiography of migration to the UK since 1945 shows that labour market institutions have played a key role in influencing the inflow of migrant workers as well as the method of their incorporation into the labour market. In turn, migrant workers have intensified dynamics in the labour market that legal institutions have helped create, such as labour market segmentation. Migrant workers have also impacted the legal institutions themselves, either by being crucial actors in the creation of new legal institutions or by shaping the operation of existing ones.

Those who argue for reduced migration often do so on the basis of its assumed negative effects on the labour market. These minatory critics regularly claim that migration displaces local workers from jobs and drives down their wages. 1 Mainstream economists have tried to intervene in these discussions by analysing labour market data to determine the aggregate effects of migration on employment and unemployment rates and the wages of local workers. While acknowledging that the precise employment outcomes of migration will depend on factors such as domestic economic conditions and the skill level of migrants, most studies have found that migration has very little impact on employment outcomes, and a negligible impact on wages, although it is slightly more pronounced among ‘low-skilled’ workers. 2 Invariably, these studies are constructed as small case studies in which economists compare labour market data from geographical areas of high and low migration (‘spatial correlation’), or across skill groups that have experienced more or less competition from migrants (‘skill-cell correlation’), and then statistically parse out the effects of other factors. 3 Individual case studies sometimes provide mixed results since they are beset by definitional issues, limited by the availability of data and plagued by methodological disagreements. However, large-scale literature reviews can provide a fairly reliable picture because they iron out wrinkles that are inherent in small case studies. The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), set up by the Labour government in 2007 to provide ‘transparent, independent and evidence-based advice to the government on migration issues’, has been asked to review the available economic evidence of migration on labour markets on three separate occasions. 4 MAC has concluded in 2012, 2014 and 2018 that the impact of migration on the labour market is small to non-existent. 5 What explains the findings of these surveys which confound simple economic logic about demand and supply? 6 Economists suggest that in the short term, whether migrants have a negative impact on jobs and wages depends on whether they have skills that substitute or complement those of existing workers. 7 In the longer term, economists point out that migrants add not only to labour supply, but also to labour demand. 8

While these studies provide a valuable perspective, labour lawyers should exercise some caution about simply accepting what mainstream economists tell about the relationships between migration and labour markets. For a start, these economic studies are based on assumptions about a prevailing state of equilibrium in labour markets, which is initially disturbed by migration but then eventually restored. Heterodox economists have long disputed that labour markets operate in this manner, instead emphasising their character as social institutions. Second, economists aim to predict the effects of migration by isolating the impact of migration from other factors using statistical tools such as regression analysis. However, these other factors, rather than clouding the issue, remain highly relevant—for example, how migration interacts with important components of labour markets, such as their labour laws, to produce particular effects, remains a critical question. Third, these studies treat migration as some sort of exogenous shock that needs to be analysed separately from the operation of labour markets themselves. In reality, migrants come looking for work in response to local labour market conditions. This means that migration is at the same time a factor that needs to be explained and also an explanatory factor in its own right. Fourth, economic studies provide only a snapshot on how migration has affected a specific splice of the labour market, while literature reviews provide an aggregate picture of the state of knowledge. What is urgently needed is an analysis of how specific labour markets affect migration, as well as an explanation of how migration impacts upon these labour markets.

Taking as an example the evolution of the British labour market in the period 1945 to the present, this article attempts to make visible the mechanisms by which migration and labour markets have interacted. I draw on a relatively new and inchoate theoretical framework, called legal institutionalism, to provide the theoretical scaffolding for this inquiry. 9 In the view of legal institutionalists, market dynamics are best studied by analysing the evolution of labour market institutions, such as the contract of employment and collective bargaining. Legal institutions are systems of rules inherited from the social environment and which shape the way that market actors behave. 10 In modern capitalist economies, legal institutions are made up primarily of legal norms supported by state-mandated enforcement apparatuses, but legal institutions also include cultural factors that shape the way that legal norms are given effect. If we foreground the role of legal institutions in our analysis of the historiography of migration to the UK since 1945, we can see that labour market institutions have mediated the relationship between migration and labour markets in several important ways. Since legal institutions are responsible for shaping the labour market, the need for migrant workers arises, in part, from their operation. Legal institutions also channel migrants seeking work into particular industries and jobs and determine their terms and conditions of employment. The entry of migrant workers in relatively large numbers—although never quite as high as in the frenzied imagination of migration’s critics—does impact upon labour markets despite economists’ assertations to the contrary. Migration deepens segmentation and can end up influencing the legal institutions themselves. In the following analysis, I use legal institutionalism as a methodological tool to study the relationship between migration and labour markets because it reveals the mediating function of law.

Before I proceed, the terms ‘migrant worker’ and ‘labour market’ require further explanation. Despite being in common usage, the meanings of these terms are not self-evident. Beginning with the concept of a labour market, it is clear that there are two main ways in which the labour market concept is deployed—a general labour market where employers and employees interact with each other and the price of labour is determined by competition (external labour market), and the firm-specific market where the price of labour is determined by administrative rules (internal labour market). 11 This article is mainly interested in the functioning of the external labour market, or more accurately, labour markets since markets can be simultaneously envisioned as sectoral, occupational, local, national and international depending on the actors in question. The term migrant worker —a decidedly contemporary term that I project back to study migration since the middle of the 20th century—is even slipperier. It usually refers to someone who is a national of one country but joins the labour market of another. 12 At the UK national level, a migrant worker has sometimes been defined as someone who is born overseas, while at other times, it is taken to refer to someone who is a national of another country. In either case, migrant workers comprise those who come in search of work but may also include those who enter under other streams—for example, family, study, or as asylum seekers—and eventually join the labour market. In this article, I mainly focus on labour migrants (that is, those who come in search of work), but will occasionally expand my analysis to include other categories of migrants. In some cases, I even include the progeny and descendants of migrants in my analysis because these are the terms in which the racialised debate is sometimes conducted. The inconsistency of meaning, together with the availability of data, make it difficult to accurately measure the number of migrant workers in the labour market at any point in time. While a range of statistical sources can be drawn upon—Long-Term International Migration and International Passenger Surveys, Migrant National Insurance Number Registrations, work permits issued etc.—individually, these sources only gesture at the overall picture.

This article proceeds in three main parts. In Section 2, I provide the key precepts of legal institutionalism and propose two important addendums that are necessary before it can be utilised to study the impacts of migration: situating legal institutions within broader trends in the capitalist political economy, and an account of how racism operates within institutions. Section 3 contains the substantive analysis of how legal institutions have mediated the relationship between migration and labour markets. I provide this history in two chronological periods (1945–80 and 1980–present) for reasons that will soon become clear. The focus of my discussion is how legal institutions have affected the flow and impact of migration, and how migration has in turn impacted upon the labour market and legal institutions. In the concluding section, I briefly summarise my main arguments.

There is nothing natural about describing the contracting of work for pay as a market, although it follows a general pattern in which we tend to think about the economic arena as a series of interlocking markets in which products and inputs are exchanged for money. For critical scholars, the reality of class relations is often concealed by seeing market interactions as underpinned by consensual, contractual relations. Even if we agree on the cautious adoption of the labour market as a unit of analysis, this still raises some questions about how we should conceptualise how markets arise and function. Economists from competing schools of thought hold vastly different views on these questions. According to the neoclassical school, for example, the demand for labour is determined by its marginal productivity and the supply is dependent on marginal utility. 13 Here we are introduced to the ‘methodological individualism’ that characterises the mainstream of economics today, as well as a theory of utility maximisation as the motivating force in human action. Institutional economics provide much better place and time sensitive conceptualisations of markets. One of the key themes of the institutionalists is a rejection of the idea of the utility-maximising economic agent. 14 Instead, for institutionalists, market relationships need to be understood with reference to social structures and discourses. The gravamen of the institutionalist contribution is the idea that institutions —that is, systems of rules inherited from our social environment—shape the way that market participants act. 15 In the act of doing, market participants then reproduce institutions so that they continue to endure in social life. In this view, markets vary considerably across space and time and the best way to study markets is to examine the institutions that underpin them in a society and their transformation over a particular period.

Modern institutionalism has now grown into a complex area of inquiry incorporating rational choice, historical, discursive and organisational institutionalism. 16 In this article, I draw particularly on legal institutionalism, a relatively recent branch of institutionalism. 17 Legal institutionalists emphasise the social rules that undergird markets and are chiefly interested in those rules that are supported by the power and authority of the state. Legal institutionalists do not claim that other social rules, such as those embedded in customary or cultural practices, are immaterial, but simply that they are unlikely to play a comparable role to formal law, which constitutes, shapes and reproduces markets in advanced capitalist societies. For the legal institutionalists, the centrality of law to markets mean that markets have no prior existence to the law. 18 Since markets are underpinned by a range of institutions (eg, money, contract etc.), it is not always simple to identify the relevant legal institutions to study. Following the work of Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson, I take the contract of employment (which includes common law principles as well as statutory regulation that prescribe minimum contracting terms) and collective bargaining as the two key labour market institutions. 19 The final legal institution that plays a major role in my analysis is an institution that helps manage the entry of workers into the labour market: migration law. While Deakin and Wilkinson included the duty to work—which in the modern era finds expression in social security law—as a major legal institution regulating entry to the labour market, given the space constraints of this article, my main focus will be migration law. There are, of course, complex relationships to disentangle between migration law and the duty to work, and their respective roles in regulating entry into labour markets, but this remains a task for another day. 20

Before legal institutionalism can be usefully utilised to study how migration impacts labour markets, two correctives are necessary. It is helpful to think of these correctives as operating on a ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ level, respectively. Turning first to the micro-level corrective, legal institutionalism often expresses a single-minded focus on legal norms as guiding human action at the expense of cultural ones which might shape the way that legal norms are given effect in particular situations. This is evident in the conceptualisation of labour markets advanced by legal institutionalists that tends to overlook how racism functions as a constitutive feature of labour markets. 21 Tracing the operation of racism is not merely an exercise driven by current political vogues, but rather critical to understanding how ‘real’ labour markets operate, especially when the issue of migration is under consideration. How then to account for racism’s role in constituting and structuring labour markets? The starting point in this analysis is to recognise that the relevant category of analysis is racism, not race, since racism produces race. 22 Racism is ideological in nature, and as Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown have outlined, it uses biological and/or somatic characteristics to socially differentiate particular populations. 23 Of course, emphasising the ideological character of racism is not to downplay the deeply material effects of racism. As theorists of race and colonialism often point out, the ideological content of racism is deeply informed by the racial ordering system that developed during the colonial period, although its modern manifestations show constant evidence of mutation. 24 If we marry legal institutionalism with an account of racism as an ideology, we can begin to uncover the causal mechanisms at play. We can think of racism as a miasma that pervades all market institutions, and therefore, influences the way that market participants give effect to legal norms in practice. In turn, by operationalising legal norms in all sorts of racially discriminatory ways, racial ideology is reinscribed in legal institutions and kept alive more broadly in society.

The macro-level corrective seeks to situate the legal institutions more squarely in the functioning of contemporary capitalism. Given their methodological commitment to understanding capitalism in a situated way, legal institutionalists have correctly tended to avoid developing universal, teleological principles to describe the progression of markets. Instead, legal institutionalists have tended to draw on various theoretical tools from the biological world to explain the evolution of legal institutions in a gradual, contingent and path-dependent way. 25 However, as a prominent institutionalist has recently argued, institutionalism needs to operate alongside theory of capitalist development. 26 I situate labour market institutions more firmly within ‘accumulation regimes’, which the French régulation school of economics traditionally describe as ‘ social and economic patterns that enable [capital] accumulation to occur in the long term between two structural crises ’. 27 According to these writers, configurations of social relations such as institutions have a direct relationship to the economy by helping to give effect and stabilise particular accumulation regimes. This does not mean that legal institutions simply reflect the needs of capital; they express their own histories, logics, technologies and techniques. However, accumulation regimes have a structuring function on legal institutions, particularly in the labour market. This article analyses migration to the UK from 1945 to 2020, a period that encompasses two different accumulation regimes—the period roughly from 1945 to 1980 is characterised by a ‘Fordist’ accumulation regime and the period from 1980 to present is characterised by a ‘post-Fordist’ accumulation regime. 28

The impacts of migration on labour markets are deep and variegated, and there are many ways to set out the narrative of British regulation from 1945. The periodisation that I adopt below is chronological, delineated by major shifts in British political economy and legal change. Roughly speaking, the first period (1945–80) was when migration to the UK was high in response to labour market gaps created by a high-growth economy, low unemployment and the needs of British industry. This period ends with growing legal restrictions on migration due to a racist backlash at home. The second period (1980–present) begins at the point when Britain started to experiment with a series of radical reforms to address major economic problems that had developed in the preceding decades. While the first two decades of this period were marked by relatively low levels of migration, the inflow of people began to climb from 2000 onwards in response to changes in the labour market precipitated by the Thatcherite reforms and continued under New Labour. This period ends with the passage of a new immigration system designed to restrict ‘unskilled’ immigration.

Writing about Britain’s post-war economic performance, one commentator observed that ‘for a quarter of a century or so after the Second World War the British people enjoyed full employment, no major recessions and the fastest rate of economic growth ever experienced on a sustained basis, as well as its most egalitarian distribution’. 29 These outcomes were the result of what is sometimes called a ‘Fordist’ regime of accumulation, characterised by combination of industrial production through vertically integrated firms, mass consumption, class compromise and the Keynesian welfare state. 30 The government recognised that the longevity of these developments required that sufficient workers could be found to fulfil the requirement for production. 31 To achieve this end, the government used a variety of methods to recruit workers from Europe, including resettling Polish soldiers who had served under British command and recruiting displaced persons through contract labour programmes such as ‘Balt Cygnet’ and ‘Westward Ho!’. By 1950, the population of ‘aliens’ (those not from the British mainland or its overseas territories) almost doubled to 430,000 from 239,000 in 1939. 32 In addition, without direct government intervention, a steady stream of migrants continued to arrive from Ireland in the period following the war—a source of reserve labour in England since the industrial revolution—and by 1970, this group formed the largest minority in Britain (approximately one million). 33

Another large pool of migrant labour arrived from the former Commonwealth countries in the Indian sub-continent and Caribbean. The change that facilitated their arrival had little to do with deliberate government action. In the post-war period, the UK was grappling with its post-imperial future. Keen to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of the British Empire, the Labour government passed the British Nationality Act 1948 , which converted the status of all those who had formerly been subjects into ‘Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies’. These citizens, whether born in the UK or overseas in a British colony, had the right to enter and reside in the UK and enjoyed all political, civil and social rights upon arrival. The 1948 Act also recognised as mostly equal the citizenship of the newly independent Commonwealth countries (eg, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and older independent states (eg, Canada and Australia). 34 The proximate cause of the 1948 Act was that several of Britain’s former colonies—Canada, Australia and South Africa—were taking legislative steps to craft independent national identities by defining citizenship in ways that would dilute the meaning of British subjecthood. 35 Although never intended as a piece of immigration legislation, the passage of the 1948 Act had the effect of allowing a relatively large influx of immigration from the Indian sub-continent and Caribbean. 36 Between 1948 and 1962, around 500,000 racialised people (referred to as ‘coloured immigrants’ in public discussions at the time) arrived in Britain. 37 While some employers, such as London Transport, British Rail and the National Health Service, worked actively to recruit workers from these regions, some elements of the state worked behind the scenes to hinder this movement rather than promote it. 38

While the government may have created a facilitative legal framework opening the British labour market to migrants, it is important to recognise that this migration was driven primarily by domestic labour market conditions in Britain. Labour shortages were a major concern in the post-war recovery, which the government estimated to be between 600,000 and 1.3 million in 1946. 39 This situation was further exacerbated by the large numbers of Britons leaving the UK for greener pastures in other countries—between 1946 and 1965, over 1.8 million people left the UK, a great proportion financially aided by post-war migration schemes. 40 In their influential study, Stephen Castles and Godula Kosack argued that it was not only the lack of workers that was the driving cause of migration in post-war Western Europe, but also the structure of national labour markets. 41 According to these authors, in circumstances of low unemployment, indigenous workers were able to graduate to better remunerated and stable jobs, leaving gaps in unskilled manual roles that were difficult to fill. During the period from 1945 to 1970, unemployment rates generally remained between 1% and 3%, only moving beyond this range in 1972, and then, only slowly. 42 Offering higher wages for these undesirable jobs was not seen as a viable response because employers feared a decrease in export competitiveness and the government was worried about inflation. 43 Hence, migrant workers provided an ideal solution. In fact, a migrant workforce may have helped contribute to the competitiveness of British industry during this period by keeping a lid on wage inflation, eliminating production bottlenecks, and allowing the implementation of new work processes such as shift work. 44 Lending support to this thesis, it is clear that many of the racialised workers that arrived in the period following the war occupied semi-skilled and unskilled roles in industries such as the textile industry and in foundry works, or worked as cleaners, porters and kitchen hands in the expanding services sectors. 45 Notable features of this work include low pay, shift work, asocial hours, disagreeable working environments and low levels of upward mobility. 46 In the low-paid services sector, migrant workers were joined by female workers, then entering the labour market in increasing numbers. 47

The legal institutions of the labour market at the time facilitated this mode of migrant labour incorporation. Up until 1963, employers could contract with workers with little statutory constraint, and after that with only minimal regulation in the areas of notice of termination, redundancy and equal pay. 48 Since migration was left up to market forces to determine, the arrival of migrant workers closely tracked economic conditions in Britain and employer preferences. 49 The prevalent system of collective bargaining also did nothing to ameliorate this differential access to the labour market and usually exacerbated it. In the post-war period leading up to the 1970s, collective bargaining consisted of a variety of overlapping agreements at the level of industry, company, and plant. 50 Generally speaking, industry-wide agreements between employer association and unions regulated rates of pay (which acted as minima in practice), while relatively informal plant-level agreements made between local shop stewards and managers regulated a whole host of matters such as incentive pay, overtime and work processes. 51 These negotiations took place in the absence of detailed legal regulation, although not entirely without legal support. 52 Due to the fact that racist ideas had a strong hold over the white working class during this period, informal plant-level agreements often disadvantaged racialised workers—for example, it was common for shop stewards to negotiate ‘colour quotas’, rules prioritising racialised workers for redundancy or allow shift work as long as it only affected migrant workers. 53 Even when shop stewards were not directly colluding with management to implement discriminatory arrangements, there was a general lack of awareness or failure to acknowledge the particular circumstances faced by racialised workers. 54 The way in which the two central labour market institutions functioned during this period demonstrates how interaction of cultural and legal norms manifested in discriminatory outcomes. On the contract of employment, employer prejudice determined who was offered work and on what terms. With regards to collective bargaining, racism among employers and union actors had very real effects in terms of excluding migrant workers from good jobs and promotion.

From the 1960s there was a noticeable hardening of public attitudes towards unskilled immigration from the Indian sub-continent and Caribbean. We can locate some of this shift in attitude within changing material conditions. Although far less severe than the economic deterioration that Britain was to experience in the 1970s, the 1960s were characterised by various economic malaises including stagnation, balance of payment issues and a return to mass unemployment. 55 Rising racial tensions, fomented by racist groups and opportunistic politicians, also played their part. 56 The Conservative government, later supported by Labour, responded by progressively passing legislation to restrict immigration from the New Commonwealth. The first piece of legislation, which was passed in 1962, guaranteed entry to those who held a passport issued by a dependency government (which excluded India and Jamaica, which were the source of most of the immigration) or those who could obtain a work voucher from the Ministry of Labour. Work vouchers were offered for those who had pre-arranged employment or skills/occupations considered to be in short supply. The immigration control had an immediate effect, reducing the number of racialised workers from 136,400 in 1961 to 57,046 in 1963. 57 Further restrictions on vouchers were introduced in 1965, and 1968, 1969 and 1971. 58 The 1971 legislation signalled a particularly stark break with the relatively liberal immigration regime of the prior period because it ended the right of Commonwealth citizens to enter the country unless they had a parent or grandparent born in the UK. The 1968 and 1971 legislation were introduced specifically to prevent—as it turned out unsuccessfully—settlement by South Asians who had been expelled from Kenya and Uganda respectively. 59 Work permits for semi-skilled and unskilled jobs were also no longer issued. 60 This signalled a move away from a system of free mobility to a contract labour system, which tied workers’ entry directly to labour market conditions.

One further development from this period ought to be mentioned. The 1970s also saw an increase in labour organising among racialised workers, particularly among female migrant workers. 61 The most prominent example was the 1976 strike at the Grunwick photo processing plant led by a group of determined South Asian women, which galvanised national support from workers and unions. 62 However, not all of the activism by migrant workers in this period fitted the general mould of action that we would usually associate with labour politics. There was also a surge in activism in the community, including among second-generation migrants. 63 This form of activism was to have important consequences for the way in which access to the labour market was regulated. Mobilisation by community organisations was crucial in the government passing the Race Discrimination Act 1965 and subsequently strengthening the legislative framework to cover discrimination in the private sphere (employment, housing and service provision). 64 In this instance, grassroots pressure coincided with the Labour Government’s stratagem to present racial equality legislation as the quid pro quo of immigration restriction. 65 Social movement pressure was also a significant factor in extending coverage to ‘indirect discrimination’ in 1976, an innovation introduced by the Sex Discrimination Act’s passage a year earlier. While racial discrimination legislation was to have disappointing results overall, 66 these legislative measures did have some effect in improving labour market access for racialised workers by allowing the norm of racial equality to radiate throughout society. 67 Equally importantly, some of the institutional innovations pioneered by the now-defunct Commission for Racial Equality, for example its strategy of initiating proactive investigations, have continued to influence the operation of the Equality and Human Rights Commission today. 68

B. 1980–Present

Margaret Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister on 4 May 1979 marked the beginning of a new era in Britain. The main elements of the Thatcherite political economy are by now well known. Chief among them was a decisive move towards monetarism in macroeconomic policy-making, 69 massive changes to the operation of the financial sector, 70 and public-sector reform. 71 Another key aspect of the Thatcherite agenda was reforming the labour market to conform with a particular vision of free exchange between employer and worker. Paul Davies and Mark Freedland argue that the government was driven by two related goals: ensuring that the labour market could operate flexibly and reducing the power of trade unions that were seen to impose collective restrictions. 72 The powers of trade unions were attacked by imposing procedural constraints on taking strike action (eg, introducing secret balloting requirements), placing severe restrictions on various forms of activity that enhanced the countervailing power of organised labour (eg, closed shop/union membership agreements, secondary action, picketing) and a retreat from various corporatist arrangements that accorded unions an important role in the nation’s economic policy-making process. These transformations were brought about not only by changes to labour law (reducing the scope of the trade union immunities from common law liability), but also by selective amendments to social welfare and criminal law. 73 Given dispensation by the government and reassured that the large numbers of workers joining the ranks of the unemployed would strengthen their bargaining position, private sector employers were quick to take advantage of the situation. They did so by restructuring their operations and by beating back union efforts to engage in collective bargaining. 74 In 1979, over 80% of the workforce had been covered by a collective agreement, after almost two decades of Conservative rule, that number had dropped to less than half of that figure. 75 These labour law changes marked the advent of employment relations based on ‘flexibility’, work intensification and decline in the standard model of employment, which some have described as a ‘post-Fordist’ regime of accumulation. 76

The impacts of this series of changes were profound, leading to a sudden spike in unemployment, which peaked at 13% in 1982 and remained higher than 6% until 1990. 77 These labour market transformations had an enormous impact on migrant workers, including those who had been born in the UK but were nevertheless racialised as outsiders. Deindustrialisation and privatisation led to the gradual disappearances of internal labour markets where workers could join a firm and hope to advance through seniority. 78 This process was also hastened by firms increasingly outsourcing or contracting out ‘core’ functions, and those employed in these new entities were often drawn from the external labour market. 79 While migrant workers did not generally benefit from the operation of internal labour markets due to their exclusion through plant-level agreements, the erosion of internal markets meant that competition increased in external labour markets that were now separated into a ‘core’ segment characterised by job security and mobility, and a ‘secondary’ segment typified by insecure and contingent work. 80 Competition for jobs in the secondary labour market had always been fierce under conditions of high unemployment, but the addition of workers previously employed in firms that relied upon stable models of employment relations, and those who found themselves newly unemployed, intensified competition. Survey data from the period show that migrant workers were disproportionately represented among the unemployed, which means that some of the competition in secondary labour markets was between different groups of migrant workers. 81

This is the context in which additional migration during the 1980s and 1990s needs to be understood. Migration under free movement from the European Economic Community (and European Union after 1993) did not have much of an effect given the entity’s small membership at that time and the similarity of economic conditions with the UK’s. 82 Accordingly, when the government passed the Immigration Act 1988 to ensure that workers from the EEC did not need permission to enter or remain in the UK, immigration did not increase significantly. One of the early actions of the Thatcher government in the field of immigration was to introduce the British Nationality Act 1981 , which finally sundered the concept of citizenship from the Commonwealth and linked it firmly to the British nation. While the legislation retained a quota for work permits from the Commonwealth, this was restricted to 5,000 per year. 83 Over the course of the decade, the number of work permits granted gradually crept up, and by 1996 there were roughly 20,000 work permits, but a significant portion of these went to workers in professional and managerial roles (approximately 70%). 84 Many of these work permits were granted to citizens of the USA and Japan, which were Britain’s major trading partners outside the European Community at the time. 85 It should be noted that non-labour flows of migration continued to rise during this period—for example, political turmoil in countries such as Sri Lanka and Somalia in the 1990s saw a sharp increase in those seeking asylum—and many of those who were ultimately granted refugee status joined the labour market. 86

The Blair government that assumed office in 1997 was committed to continuing significant parts of the agenda that characterised British political economy under the previous Conservative government. 87 Influenced by ‘Third Way’ thinking that emphasised the competitiveness of enterprises along with the equal opportunity and social inclusion of workers, but also never entirely constrained by this philosophy, the Labour government (self-described as ‘New Labour’) retained significant aspects of labour market regulation. 88 New Labour did make some impact and the broad outlines of the employment and labour law reforms that Labour went on to enact can be found in a 1998 White Paper titled ‘Fairness at Work’. 89 The White Paper promised several new rights for individuals, including a new minimum wage, a shorter qualifying period to bring an unfair dismissal claim, working time regulation and an extension of parental leave entitlements. In the case of working time and parental leave, the government was seeking to implement EU-level obligations. In the area of collective bargaining, Labour left intact the basic architecture of the previous government’s draconian anti-union legislation (ballots before strikes, and prohibition of mass/flying pickets and secondary action) but did introduce a new statutory procedure for ascertaining whether majority employee support existed for collective bargaining within a particular workplace. 90 The intention behind New Labour’s labour market regulation was to facilitate the continuation of the post-Fordist regime of accumulation.

These arrangements deepened labour market segmentation in a number of ways and migration became a solution for many of the problems generated by these developments. Flexible production through outsourcing, for example, increased the number of workers subject to the highly competitive secondary segment of the labour market. Equally, the new employment standards stabilised a set of status-based distinctions (agency work, part-time, fixed term etc.) which operated to stratify and fix into place a variety of distinctions in the labour market. 91 Along with other dynamics such as under-investment in training, increasing use of technology by employers and the general immobility of local labour due to social ties, this generated a need for migrant workers at both the ‘high skilled’ and ‘low skilled’ end of the labour market. 92 During the period of New Labour, employers were able to satisfy this demand through a variety of paths. New Labour’s general attitude towards migration was that it could be managed to deliver positive economic outcomes, which explains its relatively relaxed and open attitude towards labour migration. 93 The main avenue was through EU free movement, which since the accession of the ‘EU-8’ countries in 2004, and Bulgaria and Romania three years later (‘EU-2’ countries), has provided a steady stream of workers into low-skilled occupations in industries such as hospitality, transport & storage, manufacturing and agriculture. 94 Some booming sectors, such as construction, looking to benefit from weaker labour rights in some of the newly acceded states, imported workers under the EU’s posted worker regime. 95 Workers from non-EEA countries could also enter the country via a range of mechanisms including by obtaining a work permit, as Working Holiday Makers, under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme, Sector Based Schemes (2003–2008), or the Highly Skilled Migrants Programme (2002–08). 96 From 2008, a ‘Points-Based System’ (PBS) was introduced to replace a number of the routes of entry for non-EEA migrants. 97 Work permits, and the PBS that superseded it, provided workers for sectors such as IT, finance and education. 98 By the end of the decade, nationals from India, USA, China, Japan and Australia were generally the top users of this route. 99 It is important to note that unlike the migration from the former Commonwealth during the 1945–80, this second significant wave of migration—the overall migrant population nearly doubled between 2005 and 2017, rising from 5.3 million to 9.4 million— 100 occurred during a period of relatively high unemployment (between 2000 and 2016, unemployment stubbornly remained at close to five percent or above). 101 So, rather than labour shortages, the segmented labour markets produced by the Thatcherite reforms and continued by New Labour created the conditions for the entry of migrant workers during this period.

How did labour market institutions channel this new influx of workers into particular industries and jobs? The answer to this question is complicated and requires us to consider the operation of labour market institutions in which racism is an entrenched feature. Many of the highly skilled workers that entered during this period did so under EU free movement or work permits. These workers were motivated to choose particular jobs and remain in them either through high wages/good working conditions, tied visas, or a combination of the two. Time-bound, employer-tied visas mean that workers are less likely to challenge their employer because they fear they will be deported, which can produce servile employment relations in the labour market. 102 In contrast, low-skilled workers entering the UK under EU free movement (primarily from E-8 and EU-2 countries) were guided into particular jobs and kept there through labour market institutions in which racism was an embedded feature. Alana Lentin has pointed out that a new form of ‘xenoracism’, directed against Eastern Europeans, has taken root in Britain, meaning racism that is based on perceived cultural differences rather than simply being colour-coded. 103 Given the challenge of enforcing equality norms contained in anti-discrimination law at the point of recruitment, the contract of employment continued to provide employers with almost complete discretion in deciding which jobs to offer workers as well as their working conditions once employed. There is ample evidence that some employers prefer hiring migrant workers for low-wage jobs because they expect that these workers will have lower expectations around wages, temporal rhythms and the place of work; employers, of course, rarely explicitly stated this view, instead choosing to express their preferences in terms of statements about ‘superior work ethic’. 104

Once migrant workers have begun to work in the secondary segment through the sorting function of legal institutions, they can soon become entrenched within this segment. This is because of two dynamics within legal institutions concerning their operation in relation to migrants. The first dynamic relates to the way in which legal norms can interact to reinforce precarity for migrant workers. Take for example the protection against unfair dismissal, which is the primary means for workers to attain a measure of job security in the labour market. The Employment Rights Act 1996 requires that an employee has served a minimum of 2 years’ continuous service before accruing this right, which for some migrant workers presents a particular difficulty because of the operation of time-limited of visas or their employment in temporary roles with irregular hours. 105 Another example is the way in which the courts can deem contracts ‘illegal’, and therefore unenforceable when it comes to claiming employment rights, in circumstances where workers are ‘illegally’ working under s 34 of the Immigration Act 2016. 106 This population is estimated to be between 800,000 and 1.2 million in the UK; 107 a portion of these workers might have commenced work with the proper authorisation but lost it due to a variety of administrative reasons. The second dynamic relates to the way in which employment rights are enforced in Britain. A panoply of enforcement agencies (HRMC, HSE, GLAA, EAS) that are supposed to uphold employment standards have trouble fulfilling their mandates due to under resourcing, lack of coordination among agencies, and absence of specific strategies to target migrant workers. 108 This means that workers are required to enforce their own individual rights by bringing claims in the Employment Tribunal system, and individual enforcement of rights tends to be especially low among low-wage migrant workers. 109 The near absence collective bargaining in the industries in which migrant workers were employed means that unions, now predisposed to observe anti-racism norms, have not been able to ameliorate some of these effects. The segmentation of the labour market and the employment of migrants in the secondary segment has a self-reinforcing tendency. The gradual deterioration of working conditions leads local workers to eschew these jobs, and employers look to migrant workers as a substitute workforce, developing symbiotic relationships with labour contractors or migrant/ethnic networks to fill these positions. This dynamic is visible in a number of sectors, such as food processing, 110 hospitality 111 and social care. 112

Since the UK’s exit from the European Union, the government has implemented a new immigration system, which represents a radical break from free movement that characterised the previous regime. This system has been in place since 1 January 2021. At the heart of the system is an expansion of the Tier 2-visa route. Applicants must have a job offer by an approved sponsor that pays above the minimum salary level, which is the higher of £25,500 or a stipulated ‘going rate’ (or £20,480 in certain circumstances), a job at least at the intermediate skill level (RFQ3 or above), and English language skills. As Jonathan Portes has recently observed, the new immigration system represents a major liberalisation for non-EU migrants, since about half of all full-time jobs would now qualify someone for a Tier 2 visa. 113 The visa requirements in essence prevent so-called low-skilled migration, although sector-specific alternatives might be rolled out such as the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Pilot programme designed for the agricultural sector. Employers in the secondary segment employing low-wage and precarious workers are likely to be lose out by these changes, and there is already some evidence of this in sectors such as hospitality. 114

The above analysis reveals that legal institutions have played an important mediating role in the relationship between migration and labour markets since 1945, when sustained immigration to the UK began. The specific mediating role has shifted over time. During the Fordist period of accumulation, which saw an influx of migrant workers from the former Commonwealth countries, the legal institutions funnelled workers into semi and unskilled jobs in export-oriented manufacturing and the expanding services sector, ensuring that they remained there by hindering their promotion. Organising by migrants shaped the labour market by creating a legal institution that promoted equality norms. In the post-Fordist period of accumulation, major reforms to labour market institutions created a highly flexible but segmented labour market. The wave of migrants that arrived in the new millennium, particularly from E-8 and E-2 countries, was channelled into jobs at both the upper and lower ends of the labour market. The legal institutions operate to keep migrants initially placed in the secondary sector confined to it. As a corollary, given that the UK has decided to restrict the migration of ‘low-skilled’ and low-wage workers going forward, are we likely to see the predictions of anti-migrant fabulists about rising wages and plentiful jobs come true? It is unlikely. Rather, we can be fairly sure that as long as the legal institutions of the labour market remain unchanged, the dynamics described in this article will remain in place.

This article was presented at an online event organised by the ‘Work on Demand’ team in June 2021 and benefited greatly from the comments received from members of the audience. I also want to thank Bridget Anderson, Ruth Dukes, Paddy Ireland and the two anonymous reviewers who provided very helpful feedback on an earlier draft. All errors of fact and interpretation, of course, remain my own.

These arguments was often raised in the fractious debate leading up to the UK’s vote on membership of the European Union—see, eg, C. Cooper, ‘Boris Johnson Says “Uncontrolled” Immigration from EU Is Driving Down Wages and Putting Pressure on NHS’ The Independent (23 March 2016). https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-says-uncontrolled-immigration-eu-driving-down-wages-and-putting-pressure-nhs-a6948346.html (accessed 15 July 2021).

See, eg, S. Nickell and J. Saleheen, ‘The Impact of Immigration on Occupational Wages: Evidence from Britain’ (London: Bank of England, 2015). Staff Working Paper No. 574. https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/working-paper/2015/the-impact-of-immigration-on-occupational-wages-evidence-from-britain.pdf?la=en&hash=16F94BC8B55F06967E1F36249E90ECE9B597BA9C ; S. Lemos and J. Portes, ‘New Labour? The Impact of Migration from Central and Eastern European Countries on the UK Labour Market’ (Bonn: Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (Institute for the Study of Labor), 2008) Discussion Paper Series IZA DP No. 3756. https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/3756/new-labour-the-impact-of-migration-from-central-and-eastern-european-countries-on-the-uk-labour-market ; C. Dustmann, F. Fabbri and I. Preston, ‘The Impact of Immigration on the British Labour Market’ (2005) 115 Economic Journal F324.

C. Devlin and others, ‘Impacts of Migration on UK Native Employment: An Analytical Review of the Evidence’ (London: Home Office and Department of Businesses Innovation & Skills, 2014) Occasional Paper 19. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/287287/occ109.pdf .

M. Ruhs, ‘“Independent Experts” and Immigration Policies in the UK: Lessons from the Migration Advisory Committee and the Migration Observatory’ in M. Ruhs, K. Tamas and J. Palme (eds), Bridging the Gaps: Linking Research to Public Debates and Policy-Making on Migration and Integration (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019), at 72.

D. Metcalf (Chair), ‘Analysis of the Impacts of Migration’ (London: Migration Advisory Committee, 2012); D. Metcalf (Chair), ‘Migrants in Low-Skilled Work: The Growth of EU and Non-EU Labour in Low-Skilled Jobs and Its Impact on the UK’ (London: Migration Advisory Committee, 2014); A. Manning (Chair), ‘EEA Migration in the UK: Final Report’ (London: Migration Advisory Committee, 2018).

On the left, a crude reading of Marxism arrives at the same position—see, eg, A. Nagle, ‘The Left Case Against Open Borders’ (2018) II American Affairs . https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/11/the-left-case-against-open-borders/ . However, sophisticated and contextual analyses present a more complicated picture: see, eg, C. Czabla, ‘Reading Marx on Migration’ ( Legal Form , 30 July 2018). https://legalform.blog/2018/07/30/reading-marx-on-migration-chris-szabla/ .

M. Ruhs and C. Vargas-Silva, ‘The Labour Market Effects of Immigration’ (The Migration Observatory 2020) Briefing. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/the-labour-market-effects-of-immigration/ (accessed 29 April 2021).

J. Portes, What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Immigration? (London: Sage Publications, 2019), at 29.

See, eg, S. Deakin and F. Wilkinson, The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialization, Employment, and Legal Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); G. M. Hodgson, Conceptualizing Capitalism: Institutions, Evolution, Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); S. Deakin and others, ‘Legal Institutionalism: Capitalism and the Constitutive Role of Law’ (2017) 45 Journal of Comparative Economics 188; K. Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). See Section 2 of this paper for further elaboration.

G. M. Hodgson, ‘What Are Institutions?’ (2006) 40 Journal of Economic Issues 1.

J. Howe, R. Johnstone and R. Mitchell, ‘Constituting and Regulating the Labour Market for Social and Economic Purposes’ in C. Arup and others (eds), Labour Law and Labour Market Regulation (Sydney: Federation Press, 2006).

See, eg, definition of ‘migrant worker’ in International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (adopted 18 December 1990, entered into force 1 July 2003) 2220 UNTS 3.

For a good discussion of the neoclassical theory on the demand for labour and supply of labour, see J. E. King, Labour Economics , 2nd edn (London: MacMillan, 1990), Chs 2 and 3.

See, eg, G. M. Hodgson, The Evolution of Institutional Economics (London: Routledge, 2004).

Hodgson, ‘What Are Institutions?’ (n.10).

J. L. Campbell and O. K. Pedersen, ‘Introduction’, The Rise of Neoliberalism and Institutional Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

See above n.9.

Legal norms and enforcement mechanisms clearly play an important role in the functioning of labour markets, although there are varying conceptualisations of the role that law plays in regulating the exchange of labour power for money. In the neoclassical and Hayekian traditions, which are quick to condemn the market-distorting effects of law, there is still an acknowledgement that certain laws, primarily property and contract, play an important market-facilitative role: see A. Lang, ‘Market Anti-Naturalisms’ in J. Destautels-Stein and C. Tomlins (eds), Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Deakin and Wilkinson (n.9).

While the Duty to Work and migration law will work in tandem to control supply in labour markets, they are also often pitted against each other since migration is said, erroneously, to undermine domestic welfare systems: see, eg, P. Hansen, A Modern Migration Theory: An Alternative Economic Approach to Failed EU Policy (London: Agenda Publishing, 2021).

L. Tilley and R. Shilliam, ‘Raced Markets: An Introduction’ (2018) 23 New Political Economy 534.

On the social construction of race, see, eg, M. Omi and H. Winant, Racial Formation in the United States , 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2015).

R. Miles and M. Brown, Racism , 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). See also A. Sivanandan, ‘Race, Class and the State: The Black Experience in Britain’ 17 Race and Class 347.

S. Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); R. Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2018).

Hodgson sees the process of evolution through the lens of a redeemed social Darwinianism shorn of its racially legitimating applications: G. M. Hodgson, Economics and Evolution: Bringing Life Back into Economics , reprint edition (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996). Deakin and Wilkinson, influenced by systems theory, see legal evolution as only weakly linked with economic transformations: Deakin and Wilkinson (n.9).

W. Streeck, ‘Institutions in History: Bringing Capitalism Back in’ (Cologne: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, 2009). https://www.mpifg.de/pu/mpifg_dp/dp09-8.pdf .

R. Boyer and Y. Saillard, ‘A Summary of Régulation Theory’ in Robert Boyer and Yves Saillard (eds), Régulation Theory: The State of the Art (London: Routledge, 2002). For the text that is often seen as launching this perspective, see M. Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation—The US Experience (London: Verso, 2015).

P. Thompson, ‘Disconnected Capitalism: Or Why Employers Can’t Keep Their Side of the Bargain’ (2003) 17 Work, Employment and Society 359; M. Vidal, ‘Postfordism as a Dysfunctional Accumulation Regime: A Comparative Analysis of the USA, the UK and Germany’ (2013) 27 Work, Employment and Society 451.

R. Middleton, The British Economy Since 1945 (London: MacMillan, 2000), 25. Cf. those who thought that the period following the Second World War was marred by a series of malaises including low rates of growth relative to comparable economies, balance of payment problems, and eclipsed imperial ambitions that acted as a drain on resources, including A. Shonfield, British Economic Policy Since the War (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1958).

See Thompson (n.28); Vidal (n.28).

C. Holmes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration & British Society, 1871–1971 (London: MacMillan, 1988), at 210.

Ibid., at 214.

Ibid., at 216.

For a discussion of the various statuses under the 1948 Act and their relation, see I. S. Patel, We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire (London: Verso, 2021), 56–58.

N. El-Enany, Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), Ch 3.

B. Anderson, Us and Them?: The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

El-Enany (n.35).

G. K. Bhambra and J. Holmwood, ‘Colonialism, Postcolonialism and the Liberal Welfare State’ (2018) 23 N ew Political Economy 574.

Patel (n.34), at 46.

Ibid., at 51.

S. Castles and G. Kosack, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe , 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). While unemployment rates spiked in 1946–47, the Labour Government’s policies directed at achieving full employment succeeded, managing to reduce unemployment to under 2% of the insured labour force from 1948 onwards: K. O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), at 183.

J. Denman and P. McDonald, ‘Unemployment Statistics from 1881 to the Present Day’ (London: Labour Market Statistics Group, Central Statistical Office, 1996) Special Feature Prepared by the Government Statistical Service.

For a good contextual discussion of these concerns, see A. Gamble, Britain in Decline: Economic Policy, Political Strategy, and the British State , 4th edn (London: MacMillan, 1994).

Castles and Kosack (n.41), at Ch IX.

Sivanandan (n.23); B. Hepple, Race, Jobs and the Law in Britain (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1968), at Ch 4; R. Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (London: Verso, 2017), at 238–40.

Ramdin (n.45).

Ibid, 234–5.

R. Lewis, ‘The Historical Development of Labour Law’ (1976) 14 British Journal of Industrial Relations 1.

Sivanandan (n.23).

Lord Wedderburn, The Worker and the Law , 3rd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), at Ch 4.

Lord Donovan (Chairman), ‘Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, 1965–1968. Report Presented to Parliament by Command of Her Majesty’ (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1968).

O. Kahn-Freund, ‘Labour Law’, Selected Writings (London: Stevens, 1978). For an insightful discussion of how Kahn-Freund conceptualised the role of the state, see R. Dukes, ‘Otto Kahn-Freund and Collective Laissez-Faire: An Edifice Without a Keystone’ (2009) 72 Modern Law Review 220.

J. Wrench, ‘Unequal Comrades: Trade Unions, Equal Opportunity and Racism’ (Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Warwick, 1986) Policy Papers in Ethnic Relations 5; E. J. B. Rose and Others, ‘Colour & Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations’ (London: Institute of Race Relations, 1969), at Ch 19; S. Virdee, ‘Racism and Resistance in British Trade Unions, 1948–79’ in P. Alexander and R. Halpern (eds), Racializing Class, Classifying Race: Labour and Difference in Britain, the USA and Africa (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2000).

Wrench (n.53).

J. Hughes, ‘The British Economy: Crisis and Structural Change’ (1963) 21 New Left Review .

R. Trust (1982) cited in R. Miles, Racism & Migrant Labour (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), at 163. Immigration policy was enacted through a mixture of legislative and administrative rule changes. For example, the entry of partners and dependents was often regulated through changes to administrative rules.

Patel (n.34).

J. Clarke and J. Salt, ‘Work Permits and Foreign Labour in the UK: A Statistical Review’ [2003] Labour Market Trends 563.

There were strikes by female migrant workers in 1972 (Mansfield Hosiery Mills Ltd), 1974 (Imperial Typewriters) and 1976 (Grunwick)—see S. Anitha and R. Pearson, Striking Women: Struggles & Strategies of South Asian Women Workers From Grunwick to Gate Gourmet (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2018).

On Asian youth movements—see A. Ramamurthy, Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2013). On the IWA, see J. DeWitt, Indian Workers’ Associations in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). On CARD, see B. W. Heineman, Politics of the Powerless: Study of the Campaign against Racial Discrimination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

See Heineman (n.63).

El-Enany (n.35), at 106–7.

See, eg, J. Solomos, ‘From Equal Opportunity to Anti-Racism: Racial Inequality and the Limits of Reform’ (London: Birkbeck Public Policy Centre, Birkbeck College, 1989) Policy Papers in Ethnic Relations 17.

B. Hepple, ‘Have Twenty-Five Years of the Race Relations Acts in Britain Been a Failure?’ in B. Hepple and E. M. Szyszczak (eds), Discrimination: The Limits of Law (London: Mansell, 1992), 20.

C. O’Cinneide, ‘The Commission for Equality and Human Rights: A New Institution for New and Uncertain Times’ (2007) 36 Industrial Law Journal 141; B. Hepple, ‘The New Single Equality Act in Britain’ (2010) 5 Equal Rights Review 11.

N. Kaldor, ‘How Monetarism Failed’ (1985) May–June Challenge 4.

M. Moran, The Politics of the Financial Services Revolution: The USA, UK and Japan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), at Ch 3.

K. Albertson and P. Stepney, ‘1979 and All That: A 40-Year Reassessment of Margaret Thatcher’s Legacy on Her Own Terms’ (2020) 44 Cambridge Journal of Economics 319.

P. Davies and M. Freedland, Labour Legislation and Public Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), at Chs 9 and 10.

Ibid., at Ch 9.

K. D. Ewing, J. Hendy and C. Jones (eds), A Manifesto for Labour Law: Towards a Comprehensive Revision of Workers’ Rights (London: Institute of Employment Rights, 2016), at 4.

Thompson (n.28); Vidal (n.28).

Denman and McDonald (n.42).

J. Lovering, ‘A Perfunctory Sort of Post-Fordism: Economic Restructuring and Labour Market Segmentation in Britain in the 1980s’ (1990) 4 Work, Employment and Society 9.

P. Davies and M. Freedland, Towards a Flexible Labour Market: Labour Legislation and Regulation Since the 1990s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), at 11. See also H. Collins, ‘Independent Contractors and the Challenge of Vertical Disintegration to Employment Protection Laws’ (1990) 10 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 353.

For a good summary of the various theories of labour market dualism/segmentation, see J. Peck, Workplace: The Social Regulation of Labour Markets (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996), at Ch. 3 and S. Deakin, ‘Addressing Labour Market Segmentation: The Role of Labour Law’ (Governance and Tripartism Department, International Labour Office 2013) Working Paper 52.

C. Brown, Black and White: The Third PSI Survey (London: Heinemann, 1984).

‘International Migration: A Recent History—Office for National Statistics’ (15 January 2015). https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/internationalmigrationarecenthistory/2015-01-15 (accessed 1 May 2021).

El-Enany (n.35), at 126. For the increased numbers, see J. Salt and V. Bauer, ‘Managing Foreign Labour Immigration to the UK: Government Policy and Outcomes Since 1945’ (London: UCL Migration Research Unit, 2020).

Clarke and Salt (n.60).

J. Salt and R. T. Kitching, ‘Labour Migration and the Work Permit System in the United Kingdom’ (1990) 28 International Migration 267.

P. W. Walsh, ‘Asylum and Refugee Resettlement in the UK’ (The Migration Observatory 2021) Briefing. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migration-to-the-uk-asylum/ (accessed 1 May 2021).

See, eg, R. Heffernan, New Labour and Thatcherism: Political Change in Britain (London: Palgrave, 2001).

For a distillation of ‘Third Way’ thinking, see H. Collins, ‘Is There a Third Way in Labour Law?’ in J. Conaghan, R. M. Fischl and K. Klare (eds), Labour Law in an Era of Globalization: Transformative Practices & Possibilities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For a discussion of the distance between the practice of New Labour and the ideology of Third Way, see S. Fredman, ‘The Ideology of New Labour Law’ in C. Barnard, S. Deakin and G. Morris (eds), The Future of Labour Law: Liber Amicorum Sir Bob Hepple (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2004).

‘Fairness at Work. Presented to Parliament by the President of the Board of Trade by Command of Her Majesty’ (1998) Cm 3968.

For extended analyses of New Labour’s reform to the legal institutions of the labour market, see T. Novitz and P. Skidmore, Fairness at Work (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2001); A. Bogg, The Democratic Aspects of Trade Union Recognition (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2004).

Deakin (n.80).

B. Anderson and M. Ruhs, ‘Migrant Workers: Who Needs Them? A Framework for the Analysis of Staff Shortages, Immigration, and Public Policy’ in M. Ruhs and B. Anderson (eds), Who Needs Migrant Workers? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

W. Sommerville, Immigration under New Labour (Bristol: Policy Press, 2007). For a sophisticated account of the economic, ideological and institutional factors leading to New Labour’s position on immigration, see E. Consterdine, Labour’s Immigration Policy: The Making of the Migration State (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

M. Fernández-Reino, ‘Migrants in the UK Labour Market: An Overview’ (The Migration Observatory 2021) Briefing. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migrants-in-the-uk-labour-market-an-overview/ .

N. Lillie and I. Greer, ‘Industrial Relations, Migration, and Neoliberal Politics: The Case of the European Construction Sector’ (2007) 35 Politics & Society 551; C. Woolfson, ‘Labour Migration, Neoliberalism and Ethno-Politics in the New Europe: The Latvian Case’ (2009) 41 Antipode 952.

Salt and Bauer (n.83).

M. Zou, ‘Employer Demand for “Skilled” Migrant Workers: Regulating Admission under the United Kingdom’s Tier 2 (General) Visa’ in J. Howe and R. Owens (eds), Temporary Labour Migration in the Global Era: The Regulatory Challenges (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2016).

M. Sobolewska and R. Ford, Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), at 30.

Office of National Statistics, ‘Unemployment Rate (Aged 16 and Over, Seasonally Adjusted)’ ( Labour Market Statistics Time Series ). https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment/timeseries/mgsx/lms (accessed 19 May 2021).

B. Anderson, ‘Migration, Immigration Controls and the Fashioning of Precarious Workers’ (2010) 24 Work, Employment and Society 300.

A. Lentin, ‘Cameron’s Immigration Hierarchy: Indians Good, Eastern Europeans Bad’ The Guardian (18 February 2013). https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/18/cameron-immigration-indians-good >.

Anderson and Ruhs (n.92).

ERA 1996, s 108(1).

For an insightful discussion of how the illegality doctrine in relation to employment claims is likely to be treated under a situation of statutory illegality, see A. Bogg, ‘Irregular Migrants and Fundamental Social Rights: The Case of Back-Pay under the English Law on Illegality’ in B. Ryan (ed), Migrant Labour and the Reshaping of Employment Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, forthcoming).

P. Connor and J. S. Passel, ‘Europe’s Unauthorized Immigrant Population Peaks in 2016, Then Levels Off’ (Washington, DC: Pew Research Centre, 2019). https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/11/13/europes-unauthorised-immigrant-population-peaks-in-2016-then-levels-off/ .

D. Metcalf, United Kingdom Labour Market Enforcement Strategy 2018/19 (London: HM Government, 2018) Presented to Parliament pursuant to s 5 (1) of the Immigration Act 2016. https://www.webarchive.org.uk/access/resolve/20180522191539 or https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/705503/labour-market-enforcement-strategy-2018-2019-full-report.pdf (accessed 1 May 2021).

C. Barnard, ‘Enforcement of Employment Rights by Migrant Workers in the UK: The Case of EU-8 Nationals’ in Cathryn Costello and Mark Freedland (eds), Migrants at Work: Immigration and Vulnerability in Labour Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2014).

A. Geddes and S. Scott, ‘UK Food Businesses’ Reliance on Low-Wage Migrant Labour: A Case of Choice or Constraint’ in B. Anderson and M. Ruhs (eds), Who Needs Migrant Workers? Labour Shortages, Immigration, and Public Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

A. Batnitzky and L. McDowell, ‘The Emergence of an “Ethnic Economy”? The Spatial Relationships of Migrant Workers in London’s Health and Hospitality Sectors’ (2013) 36 Ethnic and Racial Studies 1997.

F. van Hooren, ‘Varieties of Migrant Care Work: Comparing Patterns of Migrant Labour in Social Care’ (2012) 22 Journal of European Social Policy 133.

J. Portes, ‘Immigration and the UK Economy After Brexit’ (Bonn: IZA Institute of Labor Economics, 2021) Discussion Paper Series.

D. Strauss, ‘Surge in Hiring as Hospitality Reopens Adds to Pressure on Labour Market’ [2021] Financial Times . https://www.ft.com/content/98c3a781-7661-41a7-b6a3-4ff9a0a10b9b .

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Migration and families left behind

Families that stay behind when a member migrates do not clearly benefit

GATE—Lyon-Saint-Etienne and CNRS, France, and IZA, Germany

Elevator pitch

About a billion people worldwide live and work outside their country of birth or outside their region of birth within their own country. Labor migration is conventionally viewed as economically benefiting the family members who are left behind through remittances. However, splitting up families in this way may also have multiple adverse effects on education, health, labor supply response, and social status for family members who do not migrate. Identifying the causal impact of migration on those who are left behind remains a challenging empirical question with inconclusive evidence.

Key findings

The migration of a family member brings additional income through remittances, which can support household consumption and investment.

This income effect can reduce the need for child labor and increase children’s schooling, notably for girls in developing countries.

Remittances can improve families’ sanitation, health care, and nutrition and fill in for missing formal health insurance in the short term.

Remittances can enable remaining family members to engage in higher-risk, higher-return productive activities.

Where most migrants are men, the bargaining power of women who stay behind may be strengthened.

The migration of an economically active family member places a heavier burden on those who stay behind, who must make up for the lost employment and spend more time on household chores.

The absence of the main caregiver can increase children’s probability of dropping out of school and delay school progression.

Disrupted family life can lead to poor diets and increased psychological problems.

Migration may reduce incentives for education when perceived future returns to education are low because of expectations of migration.

Migration can reduce labor force participation for family members left behind, especially for women.

Author's main message

The effect of a family member’s migration on those who stay behind can be either positive or negative, depending on individual circumstances. Although remittances are a potentially important means of easing family budget constraints and alleviating poverty, the most vulnerable populations may be hurt by a family member’s migration. Policymakers need to consider the specific circumstances behind the migration and of the family members in the home country. Support systems for these families may need to be bolstered to help them cope with any detrimental impacts of migration, especially its effect on education and human capital accumulation.

The number of people migrating from their country of origin or from one region to another within it has been growing dramatically in recent decades. The UN estimates that about 232 million people live and work outside their country of birth and that 763 million people live and work outside their region of birth within their home country. Since 2000, the international migrant stock has been growing faster than the total world population, and it now accounts for 3.2% of the world population ( Figure 1 ).

International migrants and internal migrants together account for one in seven people worldwide. These migrants do not always move with their entire family. More often, they leave the rest of their family behind: their spouse, children, and parents. Rigid migration policies, uncertain living conditions in the destination country or region, and the high cost of migration are among the reasons why many people migrate alone. In China, individuals who have migrated from rural areas to cities have left behind an estimated 61 million children, 47 million wives, and 45 million elderly relatives [1] . In the Philippines, one of the largest sources of migrant laborers worldwide, around nine million children are growing up without at least one of their parents because of migration.

The impact of migration on sending communities, especially on family members left behind, has long been debated. On the one hand, labor migration is viewed as economically benefiting the family in the home country through financial transfers. Remittances can ease liquidity and budget constraints and thereby improve households’ long-term welfare through investments in health care and education. On the other hand, many studies have pointed out the social cost that migration imposes on families left behind. In particular, the physical absence of the migrant may have multiple adverse effects on family members’ education, health, labor supply response, and social status. Thus, identifying the impact of migration on family members who remain is an open empirical question with inconclusive evidence.

Discussion of pros and cons

The main channels: remittances and household time allocation.

When people migrate for work, the groups that are most likely to be left behind are women, children, and the elderly. Two primary mechanisms associated with migration can affect those staying behind. Most important, the migration of a family member usually brings additional income to the family through remittances and can therefore ease the budget constraint for family members in the home country or region. In particular, the income effect can enable larger investments in education and health care, create new opportunities to invest in businesses, and raise the reservation wage (the lowest wage at which a person is willing to accept a job) of family members who remain behind. Yet migration also entails the absence of an economically active family member and the loss of that member’s time inputs to both market and household production. In particular, this absence may translate into disrupted personal care for dependent family members, including children and the elderly, and a greater burden of responsibility for work and household chores among family members. The forgone market and household production (including both labor force participation and care) may be substantial and may outweigh the gains from remittances. Since these two mechanisms work in opposite directions, the impact of migration on family members left behind can only be determined empirically.

Another dimension to consider when assessing the relationship between migration and the family left behind is the duration of migration [2] . The expected impact is ambiguous in both the short term and the long term. In the short term, migration may have a disruptive effect on the family because of reduced inputs to market and household production. As migration is costly and does not necessarily lead to immediate employment at destination, it may even translate into reduced income for the family that has to finance the migrant. In the long term, the forgone market and household production may be compensated for by a reallocation of labor among family members who stay behind. Yet, whether financial transfers rise or fall with the duration of migration is uncertain. Long-term migrants are likely to earn a higher income and as a consequence may be able to afford to send larger remittances. However, their commitment to their family may weaken over time, leading to reduced financial transfers.

Thus the impact of migration on the family in the home country or community is complex, multi-channeled, and context-dependent. It ultimately depends on who migrates and who is left behind (gender and age are key dimensions here) and on the duration of migration. Given the complexity of the relationship, empirical studies are needed to clarify a net impact that is ambiguous a priori.

Measuring the causal impact of migration is challenging

Empirical work is made possible by the availability of household survey data that 
account for internal and international migration flows. The standard research strategy is to compare outcomes of interest for migrant-sending households and for non-migrant-sending households. But there are important methodological problems that may limit the scope of the findings and to some extent explain their inconclusiveness. The main difficulty arises from the fact that migration is a choice variable, which plagues the empirical literature with important selection and reverse-causality problems.

Selection bias, which complicates analyses of migration, can arise for a number of reasons: individuals (or households) are not randomly selected but self-select into migration; they choose how many family members will migrate; they choose when to migrate and for how long (including whether to return); and they choose whether to send remittances and how much to send. In this context, omitted variables that are correlated with both the migration decision and its outcomes for family members who are left behind may cause endogeneity problems and bias estimates of the impact of migration on the family left behind [2] . For instance, wealthier households may be able to afford to send family members abroad for work and still have enough money to pay for the education or health care expenses of the rest of the family. In that case, comparing migrant-sending households with non-migrant-sending households may capture differences in wealth rather than the effect of migration. In addition, endogeneity may also result from reverse causalities between some of the outcomes of interest and migration. Because parental health can be part of the migration cost, having parents in poor health may outweigh the economic benefit of migration and may therefore reduce the likelihood that their children will migrate. A careful identification strategy that takes into account this possible reverse causality is required in order to estimate the causal impact of children’s migration on parental health.

Researchers have applied various methods to correct for multiple selection and reverse causality biases in observational data. Typical methods include the use of instrumental variables (variables that are correlated with the migration decision but uncorrelated with the outcome of interest outside of its impact on migration), selection–correction models, natural experiments, and matching methods (which assume that selection into migration depends on observable characteristics only and match migrants with comparable non-migrants based on these observable characteristics).

Finding valid instruments is a major difficulty, and while using experimental data is a promising approach, such data are rarely available and may be very costly to construct [3] . Nonetheless, a few recent studies have taken advantage of data on policy experiments in New Zealand, which introduced immigration-visa lotteries for selecting applicants from Samoa and Tonga. The studies then compared households with a lottery winner (with migrants) with households with a lottery loser (without migrants) [2] , [4] , [5] . This strategy solves the problem of self-selection into migration because households in both groups had members who were willing to migrate. In the same vein, a study used the US diversity visa lottery to estimate the impact of migration to the US on the consumption and health of household members staying in Ethiopia.

Evidence of the impacts on education

The impact of migration on the school attainment and education performance of children left behind is the most documented dimension of the link between migration and the family left behind. One difficulty in measuring this impact is that parental migration is likely to be correlated with unobserved factors that may also explain the education outcomes of the children. For instance, if migrants are positively selected (more skilled and educated than the average person in the home country or community), households with migrants may have stronger preferences for investment in education, in which case the analysis may be identifying the effect of education preferences rather than of migration.

There are several main channels where a parent’s migration may affect children’s education. On the positive side, remittances sent back home can ease the household budget constraint by making more resources available. As a direct consequence, families have less need of child labor, which frees up children’s time for school. On the negative side, the disruption to family life as a result of a parent’s migration, especially the lack of a parent’s care and supervision, might negatively affect children’s school performance.

A third, complementary channel is the possibility of a child’s own (future) migration, which might either encourage or discourage a child’s education, depending on perceived returns to education in prospective jobs. Studies for Mexico have pointed out that families with higher probabilities of migrating to the US invest less in education, an outcome that is attributed to the low return to Mexican education in the US labor market.

Finally, a parent’s migration may lead to a redistribution of decision-making and responsibilities within the household, which can affect child schooling, either because the new decision-maker (for example, the other parent or an older child) cares more or less about investment in education than the migrating parent or because the redistribution of roles puts more pressure on children to help in the household.

The literature offers inconclusive evidence on whether migration has a net positive or net negative impact on education outcomes of children who are left behind [1] , [6] . Most empirical studies highlight heterogeneous impacts that depend on the gender, age, and sibling birth order of the children left behind, as well as on the gender of the parent migrant and whether one or both parents are absent.

Focusing on the short-term direct effect of remittances on household decisions, some studies provide evidence of a positive impact of remittances on schooling in the Philippines [7] and in Mexico [8] . Other studies that have assessed the negative consequences of parental absence have found that parental migration increases the probability of a child’s dropping out of school and of delayed school progression and has a negative impact on children’s school performance.

Evidence for Mexico also reveals gender-based differences [9] . Parental migration significantly increases educational attainment for girls, lowers the probability of boys completing junior high school and of boys and girls completing high school, and, when the migrant was a caregiver, raises the probability that boys and girls will have academic difficulties. For girls, especially in developing countries, the income effect appears to dominate: remittances, by easing family budget constraints, open up greater education opportunities for girls, who are more likely to be deprived of educational investments when family finances are constrained. For older boys, however, alternatives to education, particularly their own migration, tend to overcome the income effect and drive boys away from school.

Evidence of the impacts on health

The impact of migration on the health of family members left behind has received relatively little attention. Estimating health effects also faces selection and reverse causality problems. For instance, adult children whose parents are in bad health and in need of care might be less likely to migrate. At the other end of the health spectrum, migrants may share a genetic predisposition to good health with their children and their parents.

The channels through which migration behavior may affect the health and nutrition status of family members left behind are similar to those highlighted for education. In the long-term, the income effect of remittances may be large if they contribute to better sanitation, improved food habits, and more health-seeking behaviors. In the short-term, migrants may also make up for missing formal health insurance mechanisms by sending larger financial transfers back home when they are needed.

Working in the opposite direction, however, is the household time reallocation necessitated by a migrant’s absence, which may negatively affect the health of family members left behind. Family members may have to take on more housework (including farm work in rural areas), may suffer greater psychological pressure, or may eat more poorly, especially in the case of children, because of the absence of the main caregiver. In rural societies, migration may also disrupt traditional kinship systems and care structures, to the detriment of the most vulnerable groups. And as in the case of education, the relationship between migration and the health status of those who are left behind also differs by gender and age.

A growing literature is analyzing the causal effect of parental migration on children’s health and nutrition. Migration seems to improve the nutritional status of very young children, measured by birth weight, infant mortality rate, or weight-for-age [10] . However, a study that exploits New Zealand’s migration lottery program to capture the causal effect of migration from Tonga finds worse diets and lower height-for-age in the short term among children under the age of 18 who are left behind when a parent migrates compared with children whose parents applied but did not win the migration lottery [5] .

Another set of studies, some using careful instrumental variable approaches, has empirically assessed the impact of the migration of adult children on the health of their elderly parents. Again, the evidence is mixed. In both China and Mexico, the migration of adult children has been found to result in lower self-reported health status among elderly parents. In contrast, a study for Moldova finds evidence of a beneficial impact of the migration of adult children on the physical health of elderly family members who stay behind and finds no significant impact on their mental health or cognitive capacity. These findings are attributed mostly to a strong income effect: remittances contribute to a more diversified diet and allow for changes in household time allocation toward more leisure and sleep. If anything, the inconclusiveness of the recent empirical literature on the health effects of migration reveals that whether migration is detrimental or beneficial to the health of those who are left behind is deeply context-dependent.

Evidence on the labor supply response to migration

As with education and health, migration affects the labor allocation decisions of the family members left behind through two main channels. First, the availability of remittances may change labor supply responses in potentially competing ways. On the one hand, financial transfers from migrants can enable family members who stay behind to enter riskier, higher-return activities by easing household financial constraints. If this effect dominates, then migration will lead to a diversification of economic activities among family members who are left behind and possibly to increased income from local activities in the long term. On the other hand, the increase in disposable income brought by remittances may dampen the incentives to work of non-migrating family members, in particular if the financial transfers raise the reservation wage of family members and lower the opportunity cost of leisure [11] . In that case, the increase in income from remittances may reduce the labor force participation of family members, and in the long term it may create dependency on income from remittances.

Second, migration results in the loss of the migrant’s local labor, which may strongly constrain the labor supply response of non-migrating members in the short term. In particular, when labor markets are imperfect, as is typically the case in developing countries, family members who are left behind may not be able to hire labor to compensate for the lost contributions from the migrant. In rural areas, this lost labor may force other family members to increase the time devoted to (subsistence) farming.

In addition to these two main channels, migration may also affect a spouse’s labor market participation by affecting productivity in the home. If the inputs of spouses in the home production function are complements, then migration will lower the productivity of the spouse who remains behind; if the inputs are substitutes, the opposite will hold. As is the case for education and health, the net effect of migration on labor supply depends on the relative magnitudes of the remittances-related effect and the lost-labor effect. Moreover, the net effect may vary across different subgroups of people, depending on the age and the gender of the household members, their employment sector, the seasonal or permanent nature of migration, the household’s assets, and on how binding liquidity constraints are for the household [12] .

Research on the labor supply responses of family members to international migration consistently finds evidence of decreasing labor force participation of women who are left behind, be they Albanian, Egyptian, Mexican, or Nepalese [11] . The only increase in labor supply comes from an increase in unpaid family work and subsistence work, particularly in rural areas. In rural China, internal migration is found to increase farm work for all family members who remain behind (women, the elderly, and children), and return migration does not seem to reverse these labor allocation changes [12] .

Evidence of impacts on intra-family roles and the transfer of norms

A straightforward extension of the analysis of the labor supply responses of family members left behind is to investigate the reallocation of intra-family roles and the possible strengthening of the bargaining power of certain members who stay behind, as this affects decision-making and the control and allocation of resources. In patriarchal societies, where most migrants are men, migration may influence not only the labor supply in communities of origin but also the position of women who remain behind [13] . In Albania, less educated women in households from which men have migrated are more likely than their peers in households without a male migrant to gain access to remunerative employment, which could empower them to make resource-allocation decisions within the household. Changes in intra-family roles can also be observed among siblings: in China, older sisters are found to have a positive influence on their younger siblings in households from which a parent has migrated.

Finally, a recent strand of the literature focuses on the transfer of norms, looking in particular at how political norms and behavior at home change with migration. Migrants may transfer not only financial resources to the family left behind but also political knowledge, preferences, and practices absorbed in their host country. In transition or developing countries, where institutions are weak, the diffusion of political norms through communication between migrants and their family back home has the potential to boost demand for political accountability and promote democracy. Using a voting experiment to capture the individual demand for better governance in Cape Verde, a study provides evidence of a positive impact of the proportion of international migrants in an individual’s locality on the demand for political accountability. International migration is also found to affect political behavior and voting: in Mexico and Moldova, there is evidence of a positive impact of migration on votes for opposition parties.

Limitations and gaps

The literature on migration and the family left behind recognizes the difficulty of measuring a causal impact. This is both a clear limitation and a major challenge to researchers. Most studies rely on data from home-country household surveys, making it difficult to overcome the problem of the non-random selection of individuals into migration. Unresolved endogeneity problems are among the reasons why studies report mixed results of the impact of migration on the education, health, and labor supply of family members who stay behind. The recent use of experimental approaches, through policy experiments such as visa lotteries and natural experiments, is leading the way to promising solutions to these difficulties. Collecting such data is particularly challenging, however, and often depends on the willingness of policymakers to share the data with researchers.

There is also a need for better survey data, notably for richer longitudinal data sets that simultaneously survey migrants abroad and sending households. Although studies using such data sets would still not be as good as randomized controlled studies, they would help researchers and policymakers learn more about the mechanisms through which migration affects family members who do not migrate.

Another limitation is that most studies have investigated specific settings, so the results may not be generalizable. In particular, the impact of migration may vary considerably depending on the type of migration and on the source and destination countries analyzed. For instance, the loss of parental supervision and interaction might be much more detrimental for international migration, with long-distance travel and infrequent returns, than for short-distance internal migration.

Another source of cross-study variability may be the family’s income level before migration, which can influence whether the net effects are positive or negative. In particular, for poor households in poor countries the income effect of remittances would be expected to be stronger and more likely to counteract the negative effects associated with the absence of the migrant.

Summary and policy advice

With about one billion international and internal migrants worldwide, the relationship between migration and the family left behind is an important policy question. Labor migration is conventionally viewed as economically benefiting the family left behind. Remittance transfers can ease budget constraints and thereby increase spending on health care and education, improving households’ long-term welfare in the source country. However, the migrant’s absence might also have negative consequences for non-migrants, be they children, the elderly, or a spouse.

Policymakers need to account for differences in the situations of migrants and their families who stay behind and bolster support systems in education and health care to help families cope with the detrimental effects of migration on the accumulation of human capital. If migration implies lower education or health status or more child labor, the potentially long-term costs of migration need to be mitigated through appropriate home country policies. Population aging is another issue to consider.

Many migrant-sending developing countries have inadequate social safety nets, especially in rural areas. Countries may need to establish supportive institutions that can help families who stay behind adapt to the loss of an economically active member or caregiver through migration. Policy options for developing countries include improving the functioning of labor markets (notably in rural areas, to facilitate the hiring of local labor when a family member migrates), strengthening formal insurance and credit markets, facilitating the transmission of remittances by lowering remitting costs, and increasing access to education and health care. More specifically, ways to mitigate the impact of migration on human capital include offering access to better education locally at primary and secondary school levels, including providing additional tutoring for children left behind, and building social safety nets to provide pensions and affordable health care for the elderly.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks two anonymous referees and the IZA World of Labor editors for many helpful suggestions on earlier drafts.

Competing interests

The IZA World of Labor project is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity . The author declares to have observed these principles.

© Sylvie Démurger

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Labor Migration: Dynamics and Politics

Introduction, theoretical and historical overviews.

• International Division of Labor
• Political Economy of Labor Migration
• Regulation and Management of Labor Migration
• Regional Migration Governance
• Skilled Labor Migration
• Temporary and Precarious Labor Migration
• Rights-Based Approach

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Labor Migration: Dynamics and Politics by Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola LAST REVIEWED: 24 March 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 24 March 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756223-0329

Much of the early research on labor migration drew on the push-pull factors of migration. The emphasis was on economic and individualistic assumptions with little notion of institutions, power, and politics. Since the early 1970s, the interest has shifted toward historical and institutional processes and structural factors and their explanatory power regarding the dynamics and patterns of labor migration. The national and international regimes of migration control have expanded and directed scholarly attention toward border and migration policies and their production of migrant categories. Migration policy research has also extended the focus from receiving countries toward complex dynamics and interactions between the labor-sending and labor-receiving countries. The migration trajectories from the global South to North have been studied extensively and more and more attention is paid to South–North, South–South and North–North migrations. Different types of labor migration and mobilities are also subject to different regional, national, and international policies and policy change. In current literature, the heterogeneity of migration is underlined, as well as how labor migration politics and policies address high-skilled migrants in different ways than low-skilled ones. However, the categories of migration are in many ways arbitrary. Labor migration is a highly complex and politically contested issue that intersects and forms a continuum with other types of migration and migration politics. Migration politics and the precarious conditions of foreign workers have been studied, among other ways, in explorations of what influence the temporal nature of migration and restricted permission to stay in the foreign territory have. Moreover, although labor migration is usually understood in terms of voluntary migration, the conditions of migrants sometimes resemble those of unfree labor, illustrating the complexity of determining what is counted as labor migration and what politics it concerns. The recent research on migrant rights and political atmosphere brings together the subjects of different migrations and how migrants navigate between different legal and political statuses. The literature is organized chronologically into eight themes that have a similar theoretical approach or similar thematic perspective to labor migration: (1) Theoretical and Historical Overviews , (2) International Division of Labor , (3) the Political Economy of Labor Migration , (4) Regulation and Management of Labor Migration , (5) Regional Migration Governance , (6) Skilled Labor Migration , (7) Temporary and Precarious Labor Migration , and (8) rights and protection in a Rights-Based Approach . The historical and geographical migration trajectories are visible through the themes, revealing how and why the particular aspects of labor migration have become questions of politics in different parts of the world.

The early work on labor migration mainly draws on Ravenstein’s individualistic models and the push-pull factors of migration. In the neoclassical theory of migration, migration was considered as a response to regional economic disparities and wage disparities. After the early 1970s oil crisis and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, attention rose toward labor migration as a question of regional politics and conflicts of interest within societies. The research on labor migration increasingly turned toward institutionalist, historical, and critical approaches. Castells 1975 put forward an argument that in advanced capitalist countries migration policies can be understood in terms of a class struggle. Piore 1979 argued that labor migration should be understood, first and foremost, as a demand-driven phenomena, and therefore the politics of destination countries would have an impact on migration. Zolberg 1989 provides an overview for migration theories and the shift from the individualistic economic model toward historical and structural approaches. Freeman 1995 analyzes and compares the immigration politics of liberal democratic states. Hampshire 2013 analyzes the different histories and institutions of the liberal states, and their contradictory imperatives, from the perspective of immigration. In Massey, et al. 1993 and Meyers 2000 , important questions put forward for migration research comprise how the mainstream theories of migration and migration control influence migration and immigration policies. De Haas, et al. 2018 shows that, in recent decades, migration policies have become more complex and selective. The bestseller De Haas, et al 2019 provides an overview of migration theories and policy information and analyzes the key migration trends in major world regions and the effects of migration.

Castells, Manuel. “Immigrant Workers and Class Struggles in Advanced Capitalism: The Western European Experience.” Politics & Society 5.1 (1975): 33–66.

DOI: 10.1177/003232927500500102

The article discusses the growing importance of the wage-earning working immigration population in Western European countries and draws attention to the increase in political struggles within societies. It analyzes migration policies from the perspective of social conflicts and labor unions, arguing that immigrant labor is an arena for new class struggles in advanced capitalism.

de Haas, Hein, Stephen Castles, and Mark Miller. The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World . 6th ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2019.

The book is one of the most cited books on migration, pointing out how international migration is the key phenomenon of modern times. The authors explain international migratory processes, the politicization of migration, and the role of migration and immigrants in the shaping of contemporary societies and political landscapes. The book offers a balanced coverage of Western and non-Western regions.

de Haas, Hein, Katharina Natter, and Simona Vezzoli. Growing Restrictiveness or Changing Selection? The Nature and Evolution of Migration Policies. International Migration Review 52.2 (2018): 324–367.

DOI: 10.1111/imre.12288

The article studies the characteristics and evolution of migration policies in forty-five countries around the world over the 20th and early 21st centuries. It demonstrates that migration policies have, overall, become less restrictive and simultaneously more complex and selective as to tightened policies and control directed toward undocumented migrants and family migration and simultaneously the facilitation of the entry of many other migrant groups across countries.

Freeman, Gary. “Modes of Immigration Politics in Liberal Democratic States.” International Migration Review 29.4 (1995): 881–902.

DOI: 10.2307/2547731

Analyzes the politics of immigration in liberal democracies and identifies three groups of states displaying distinct immigration politics: English-speaking settler societies, the migrant-receiving European countries, and traditionally migrant-sending European countries. It argues that immigration politics in these states are considerably similar when viewed in terms of expansionism and the objective of inclusion.

Hampshire, James. The Politics of Immigration: Contradictions of the Liberal State . Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013.

The book examines the different histories and institutions of the liberal state and distinguishes different constitutent aspects of statehood (representative democracy, constitutionalism, capitalism, and nationhood) and their contradictory effects on migration. The book provides a nuanced analysis of the multifaceted, selective nature of state migration policies in the Western liberal states.

Massey, Douglas, Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, Adela Pellegrino, and J. Edward Taylor. “Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal.” Population and Development Review 19.3 (1993): 431–466.

DOI: 10.2307/2938462

This frequently cited article explicates and integrates the leading theories of international migration and international labor migration, proposing an analytical distinction between the theories of initiation of international migration and the ones explaining their persistence. The article investigates the intellectual basis of the theories from the perspective of immigration policy.

Meyers, Eytan. “Theories of International Immigration Policy—A Comparative Analysis.” International Migration Review 34.4 (2000): 1245–1282.

DOI: 10.1177/019791830003400407

Delineates the major theoretical approaches in the field of immigration control research, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses and their impact on immigration policy. The paper proposes different strategies for developing immigration policy theory.

Piore, Michael. Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies . London: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511572210

The often cited and influential book analyzes the motivations of migration processes to industrialized regions and underlines the need to understand the roots and social context of migration. Whereas the dominant theories up to that point had focused on the push factors of migration, Piore takes the dual labor market theory as a starting point and argues that international migration is a demand-driven phenomena.

Zolberg, Aristide R. “The Next Waves: Migration Theory for a Changing World.” In Special Issue: International Migration an Assessment for the 90’s . Edited by M. Silvano. International Migration Review 23.3 (1989): 403–430.

DOI: 10.2307/2546422

The paper offers an overview of the major change and development of migration theory from Ravenstein’s individualistic model to a variety of new historical, structural, globalist, and critical approaches, and analyzes them with the help of the traditional world-systems approach and state theories. It then discusses the major topics and current trends of migration research and their normative implications.

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Advancing social justice, promoting decent work ILO is a specialized agency of the United Nations

Migrant workers contribute to growth and development in their countries of destination , while countries of origin greatly benefit from their remittances and the skills acquired during their migration experience. Yet, the migration process implies complex challenges in terms of governance, migrant workers' protection, migration and development linkages, and international cooperation. The ILO works to forge policies to maximize the benefits of labour migration for all those involved.

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Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets

The rich have many assets; the poor have only one—their labor. Because good jobs are slow to come to the poor, the poor must move to find productive employment. Migration is, therefore, the most effective way to reduce poverty and share prosperity, the twin goals of the World Bank. Not surprisingly, all development experiences and growth episodes in history have involved a reallocation of labor across space and sectors within countries.

According to Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets , however, some of the biggest gains come from the movement of people between countries. Migrants’ incomes increase three to six times when they move from lower- to higher-income countries. The average income gain for a young unskilled worker moving to the United States is estimated to be about $14,000 per year. If we were to double the number of immigrants in high-income countries by moving 100 million young people from developing countries, the annual income gain would be $1.4 trillion. This global welfare gain dwarfs the gains from the removal of all restrictions on international flows of goods and capital.

These gains remain largely notional because most people cannot move. Only about 3 percent of the world’s population live in a country in which they were not born, a proportion that has not changed much over six decades of otherwise unprecedented global integration, via trade, investment, and knowledge flows. Distances in space, culture, and language are inherent impediments to mobility, imposing an estimated 30–50 percent tax on migrant wages. The most important barriers are, however, national borders. The tax equivalent of an international border is over 150 percent for young unskilled workers from most developing countries, more than three times larger than those imposed by physical and cultural dimensions of distance.

The gains for immigrants do not come at the expense of host countries. Farmers in destinations from New Zealand to New Mexico thrive thanks to the hard work of immigrant workers. Institutions at the technology frontier—from CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva to Silicon Valley in California— innovate thanks to the ingenuity of immigrants. Native-born workers also gain on average as they gravitate away from the occupations that immigrants are willing to perform, because they benefit from the complementary skills that immigrants bring, or because they are consumers of the products and services immigrants provide. Almost every empirical study finds that increased labor mobility leads to large gains for the immigrants and positive overall gains for the destination country.

That creates a puzzle. The compelling economic evidence on the economic gains and social benefits of migration sits awkwardly with stark political opposition to immigration. Respondents to political opinion polls rate the arrival of immigrants in their countries as among their worst fears. Citizens worried about what migrants and refugees would do to jobs and wages, welfare programs, crime, schools, and their national identity. Frustrated by the public’s disregard of their empirical findings, many economists attribute political opposition to cultural and social factors, including xenophobia.

This Policy Research Report, Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets , is an attempt to address this tension between the academic research and the public discourse by focusing on the economic evidence. We suggest a labor market–oriented, economically motivated rationale to the political opposition to migration. Global migration patterns lead to high concentrations of immigrants in certain places, industries, and occupations. For example, the top 10 destination countries account for 60 percent of global immigration. In the United States four states host half of all immigrants, and 10 counties host half of the immigrants in these four states. Immigrants are further concentrated in a narrow set of industries and occupations in specific geographic regions. The same pattern repeats itself in almost every major destination country. It is these geographic and labor market concentrations of immigrants that lead to increased anxiety, insecurity, and potentially significant short-term disruptions among native-born workers. Furthermore, the positive effects and benefits in the destination labor markets tend to be more diffuse whereas the costs are more concentrated and easily attributable to immigration.

Understanding (and empathizing with) these legitimate economic concerns is critical to informed and effective policy making. The goal should be to ease the costs of short-term dislocations of native-born workers and distribute more widely the economic benefits generated by labor mobility. Proactive interventions to ease the pain and share the gain from immigration are essential to avoid draconian restrictions on immigration that will hurt everybody. Ignoring the massive economic gains of immigration would be akin to leaving billions of hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Patterns of Global Migration

Chapter 2: The Economic Drivers of Migration Decisions

Chapter 3: The Wage and Employment Impacts of Migration

Chapter 4: Longer-Term Dynamics: Immigrant Economic Adjustment and Native Responses

Chapter 5: High-Skilled Migration

PRAISE FOR THE REPORT:

Dani Rodrik

Report Launch | Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets

Çağlar Özden

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Types of migration

Labour migration

Data sources & measurement, further reading.

According to the latest available estimates, there were  169 million international migrant workers globally in 2019 and they constituted 4.9 per cent of the global labour force ( ILO, 2021 ). These international migrant workers made up approximately 69 per cent of the world’s international migrant population of working age (aged 15 and over) in 2019  ( ILO, 2021 ). 

Crossing national borders to work is one of the key motivations behind international migration, whether driven by economic inequalities, seeking employment, or both. The additional impact of economic, political and environmental crises and shifting demographics, with ageing populations in some parts of the world and a “youth bulge” in others, contribute to rising labour migration ( Ozel et al., 2017 ).  

There is no internationally accepted statistical definition of labour migration. However, the main actors in labour migration are migrant workers , which the International Labour Organization (ILO) defines as: 

A person who “is to be engaged or has been engaged in a remunerated activity in a state of which he or she is not a national” ( United Nations Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, 1990, Article 2(1) ).

The United Nations Statistics Division (UN SD) also provides a statistical definition of a foreign migrant worker :

“Foreigners admitted by the receiving State for the specific purpose of exercising an economic activity remunerated from within the receiving country. Their length of stay is usually restricted as is the type of employment they can hold. Their dependents, if admitted, are also included in this category.” ( UN SD, 2017 ).

While migrant workers are often also international migrants, not all are (see table below). It is important to note the difference between the definition of a foreign migrant worker and an international migrant . An international migrant is defined as:

“any person who changes his or her country of usual residence” ( UN DESA, 1998 ). 

Data on international migrant stocks are mostly based on country of birth (if different from country of residence). Where no information on country of birth is available in censuses, data on international migrant stocks are based on country of citizenship ( UN DESA, 2016:4 , UN SD, 2017 ). When defining migrant workers , emphasis is placed on a person’s citizenship rather than on their country of birth ( ILO, 2015 ). 

According to the ILO's most recent estimates, there were an estimated 169 million migrant workers globally in 2019 ( ILO, 2021 ). Over two-thirds of all migrant workers were concentrated in high-income countries and approximately 60.6 per cent were located in three subregions: 24.2 per cent in Northern, Southern and Western Europe; 22.1 per cent in Northern America; and 14.3 per cent in the Arab States ( ibid. ). The importance of these top three subregions in terms of the number of international migrant workers they host has not diminished over time. According to previous estimates, the same three subregions hosted the biggest shares of all migrant workers: 60.2 per cent in 2013 and 60.8 per cent in 2017 ( ibid. ). The five OECD countries with the highest inflows of migrant workers in 2022 were United Kingdom (170,300), United States of America (145,700), Canada (135,800), Germany (89,900) and New Zealand (74,800) ( OECD, 2023 ).

Between 2010 and 2019, the number of international migrant workers in Africa increased from 9.6 million to 14.5 million respectively. The average annual growth rate among migrant workers (4.8%) is higher than that of the overall African population (2.7%) ( African Union, 2024 ; African Union Commission and JLMP partners, 2021 ). In 2019, international migrant workers accounted for 2.8 per cent of the total labour force in Africa. Regionally 82 per cent of the migrant workers in Africa in 2019 were in East Africa (4.1 million), West Africa (4.3 million) and Southern Africa (3.5 million), 10 per cent in Central Africa (1.5 million) and Northern Africa hosted 8 per cent (1.2 million) (GMDAC calculations based on African Union Commission and JLMP partners, 2021 ).

Among all migrant workers worldwide in 2019, 70 million or approximately 41.5 per cent were female ( ibid. ). Male migrant workers made up 99 million or 58.5 per cent of the total ( ibid. ). Women represent a smaller share of the total of international migrant workers because they also represent a lower share of the total international migrants (47.9%) and they have a relatively lower labour market participation rate compared to men (59.8% vs. 77.5%) ( ibid. ). However, some significant regional variations existed in the share of women among total migrant workers. In Northern, Southern and Western Europe, women represented more than 50.0 per cent of all migrant workers; in the Arab States, the share was below 20.0 per cent ( ibid. ). Women accounted for 39 per cent of migrant workers in Africa in 2019, slightly lower than the share of women in the total labour force (45%), but an increase from 27 per cent in 2010 ( African Union, 2024 ; African Union, 2021 ). Women working in informal labour or unpaid domestic labour may not be represented in these statistics.

Age breakdown

Adults aged 25–64 constituted 86.5 per cent of all migrant workers ( ILO, 2021 ). Approximately 10 per cent of all migrant workers in 2019 were between 15 and 24 years old ( ibid. ). The share of older workers (aged 65 and over) among migrant workers constituted 3.6 per cent ( ibid. ). In Africa, there were 6.7 million young international migrants (defined here as ages 15-35 years old), constituting 46 per cent of all international migrant workers that year, and 60 per cent of them were male (GMDAC calculation based on African Union Commission and JLMP Partners, 2021 ).

The services sector was the main employer of migrant workers, employing 66.2 per cent of all migrant workers and almost 80 per cent of total female migrant workers worldwide ( ibid. ). A growing demand for labour in the care economy (including in health and domestic work), where the labour force is predominantly female, could partially explain the high share of women migrant workers in the services sector ( ibid. ). As for the remaining migrant workers, 26.7 per cent were in industry and 7.1 per cent in agriculture ( ibid. ). In Africa in 2019, the top three sectors in which migrants were employed were in agriculture, forestry and fishing (27.5%) followed by wholesale and retail trade; transport and storage; accommodation and food service activities (21.9%) and public administration and defence, education, human health and social work activities (21%) ( African Union, 2021 ).

Labour force participation rates

Significant regional variations existed in the share of women among total migrant workers in 2019: women represented more than 50 per cent of all migrant workers in Northern, Southern and Western Europe but the share was below 20 per cent in the Arab States ( ILO, 2021 ). Though the labour force participation of migrant women was lower than that of migrant men, the labour force participation rate of migrant women was higher than that of non-migrant women in many countries.

Data on labour migration and migrant workers are collected in a number of ways. The five main data sources  used to measure the flows and stocks of migrant workers are:

• Population censuses; 
• Household surveys; 
• Labour force surveys; 
• Administrative sources; and 
• Statistical sources ( ILO, 1994/5 ). 

Administrative sources used to measure migrant worker flows include the measurement of new entry or immigration visas, new permissions issued to work in a country, administrative entry registrations at the border and the apprehension of clandestine border crossers ( ibid. ). The measurement of migrant worker stocks include accumulated entry or immigration visas, accumulated permission to work in the country, and estimated stocks of undocumented foreign citizens.  

Other measurements linked to labour migration include recruitment costs and remittances . Aiming to lower recruitment costs can be an indicator of well-governed labour migration, as reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ( Ratha, 2014 ). It is difficult to use remittances as an indicator for labour migration in countries that have a large UN and/or embassy presence or large transnational corporations because their employees’ incomes are recorded as remittances, causing a significant increase in remittance figures.

Data collection at the global level

The ILO maintains an online database of labour statistics ( ILOSTAT ) as well as a collection of labour force surveys . The labour force surveys are standard household-based surveys of work-related statistics. 

ILOSTAT covers various subjects relating to labour, including labour migration. Indicators on labour migration are split into three subtopics: International migrant stock, nationals abroad, and international migrant flow . 

In addition, the ILO produced the third  ILO global estimates on International Migrant Workers  in 2021, which provides global estimates, estimates by country income group, and regional estimates of migrant workers. The reference year is 2019. Previously, ILO had published estimates in 2015 (reference year 2013) and 2018 (reference year 2017).

The UN Statistics Division collects, compiles and disseminates official demographic and social statistics on a number of topics, including employment. 

The Database on Immigrants in OECD and non-OECD Countries (DIOC) compiles data based on population censuses of OECD countries, and in collaboration with the World Bank has extended coverage to non-OECD countries. The database includes information on labour market outcomes, such as labour market status, occupations and sectors of activity. The datasets cover the years 2000-2001, 2005-2006, 2010-2011 and 2015-2016. 

The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series - International (IPUMS-I) - collects and distributes census data from 85 countries. The database includes population questions that address the labour force as well as labour force surveys.

Data collection at the regional level

The Eurostat database provides comprehensive, harmonized labour force data from 28 European Union member states (1995 to 2023) and five other countries, with data from the United Kingdom up to and including 2018. It also contains data on residence permits by reason, length of validity and citizenship, including remunerated activities reasons (occupation). One dataset ( migr_resocc ) disaggregates data by highly skilled workers, researchers, seasonal workers and others. 

Under the Joint Labour Migration Programme (JLMP), the African Union released the third edition of the Labour Migration Statistics in Africa study in 2021 (reference year 2019), in collaboration with the ILO, IOM, and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). The study covers labour migration within Africa in 2019, using mainly population and housing censuses, specialised surveys on employment and/or migration, and routine administrative records. 

The International Labour Migration Statistics Database (ILMS) in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region brings together official government data on international migrant workers’ stocks and flows within the region, as well as information on nationals living or working abroad. Available data available vary, but range from 1990 to 2022.

International Labour Migration Statistics: A Guide for Policymakers and Statistics Organizations in the Pacific  (2015), produced by ILO, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP), provides some data on labour migration in the region. It also provides recommendations on improving international labour migration statistics and how to collect data through census, survey and administrative data sources. 

OECD’s International Migration database provides annual series on migration flows and stocks in OECD countries. It also provides labour market outcomes of immigrants from 2012 to 2022. 

Data strengths & limitations

Data on labour migration are scattered mainly because it is difficult to collect reliable data on migrant workers. According to the Global Migration Group’s Handbook for Improving the Production and Use of Migration Data for Development (2017), data collection faces the following gaps and challenges:

• Lack of good quality data, including missing populations of interest, inconsistent periods of data collection, or key characteristics not being collected
• Limited data comparability due to different concepts, definitions and measurement methods
• Lack of infrastructure to process data in national institutions or at border crossing points
• Insufficient expertise among staff collecting or analyzing data
• Lack of infrastructure to publish key characteristics, populations or places of interest
• Insufficient priority given to labour migration in national policy agendas and related budget allocation.

There is an ongoing effort to streamline international standards and common methodologies within the field of labour migration data collection. Currently, such standards and methodologies vary across countries, making data not comparable or combinable.

ILO’s Labour Migration Module provides a useful tool for gathering reliable data on different aspects of labour migration, including a series of migration-related questions that can be added to existing household and labour force surveys.

Explore our new directory of initiatives at the forefront of using data innovation to improve data on migration.

Immigration & emigration statistics

Migration & development

Most low-skilled labour migrants pay fees to obtain contracts and complete recruitment formalities. This is against international conventions and many countries’ national laws that require employers...

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Featured Publication

The Philippines: Beyond Labor Migration, Toward Development and (Possibly) Return

The first batch of Filipino workers arrived in Hawaii on December 20, 1906 to work on sugarcane and pineapple plantations. More workers, mostly single men, followed; others left Hawaii to work in agriculture in California, Oregon, and Washington, or the salmon canneries of Alaska. On the mainland, low-wage service work in the cities provided income between agricultural seasons or when other jobs were not available. Some 4,000 Filipinos were employed in the merchant marine, but this employment possibility ceased with the Merchant Marine Act of 1936 requiring the crew of U.S. flag vessels to be at least 90 percent American citizens.

Box 1. Definitions

Overseas Filipinos is the term encompassing all Filipino migrants, whether permanent or temporary, legal or unauthorized.

Overseas Filipino Workers , or OFWs , represent a subset of Overseas Filipinos, and are temporary migrants. The OFW term is commonly used, a further sign of the pervasive role that labor migration occupies in Philippine society.

The Commission on Filipinos Overseas includes the following categories of migrants in its stock estimates:

• Permanent Migrants - Filipino immigrants and legal permanent residents abroad, Filipino spouses of foreign nationals, Filipinos naturalized in their host country, Filipino dual citizens, and their descendants.
• Temporary Migrants – Filipinos whose stay overseas, while regular and properly documented, is temporary, owing to the employment-related nature of their status in their host country. Include land-based and sea-based Filipino workers, intracompany transferees, students, trainees, entrepreneurs, businessmen, traders, and others whose stay abroad is six month or more, and their accompanying dependents.
• Irregular Migrants - Filipinos who are not properly documented or without valid residence or work permits, or who may be overstaying their visa.

Estimates place the number of Filipino workers coming to the United States, chiefly to Hawaii, between 1906 and 1934 at 120,000 to 150,000. A small number of scholars, known as pensionados , also migrated to the United States before the 1920s. They were typically either sponsored by the U.S. government or by missionary-related programs. Some returned and assumed important positions in Filipino society, while others remained in the United States.

Because the Philippines was a U.S. colony, the movement of Filipinos to the United States was considered internal migration. As U.S. nationals, Filipinos could enter and leave the country freely, but could not access citizenship. It was not until the passage of the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Law, which provided for the granting of Philippine independence within ten years, that the Philippines became subject to immigration quotas, and Filipinos in the United States became aliens. The law limited the Philippines to 50 visas per year, and migration dropped off dramatically. But even so, there was an exception clause: In case of a labor shortage, the governor of Hawaii was authorized to hire Filipino workers. World War II intervened and further migration to the United States stalled, until the Philippines became independent in July 1946.

Following passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which struck down nationality-based restrictions, Filipino immigration grew and diversified. Other countries of settlement also dismantled their pro-European immigration policies in the 1970s, paving the way for Filipinos to enter Canada, Australia, and New Zealand under family- or skills-based provisions. The Philippines eventually became one of the top ten origin countries in these traditional immigration destinations.

This permanent migration, however, was overshadowed by the larger and thornier temporary labor migration that started in the 1970s. Although the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) estimates the stock of permanent migrants (which includes Filipinos born overseas; see Box 1) is larger than that of temporary migrants, the country’s migration policies have focused on the significant annual outflows of temporary workers, their distribution throughout the world, and the myriad related issues.

Becoming a Source Country of Workers

A number of factors led to the ascent of the Philippines as a major labor exporter in Asia and worldwide. When large-scale labor emigration began in the 1970s, the push factors—already quite strong—were worsened by the 1973 oil crisis. Economic gains could not keep pace with population growth, and the country was hard pressed to provide jobs and decent wages while grappling with severe balance of payment problems.

At the same time, the GCC countries needed workers to realize their ambitious infrastructure projects. With supply and demand converging, the Philippines was ripe for large-scale labor migration, an opportunity the government of Ferdinand Marcos recognized. In 1974, the Labor Code of the Philippines established the framework for what became the government's overseas employment program.

The Philippines' foray into organized international labor migration was supposed to be temporary, lasting only until the country recovered from its economic problems. However, the ongoing demand for workers in the GCC countries and the opening of new labor markets in other regions, especially in East and Southeast Asia, fueled further migration. On the supply side, the push factors did not abate. Lack of sustained economic development, political instability, unabated population growth, persistent unemployment, and low wages continued to compel people to head abroad.

The flow of OFWs, numbering a few thousand per year in the early 1970s, surged past 1 million beginning in 2006 (see Figure 1). In 2015 alone, more than 1,844,000 Filipinos worked abroad. The data on deployed workers include seafarers, who account for 20 to22 percent of all OFWs every year. Filipinos dominate the global seafaring industry, accounting for 25 to 30 percent of the world's seafarers.

Figure 1. Annual Deployment of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), 1975-2015

Source : Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), “Compendium of OFW Statistics,” accessed July 6, 2017, available online .

As of December 2013, the stock of overseas Filipinos totaled slightly more than 10 million, including some 4.9 million permanent settlers (64 percent of whom are in the United States), about 4.2 million temporary migrants (mostly labor migrants, or OFWs, with Saudi Arabia hosting close to 1 million), and an estimated 1.2 million unauthorized migrants worldwide (primarily in Malaysia and the United States).

Filipinos are present in the far reaches of the globe, mostly because of work. Although the destinations of OFWs have diversified, to this day, the Middle East still receives the largest share, with 64 percent heading to the region in 2015, followed by Asia with 28 percent (see Figure 2). In 2015, six of the top ten destinations for both new hires and rehires were in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain), and the remainder were in Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia).

Figure 2. Deployment of Land-Based OFWs by Region, 2015

Source : POEA, “Compendium of OFW Statistics.”

Filipino women are very visible in international migration. They not only compose the majority of permanent settlers, i.e., as part of family migration, but are as prominent as men in labor migration. In fact, since 1992, females have generally outnumbered men among the newly hired land-based workers legally deployed every year. In 2015, domestic work was the top occupation for new hires, at 38 percent.

While the demand for domestic workers has long been the main driver of female migration from the Philippines and Asia in general, until 2005, the demand for entertainers, mostly in Japan, also fueled this migration. With work in the domestic and entertainment sectors unprotected and prone to abuse, the safety and well-being of women migrants became a significant concern. Entertainer migration was particularly controversial and stigmatized because of perceptions that women ended up in the sex industry. From a deployment to Japan of tens of thousands of Filipino entertainers annually, the numbers dropped sharply in 2005 following Japan’s decision to adopt more stringent requirements for foreign entertainers. Likewise, the significance of domestic worker migration was a major push for the Philippines to ratify the 2011 Convention on Domestic Workers, which recognizes domestic work as labor that must be protected.

Beyond Labor Migration

The growing volume of labor migration from the Philippines has increased the incidence of problems and challenges faced by migrants and their families. The participation of private recruitment agencies in matching workers with employers abroad has contributed to the challenges. The problems that emerged in the 1970s remain the same today: illegal recruitment, contract substitution, illegal placement fees, long working hours, and no days off (in the case of domestic workers), among others.  

Over the years, institutional and policy development in the Philippines was geared toward worker protection. The 1995 Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act, a landmark law, aimed to provide protection to OFWs from predeparture through arrival and return. The focus on protection shifted during the presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (2001-10), when the government for the only time to date set a target for the deployment of workers. The Medium-Term Philippine Development Plan 2004-2010 set a goal of sending 1 million workers overseas every year.

This thrust was reversed by the subsequent administration of Benigno Aquino III (2010-16). His social contract with the Filipino people included the goal of moving “from a government that treats its people as an export commodity and as a means to foreign exchange, disregarding the social cost to Filipino families, to a government that creates jobs at home, so that working abroad will be a choice rather than a necessity; and when its citizens do choose to become OFWs, their welfare and protection will still be the government’s priority.”

This stated desire to a return to welfare and protection was accompanied by legislative and executive actions to further regulate labor migration and expand services for OFWs. Soon after Aquino took office, he signed Republic Act (RA) 10022 into law, aiming to further strengthen measures to protect migrant workers, their families, and other overseas Filipinos in distress. Among the law’s key provisions is the restriction of deployment only to countries that have been certified as safe and offering protection. Implementation-wise, certifying a country as safe or unsafe can be politically and diplomatically sensitive, and deployment bans (even for good reasons) have not proven effective in stopping migration. The law also mandates recruitment agencies or employers to provide OFWs with compulsory insurance to cover accidental death or disability, among other protections.

The Philippines Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) also amended recruitment industry regulations, resulting in the 2016 Revised POEA Rules and Regulations Governing the Recruitment and Employment of Seafarers, and a separate set of rules and regulations applying to land-based workers. These measures were aimed at curbing the illegal practices of recruitment agencies, such as exorbitant placement fees and contract substitution, which negatively impact migrants.

The welfare and protection of OFWs received another boost in 2016 with RA 10801, which launched a new charter bolstering the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA). This agency’s mandate is to provide programs and services for the welfare of OFWs and their families, and to manage the funds from member contributions and interest from investments. The contributions come from the OWWA membership fee of US $25 per contract (which employers or recruitment agencies are supposed to cover but instead pass on to OFWs).  A number of nongovernmental organizations had criticized the government for not financially contributing to OWWA operations. The 2016 OWWA charter changed this, stating that the national government would allocate a regular budget for the operations and personnel expenses of the agency, which would free up more funds for programs and services. The law also identified the reintegration program as a core function for OWWA, shifting responsibility from the Department of Labor and Employment.

The government’s antitrafficking measures also strengthen the protection environment (although trafficking can also occur internally). The Expanded Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2012 (RA 10364) amended the 2003 Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act to enhance concerted efforts to combat trafficking and increase penalties for violators. Those who are identified as victims of trafficking can access support and assistance.

Growing marriage migration also has caused anxieties about the welfare of women who marry foreign nationals. A new law (RA 10906) strengthening the Anti-Mail Order Bride Act of 1990 was enacted in 2016. Unlike the earlier law, the amended version applies to Filipino men as well as women (though marriage migrants are overwhelmingly female), and takes into account trafficking and new developments, such as online transactions. The law mainly prohibits commercial or for-profit matching or offering of Filipinos to foreign nationals through the mail, in person, or over the Internet, for the purpose of marriage or common law partnership.

Linking Migration and Development

Beyond the now-traditional facilitate-and-protect policy framework, migration governance in recent years has also started to make inroads on migration and development. The global discussion on the migration and development nexus may have influenced reflections in the Philippine context. A 2007 conference and a 2010 comprehensive study on migration and development in the Philippines brought to the fore five key observations:

• Migration policies in the Philippines were primarily focused on temporary labor migration.
• The development impact of migration was mostly discussed in terms of economic benefits, particularly remittances.
• The social costs of migration to families were often mentioned.
• National, regional, and local development plans did not take international migration into consideration.
• At the regional and local levels, there were few migration institutions.

In other words, the migration and development nexus was more of a disconnect: Except in the case of remittances, policies in these areas were not linked, and the national framework was out of sync with local frameworks. The Central Bank of the Philippines had taken the lead on improving the remittance environment, likely driven in part by the enormous importance of these money transfers as well as the relative ease of monitoring formal remittances, compared to other impacts such as social costs. However, other migration and development initiatives were not as persistently pursued, implemented, or monitored.

Despite this implementation gap at home, the Philippines has become a global leader in discussions on migration and development. It has actively participated in the Global Forum on Migration and Development, and hosted the second such forum in 2008.

These development-related discussions have also expanded the domestic migration conversation to encompass the broader population of overseas Filipinos, not just OFWs. At the start of the Aquino administration in 2010, the CFO, created in 1980 to look after the concerns of permanent migrants and nurture their links to the Philippines, embraced the task of “Responding to the Challenges of Migration and Development.” The commission began more actively reaching out to the Filipino diaspora through global and regional summits and developed a one-stop online portal for diaspora engagement, BaLinkBayan.

CFO also lobbied and cooperated with the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA), the key government agency responsible for development planning and policy, to integrate international migration issues into the Philippine Development Plan 2011-16 . Sixty provisions on migration and development appeared in seven out of nine chapters of the plan. Further, in 2014, NEDA created an interagency structure to promote attention to migration and development and improve coordination among migration-related agencies and other government agencies.

There has also been movement toward involving local governments in developing institutions, policies, and programs on migration and development, including under Phase II of the Joint Migration and Development Initiative (JMDI). In the past, local officials tended to think of overseas employment as a national government concern and responsibility. While few local governments have established migration centers, the POEA and OWWA have forged partnerships with local governments to enhance the reach of their programs and services.

Migration Governance under Duterte: Is Change Coming?

After campaigning on the promise of “change is coming,” Rodrigo Duterte became the 16th president of the Philippines on June 30, 2016, succeeding Aquino. Like Filipinos at home, those overseas largely voted for Duterte.

A year into the Duterte presidency, his administration has sent mixed signals on how it will handle international migration. In his first State of the Nation Address in July 2016, Duterte rattled off a list of migration-related goals, namely to combat human trafficking and illegal recruiting, provide mandatory financial education to migrants, and consolidate offices and agencies dealing with overseas Filipinos to more efficiently respond to their concerns.

The first—waging “war against traffickers and illegal recruiters”—basically continues predecessors’ protection thrust. Similarly, the nod to financial education for migrants and their communities was part of the package of migration and development initiatives in the 2000s.

In its first 100 days, the Duterte administration introduced some immediate moves to hasten government processes affecting OFWs, including setting up one-stop shop service centers at the POEA. These centers gather in one location the government agencies where applicants or overseas workers secure documents needed to process their papers. Other changes, such as dropping the requirement for vacationing OFWs to secure an overseas employment certificate and the introduction of an online seafarer registry, were hailed by OFWs. Discussions are underway to cut through more red tape, such as extending the validity of Philippine passports from five years to ten years.

However, Duterte’s proposal to create a single department to effectively address various OFW concerns would be a departure from the multiagency approach that the Philippines has fashioned over the years.

To Consolidate, or Not To Consolidate?

Duterte’s allies in Congress lost no time in proposing versions of the bill to create a single migration department. Proponents argue that the proposal is intended to fulfill Duterte’s campaign promise to better serve OFWs, suggesting a single department would be more efficient. Civil-society organizations are divided on this proposal. Opponents argue that the various agencies that cater to different types of overseas Filipinos and/or have different mandates have already developed competencies to perform their functions. Rather than create another bureaucracy whose components will be carved out from existing departments or divisions, opponents argue it would be more constructive to improve coordination among agencies.

Interestingly, Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III has a different idea. He sees a department devoted to OFWs as further institutionalizing overseas employment, which he claims is the very opposite of what this administration wants. He said, "Our final goal is to bring them back to the country and we can only do that if we give them decent jobs, decent pay." However, while the goal of bringing OFWs home one day has been expressed by all presidents, it has largely been unrealistic.

Duterte Finds Approval Among OFWs

The response of OFWs to President Duterte is one of overwhelming support . In his first year as president, he made 21 overseas trips, visiting 18 countries and touching base with Filipinos abroad, who greeted him enthusiastically.

In his visit to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar in April 2017, Duterte stated he was ready to kneel before OFWs to show his appreciation for their sacrifices in sending remittances home. Appearing before Filipino communities in these GCC countries, he repeated his promise to deliver better services through the proposed Department of Overseas Filipino Workers.

When he met with Filipinos in Japan, the crowd applauded his promise to end the Filipinos’ search for opportunities outside the country: “I work hard that we will earn more so that by the time, this is my promise to you and God and to those working abroad, this will be the last. The next generation of Filipinos will work in the Philippines. So we will do away with so many things. Corruption, then drugs.”

Indeed, in his visits abroad, Duterte never fails to discuss the central program of his administration: the war on drugs. His overseas audience sees his hardline stance, which has received international condemnation, as decisive and the war on drugs as necessary to rid the country of drug addicts. Since he took office, more than 7,000 alleged drug users and dealers have died in extrajudicial killings carried out by police or vigilantes, according to Human Rights Watch. The reactions of Filipinos abroad to the killings, mostly of poor Filipinos, as well as the disregard for human rights and the culture of violence that the war on drugs has bred have been muted.

Long-Term Development

Offering another glimpse into how the new administration will address migration, in February 2017 it approved the Philippine Development Plan 2012-22. The new PDP builds on the previous development plan, but also situates the development agenda within the longer-term AmBisyon Natin 2040 (Our Vision 2040; literally, ambition), which reflects the aspirations of Filipinos for themselves and their country.

This long-term view in the new PDP is novel, as development plans are typically anchored on the six-year cycle of each administration. The new PDP explains, “As one of Asia’s better-performing economies today, the Philippines is in a more favorable position than it has ever been in the last four decades. No longer weighed down by an unmanageable fiscal deficit and more secure in its political legitimacy, the government can now afford to think about national goals based on a longer time horizon.” The Duterte administration’s target is to achieve annual GDP growth of 7-8 percent in the medium term, and the PDP aims to cut the poverty rate from 21.6 percent to 14 percent overall, and from 30 percent to 20 percent in rural areas. It also seeks to reduce the unemployment rate of 5.5 percent by 3-5 percentage points by 2022.

The new PDP gives special attention to overseas Filipinos by incorporating international migration issues, often referencing migrants directly, throughout. It gives attention to the special circumstances of migrants and their families, and aims to protect their rights and improve their well-being, strengthen their engagement in governance, facilitate their participation in the country’s development, and ensure their smooth reintegration upon return.

In its chapter on human-capital development, the PDP acknowledges the push factor in labor migration, noting that “Limited employment opportunities force Filipinos to migrate by necessity and not by choice.” It points to regional integration initiatives such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and efforts to strengthen ties with China and Russia as opportunities to diversify destinations. ASEAN Member States, notably Singapore and Malaysia, have long been OFW destinations. In the case of China and Russia, Duterte overtures to these two countries may have played a hand in identifying them as potential future destinations. For now, these two receive a small number of Filipino workers, although reports indicate some 200,000 unauthorized Filipino domestic workers live in China, where they earn a higher income than in Hong Kong.

Limited employment opportunities also affect higher skilled Filipinos. A study assessing the country’s innovation found that the supply of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers outpaces local demand, which leads to emigration and underemployment of skilled scientists and engineers. And their emigration results in brain drain, which deprives the country of human capital important for development. The PDP calls for strengthening the long-running Balik Scientist (Return Scientist) Program and similar schemes, and is open to the idea of tapping foreign experts, including overseas Filipinos, for institutional capacity building and development expertise.

Since 2016, the National Reintegration Center for OFWs has been conducting consultations with stakeholders nationwide in preparation for the reintegration summit that will be held in August 2017. The summit aims to produce thoughtful reflections and action plans that will respond to the opportunities and challenges that return migrants carry with them.

Looking Ahead

In the past decade, migration governance in the Philippines has gone beyond labor migration policies and remittances, making strides toward linking migration policies to broader development goals. The last two Philippine Development Plans have integrated migration into national development planning; the government’s key planning agency, NEDA, has come to appreciate the importance of migration; and a mechanism, the Subcommittee on Migration and Development, has been established within NEDA to improve coordination among government agencies and devote more attention to migration and development.

These are important milestones that need to be fleshed out and sustained over time. At the local level, mainstreaming and upscaling projects for local institution capacity building, the setting up of Migration Resource Centers and similar structures in local government units and integrating migration in local development plans, among others, have been implemented in selected regional and local governments. In other words, the groundwork for the expansion of migration policies in the Philippines has been started; the next task is to keep up the momentum to maximize the development potentials of migration, while continuing to look out for the well-being of migrants.

ABS-CBN News. 2017. Creating OFW Department 'Goes Against' Duterte Admin Goals, Bello Says. ABS-CBN News, April 14, 2017. Available online .

Asis, Maruja M. B. 2008. How International Migration Can Support Development: A Challenge for the Philippines. In Migration and Development: Perspectives from the South , eds. Stephen Castles and Raul Delgado Wise. Geneva: International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Asis, Maruja M. B. and Fabio Baggio, eds. 2008. Moving Out, Back and Up: International Migration and Development Prospects in the Philippines. Manila: Scalabrini Migration Center.

Asis, Maruja M. B. and Golda Myra Roma. 2010. Eyes on the Prize: Towards a Migration and Development Agenda in the Philippines. In Brick by Brick: Building Cooperation between the Philippines and Migrants’ Associations in Italy and Spain , ed. Fabio Baggio. Manila: Scalabrini Migration Center.

Battistella, Graziano and Maruja M. B. Asis. 2011. Protecting Filipino Transnational Domestic Workers: Government Regulations and Their Outcomes. Discussion Paper Series No. 2011-12. Makati City, Philippines: Philippine Institute for Development Studies. Available online .

Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO). 2017. CFO Statistics on Philippine International Migration. Manila: CFO. Available online .

---. N.d. BaLinkBayan: Overseas Filipinos’ One Stop Online Portal for Diaspora Engagement. Accessed May 18, 2017. Available online .

Duterte, Rodrigo. 2016. President Duterte’s First State of the Nation Address. Quezon City, Philippines, July 25, 2016. Available online .

Garcia, Pia. 2016. Duterte to Filipinos in Japan: One Day You Will Not Have to Work Overseas. CNN Philippines, October 29, 2016. Available online .

Human Rights Watch. 2017. Philippines: Duterte’s First Year a Human Rights Calamity. News release, June 28, 2017. Available online .

IOM and Scalabrini Migration Center (SMC). 2013. Country Migration Report: The Philippines. Makati City and Quezon City: IOM and SMC. Available online .

National Economic Development Authority (NEDA). 2004. Medium-Term Philippine Development Plan 2004-2010 . Pasig City: NEDA.

---. 2011. Philippine Development Plan 2011-2016. Pasig City: NEDA.

---. 2017. Philippine Development Plan 2017-2022 . Pasig City: NEDA.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and Scalabrini Migration Center. 2017. Interrelations between Public Policies, Migration and Development in the Philippines . Paris: OECD Publishing. Available online .

Philippine Information Agency (PIA). 2017. One-Stop Service Center for OFWs (OSSCO) Now in 15 Locations Nationwide. News release, PIA, January 2, 2017. Available online .

Philippine Migrants Rights Watch (PMRW). 2016. Do We Need a Department of Migration? Press release, PMRW, September 9, 2016. Available online .

Philippine Overseas Employment Administration. 2016. Overseas Employment Statistics: Deployed Overseas Filipino Workers 2014-2015. Accessed May 18, 2017. Available online .

---. Various years. Compendium of OFW Statistics. Accessed July 6, 2017. Available online .

Republic of the Philippines Official Gazette. 2010. A Social Contract with the Filipino People: Benigno S. Aquino III Platform for Government. Accessed May 18, 2017. Available online .

Yan, Alice. 2016. Is It Time for China to Open Its Doors to Filipino Domestic Helpers? South China Morning Post, October 19, 2016. Available online .

Review of Literature Related to Labour Migration: Types, Causes, and Impacts

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Labour Migrants During the Pandemic: A Comparative Perspective

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• Published: 19 October 2020
• Volume 63 , pages 885–900, ( 2020 )

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• Arjan de Haan 1  

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The COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying policies of confinement or lockdown have been amply demonstrated and are possibly reinforcing economic, social and gender inequalities. Because of the nature of the measures that governments took in response to the health crisis, migrants—including the millions of labour migrants in Indian cities—have been placed in a particularly vulnerable situation. This essay provides a comparative and historical perspective of the conditions of migrant workers, arguing that the disadvantages migrants face are entrenched in economic and social structures, unearthed in this pandemic, and that alongside immediate social protection measures, policies need to address the deep-rooted barriers that keep migrants vulnerable.

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying policies of confinement or lockdown have been amply demonstrated and are likely reinforcing inequalities. Economic inequalities are reinforced as the better-off are better able to protect themselves, either secure in their jobs, or by having the resources to support themselves during a downturn. Gender inequalities are reinforced as women tend to be in more vulnerable jobs and are exposed to health risks. Social and identity (race, caste, nationality) inequalities often intersect with socio-economic inequalities.

Because of the nature of the measures governments around the world took in response to the health crisis, mobile populations have been placed in particularly vulnerable situations. Across the world, refugees are amongst the most vulnerable, their living conditions make containing the virus extra challenging, and stigmatisation likely increases. Labour migrants, similarly, often have poor living and working conditions, are exposed to health risks at work, have no social security or insurance to fall back on, and are often stigmatised.

Labour migrants’ vulnerability manifested itself in extreme ways in India, when the government announced a lockdown, and big cities’ labour migrants found themselves in the void of having lost their job, sometimes their housing, and in large numbers of cases having lost their income, and therefore with no alternative but to return to their home villages. Their plight has been well described in the media, by civil society organizations filling the gaps government agencies should be playing, and the efforts of groups of researchers.

This essay provides a comparative perspective of the conditions of migrant workers. Footnote 1 I will summarise international experience—documented through investigative journalism and rapid research—that shows the vulnerability of migrants and gaps in policy frameworks globally. Further, it is important to understand how the conditions that migrants in India live in are not of recent origin, and the result of a structural condition of continued circulation between home villages that do not provide the necessary livelihoods and cities that need migrants but do not create the conditions for them to settle—they remain, as I slightly awkwardly called them in my publication on migrant workers in Calcutta ‘unsettled settlers’ (de Haan 1994 ).

This essay illustrates this with a comparison with other crises, including the economic crisis following 1929 where migrant workers disappeared like ‘snow for the sun’ (but without the health consequences migrants now are facing). I will argue that both research and theories, and policies have had a deep tendency to ignore and neglect the existence of this mobile population (de Haan 1999 ): both, for different reasons, have a deep sedentary bias. Academic studies have continued to see migration as a transitory phenomenon, often in line with what is seen as a classic process of industrialisation that England experienced. For policymakers, migration has remained largely invisible: data capture circulatory migration very poorly, rural development policies often have the aim to reduce migration, and—perhaps most important—many of the public policies tend to be residence-based.

This perspective is offered to contribute to consideration of policies, particularly post-pandemic. If indeed the neglect of migrants is of a systemic nature, policy reforms need to address the roots of these. It would require a rethink of the place migrants play in India’s society, to ensure data fully acknowledge the complex but sustained patterns of mobility that exist and to enquire how public policies need to be rebuilt on the basis of that reality.

2 Inequalities Magnified: A Global Perspective

As the COVOD-19 pandemic started to evolve, there was an initial impression that the virus was an ‘equaliser’. Originating in Wuhan, China, its global spread affected global travellers and heavily impacted relatively affluent areas in Europe and the USA. Unprecedented policy responses were put in place that brought the spread of the virus under control in most OECD countries, while it continued to expand globally, including in India. Footnote 2

But thoughts of the virus being the ‘great equaliser’, as the New York governor Cuomo, for example, called it, have rapidly dissipated. In the USA, ‘ [l]ong-standing systemic health and social inequities have put some members of racial and ethnic minority groups at increased risk of getting COVID-19 or experiencing severe illness, regardless of age’ (CDC 2020 ). In Ontario, Canada, ‘[s]ocial determinants of health … such as gender, socio-economic position, race/ethnicity, occupation, Indigeneity, homelessness and incarceration, play an important role in risk of COVID-19 infection, particularly when they limit ability to maintain physical distancing’ (Public Health Ontario 2020 ). In Toronto, racialized people accounted for 83 per cent of COVID-19 cases, despite forming only 52 per cent of the population. Footnote 3 Geographically, while the pandemic initially spread in nations’ urban and well-connected centres, it has continued to spread to geographically more remote places and, particularly in developing countries, to areas with weak health sector capacities (and possibly also higher under-reporting).

The links between inequalities and the impact of COVID-19 run in both directions (Sachs 2020 ). Higher inequality tends to be associated with worse overall health conditions, increasing vulnerability to COVID-19 deaths. Inequalities can be associated with lower social cohesion and trust, and political polarisation, which can reduce governments’ capacities to adopt measures needed to address the pandemic. Inequalities in the world of work—often associated with social identity, as discussed by Deshpande and Ramachandran ( 2020 ) for India—enhance the vulnerability of large numbers of workers. Manual workers, and owners of small businesses, are more likely to lose jobs or working hours, and thus income, and often have limited social security. Informal sector workers and women disproportionally are particularly vulnerable (WIEGO 2020 ). Those staying in work without being able to distance are exposed to infections: front-line health workers, domestic workers (GlobalVoices 2020 ), workers in food industries, vendors, and in tourism (Dempster and Zimmer 2020 ), with social and gender disadvantages usually compounding labour market ones.

Labour migrants face a multitude of disadvantages during the pandemic, which in turn may contribute to spreading the pandemic. Footnote 4 First, the movement essential for their livelihoods in itself can pose a risk in terms of spread of infectious diseases, even if the initial COVID-19 spread did not primarily affect labour migrants. Footnote 5 Many were stranded as economic activities and travel shut down, and international labour migrants were hit by the restrictions government around the world put in place. Footnote 6 The restrictions in many cases have enhanced risks particularly for vulnerable groups including children (UNICEF 2020 ). There have been reports about mistreatment by smugglers (Rodriguez 2020 ). In the case of China, job loss as a result of the pandemic reinforced pre-existing inequalities along the household registration system (Che et al. 2020 ).

Second, the type of work migrants typically engage in, and their living conditions, makes them relatively vulnerable. The places migrants return to typically are under-served by health services. Absence of social protection measures makes it less easy for them to implement social distancing. As described by Choudhari ( 2020 ), mental health challenges may compound these disadvantages. Investigative journalism shows that migrant farm workers in Canada’s agricultural sector are vulnerable to, and unprotected against the consequences of the pandemic (CBC 2020 ; Financial Post 2020 ), with migration status potentially limiting access to health care (Doyle 2020 ).

Third, the pandemic can reinforce stigma, both in host locations and when migrants return (for fear of carriers of diseases), and surveillance (Castillo 2020 ). There are reports from across the word of new or intensified discriminatory treatment, Footnote 7 non-payment, for example, for domestic workers that stayed in their job (GlobalVoices 2020 ) and xenophobia (Douglas et al. 2020 ; IOM 2020b ) (Douglas et al. 2020 ), for example, in varying contexts of Gulf States (Migrants-rights.org 2020 ), Canada (Hennebry et al. 2020 ), India (Ramasubramanyam 2020 ; Bajoria 2020 ), vis-à-vis African students in China (BBC 2020 ), and in Pakistan directed at Shia minorities (Mirza 2020 ).

3 Labour Migrants in India

The vulnerability of labour migrants manifested itself in extreme ways in India, with disadvantages of work, identity and migratory status reinforcing each other. Footnote 8 Their plight has been well described in media, by civil society organizations and researchers like the Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN 2020a , b , c ). When the government announced the lockdown, labour migrants in cities found themselves in the void of having lost their job, sometimes their housing, and in large numbers of cases their income. Many of them had no alternative but to return to their home villages, Footnote 9 and as transport was cancelled as part of the lockdown, often on foot, exposed to hunger, and risks of infection, harassment, and poor conditions of forced quarantine. Migrant workers that stayed in cities often found working conditions worsen. Footnote 10 Many migrants who had returned feel forced to return to cities as they run out of savings (Patnaik 2020 ).

As far as I am aware, there are no reliable numbers of the labour migrants that moved back, though there are some estimates of how many people moved by train: estimates have varied between 5 and 40 million. In fact, numbers of internal migrants generally are uncertain (Srivastava and Sutradhar 2016 ; Srivastava 2020a ; GoI 2017 ), with the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act of 1979 remaining to a great extent a dysfunctional framework (Sivaram 2020 ). Estimates put total numbers of internal migrant workers at about 100 million (against a Census estimate of some 45 million inter- and intrastate migrant workers Footnote 11 ), mostly originating from poorer districts of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Rajasthan, etc., and a relatively small proportion of these workers being from Nepal and Bangladesh. In particular, estimates of, and knowledge about circular and seasonal migration have remained uncertain. Footnote 12 Female labour migration also is likely under-recorded (Shanthi 2006 ), adding significantly to the overall gaps in knowledge on migration. Moreover, academic studies commonly underestimate the role of labour mobility. Footnote 13 Theories and models of migration tend to neglect the complexity of patterns of mobility, again enhancing the gaps in knowledge about the extent and impact of population mobility, often particularly important with respect to more marginalised groups.

The lack of clear data appears to reflect, and possibly reinforces, the ambivalent treatment of migrants in official discourse (Deshingkar 2017 ). As in other countries, such as China during its years of miracle economic growth and institutionalised in its hukou system, and mirroring ambivalent views globally about the place of immigrant, migrants and labour mobility in particular have never been fully accepted as part of India’s policy. Urban policies demonstrate common apathy and often discrimination towards migrants. Footnote 14 Inter-state migrants are at risk of losing access to public social provisions, such as PDS, and even health care that are tied to permanent residence, and often do not have access to housing schemes in cities.

The apathy towards labour migration is often reflected in rural policies as well, with a common focus on reducing migration in development and anti-poverty programs (and in much international development policy). Footnote 15 NREGA’s objectives include reducing labour migration through the provision of locally available work in rural areas, similar to the earlier Maharashtra employment scheme (Datta 2019 : 39–40; Solinski 2012 ).

4 Mobility Neglected: An Historical Perspective

The stories of migrants moving back to their villages of origin have parallels in earlier crises. Like the COVID-19 pandemic, the bubonic plague in 1994 led to large-scale departure of migrants (though without them being stranded, as trains were made available), skilled and manual workers, from Surat, leading to a labour shortage when factories reopened.

Economic downturns have had similar impacts on migrant workers. In Calcutta’s jute industry, in 1931 following the 1929 economic crisis, many jobs were cut (de Haan 1994 ). As the British colonial Labour Commissioner R. N. Gilchrist ( 1932 ) wrote, workers moved back to the rural areas en masse, without signs of protest: they disappeared as ‘snow for the sun’. As during the 2020 pandemic, the timing and season of the return was significant, as the return happened during the month that workers usually would return for their annual visit to their homes (see further discussion below).

As in 2020, in 1931 the return of workers to their ‘native villages’ did not come as a surprise. In fact, it was a common occurrence, as patterns of migration were—and have continued to be—circular. Earlier long-distance migration streams, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—for example from parts of Bihar to Rangpur, Mymensingh and the Sunderbans in eastern Bengal, and Burma, for agricultural and other manual work, including for railway construction (Yang 1989 )—tended to be circular, as occupations were seasonal and temporary. This circular pattern continued to predominate for industrial labour: while industrial work such as in the jute industry was much more continuous, many of the workers continued to remain migrants, maintaining close links with their villages of origin.

This predominance of circular (rural-to-urban) migration has been subject to a range of interpretations that often defined the phenomenon as an exception. On the one hand, colonial authorities and factory management attributed the pattern to workers’ unwillingness to settle, and lack of commitment to modern industries, with high rates of labour turnover. They noted labour shortages, particularly during summer months, the time of harvest and or marriages. This was often highlighted as requiring informal middlemen (’sardars’) for recruitment of workers and a common system of replacement (‘badli’) workers. The personalistic and informal nature of recruitment was closely associated with a segmentation of migration streams, a pattern that has continued to define India’s labour market and migration. Footnote 16

Critical studies, on the other hand, including the work by Breman ( 1985 , 2019 ; see also his contribution to this volume) that have highlighted extreme exploitation in migrant work have argued that it was in the interest of capitalism to keep the workforce migratory, constituting a near-endless labour surplus (partly caused by the destruction of traditional artisanal production under colonialism), that employers and authorities did not invest in the living conditions that would allow workers and their families to settle, Footnote 17 and that informal and segmented recruitment helped keep costs of labour low. During strikes or lockouts, also, workers would often return home; many trade union organisers in the jute industry shared the concerns of the employers about the lack of commitment of the migrant worker to the industry and urban area. Footnote 18

Most of India’s migrant labourers have been men, and this too has been explained either by reference to workers traditional customs or preferences, or managers’ strategies and their lack of investment in living conditions surrounding factories. In my own view, single-factor explanations are insufficient to explain the diversity of migration patterns within one industry or area of destination, nor the historical trends towards a single male earner. Footnote 19

Explanations for this pattern of rural–urban migration, in my view, need to take into account the complexity of interaction between rural and urban societies, contrasting the ‘classic’ historical interpretation of the formation of an industrial and urban working class (de Haan and Rogaly 2002 ). Availability of seasonal work, of course, provides temporary opportunities outside villages that themselves provide insufficient employment. But even when work was more permanent, migrants have continued to maintain a link with their villages. Footnote 20

The importance of this continued pattern was clearly expressed in the words of the industrial workers in the jute industry I interviewed. ‘What to do? My house is there!’. Many said that they go when there was a ‘need’ or ‘work’: marriage, an emergency, taking care of the land, settling land disputes, education of the children, or simply visiting family was a key reason for going to the village, for 1 or 2 months per year, quite often longer and frequently beyond the allowed period of leave.

From the perspective of rural development, similarly, it is critical to take into account this continued interaction of rural and urban economic activity. Research on out-migration from Bihar Footnote 21 shows the long history of out-migration, as well as the fact that this has involved most socio-economic strata, including, for example, sons of larger landowners (as described by Das 1986 ). From a functionalist perspective, this continued out-migration, while caused by poverty in many parts of Bihar, also helped to maintain its socio-economic structure, with remittances supporting the structure of landownership. Unlike for international migrants—who typically have come from less poor areas in India—the income from rural–urban unskilled labour migration generally did not allow for significant investment in agricultural or other rural production, but functioned as a safety valve, economically as well as socially.

This rural–urban interaction has by and large remained outside the view of development strategies, possibly regarded as merely a transitional or exceptional phenomenon. It is not well reflected in census or surveys, which have underestimated degrees of labour migration and its importance for development in both urban and rural areas. Policies have remained by and large silent and in neglect of this reality, or indeed—as mentioned above—have aimed to reduce that mobility.

It is important to reiterate that this neglect impacts different groups of migrants differently and that it is migrants in the informal sector that are particularly affected. It appears that the neglect of migrants’ conditions—under the pandemic and long term—is mirrored in a neglect of the so-called informal sector. As much as circular migration has remained a feature of India’s modernising economy, the size of the informal sector has remained the same, and policies to address these ineffective or absent.

The long-standing neglect of migration has contributed to policy gaps that so clearly surfaced with the COVID-19 lockdown. International reporting has suggested that the extent of suffering for migrant workers seemed to be particularly extensive in India. The pattern of circular migration that has contributed to the sudden large-scale movement is not unique to India; for example, similar movements of annual return are witnessed during China’s New Year, and there have been reports from West African cities of young migrants moving back to their villages to support harvesting. What appears pronounced is the neglect and negligence by official policy and employers: while public health concerns of course directed a cessation of movement, there were no or very limited attempt to safeguard the travel of those tens of millions of workers.

5 Inclusive Policies

It is important to highlight the initiatives that supported migrant workers in India, including civil society efforts (such as SWAN mentioned above and SEWA as described in Homenet 2020 ), Self Help Group initiatives (IFAD 2020 ), and Central Government support measures. Footnote 22 Bihar’s Chief Minister offered to cover the costs of stranded migrant workers elsewhere in India. Odisha’s Chief Minister offered to bring back migrants that were stuck in different parts of the country during lockdown; the government set up dedicated hospitals and health centres and announced a package of income and employment support for returning workers (Mishra 2020 ; The Indian Express 2020 ).

Kerala that stood out for its proactive response to the emerging COVID-19 pandemic provided support to migrant workers that had lost employment (The Week 2020 ; The Economic Times 2020 ). It set up camps using, for example, schools and provided basic necessities and health-related information in various languages. Kerala’s response may have led to a relatively small proportion of migrant workers returning to their villages of origin (Nideesh 2020 ).

While these responses do play a role and have provided essential support to migrants, they are insufficient to address major inequalities and the risks associated with health and other shocks. The disadvantages migrants face—unearthed in this pandemic—are entrenched in economic and social structures. How can this be turned around? What policies are needed to address the deep-rooted barriers that keep migrants vulnerable? And does the current crisis provide an opportunity for such changes?

Critical, in my view, is the need to accept migration, and the specific patterns of migration and the contribution migrant workers make to local economies. Often, there is a greater—and important—concern for the well-being of migrants abroad, Footnote 23 and it is important that the vulnerability of internal migrants is equally recognised. With the benefit of hindsight, the way the Government was caught by surprise by the chaos caused by the lockdown—and the public health risks this may have caused—is part of a pattern of neglect of labour migration. Despite their essential function in the urban economy (and possible costs to the economy of labour shortages workers have left), seasonal and circular migrant workers do not have a fixed or accepted place in cities (Kundu 2009 ), with as mentioned many of their entitlements based in their villages of origin. Accounting for these migration patterns, and their impacts on household forms, in surveys (for example in the form of Kerala’s migration survey) and census is a critical first step.

A ‘regularisation’ of migrant workers ensures all citizens can access rights and entitlements independent of their current residence. Footnote 24 During the crisis, some countries and authorities limited the rights of migrants, Footnote 25 while others enhanced these. Bahrain declared an amnesty during 2020 for irregular workers in the country to get regularized without paying any fees or fines (Sorkar 2020 ). On the sending side, countries like Bangladesh that for many years have institutionalised support to international migrants—often supported by IOM—put in place schemes for returning workers including soft loans for training and starting economic activities (Sorkar 2020 ). The Philippines’ government in collaboration with non-state actors has been commended for its proactive role in repatriating, and welfare measures for migrants (albeit with significant gaps in implementation; Liao 2020 ).

Ensuring migrants have access to their right requires a range of reforms and new measures, most of which are not new. Footnote 26 Social protection measures need to become ‘portable’ (Srivastava 2020b ); subsidised food, for example, needs to be accessible independent of location. The ‘one nation one ration card’ initiative could be a critical step towards this goal, and there is a need and opportunity to apply existing technology to enable easier transfers of financial support (Shreedharan and Jose 2020 ). Where migrants move with families including children, education (CREATE 2008 ) and mid-day meals need to be accessible—similar to education initiatives under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the District Primary Education Programme (Majumder 2011 )—to them. Registration for welfare provisions needs to be simple.

Migrants should be able to avail the same political rights NRI’s have been given, to vote by ballot (Ghosh and Bandyopadhyay ( 2020 ); recent analysis by Gaikwand and Nellis ( 2020 ) shows low political participation by migrants, and hence a lower likelihood that politicians represent their interests. Health services—regular care as well as pandemic services—need to be accessible to migrants as much as local populations (Kusuma and Babu 2018 ; Nitika et al. 2014 ). Sustained advocacy for workers rights, such as by Aajeevika, SEWA, Footnote 27 and more recently new networks as mentioned above, as well as effective representation by trade unions is an essential element of ensuring migrants can realise their rights.

6 Conclusion

The marginalisation of migrant workers in India is deep-rooted, has a long historical background and continuity since the colonial period, and manifests itself in the absence of knowledge and data of how many migrant workers live and work outside their place of residence. Urban authorities and employers have continued to take the pattern of circular migration for granted, providing minimal facilities and security for its workers, reinforcing a lack of belonging and ability for migrants to settle with their families.

The unique shock that COVID-19 implied, but equally importantly the government’s response, lockdown and extremely limited support for the tens of millions of migrant workers, showed how deep this neglect is, and the potential costs for the migrants themselves but also the health system and the economy more broadly. Crises provide opportunities for ‘building back better’: in the case of migrant workers these consist of essential immediate social protection, but also, and likely much more challenging, addressing deep-rooted inequalities that keep workers in marginalized positions, and the invisibility of the migrants that once again were absorbed by their villages of origin.

This case of neglect of migrant workers during the pandemic in India was quite widely reported, at least during the early months of the pandemic. The rapid survey of sources on which this essay is built suggest that there has been much less reporting in other parts of the world; this may be a case of under-reporting, or an indication of particular and widespread vulnerability of migrants in India. Responses to shocks for international migrants have seen both new supportive measures, and further marginalisation and stigmatisation. It seems important to develop exploration of the varied responses and of the policies and advocacy that can address the deep-rooted disparities that migrant workers face.

The essay draws liberally on a range of sources, including investigative journalism and rapid research during the pandemic, peer-reviewed studies and my own earlier field research, and was written at a time that the daily numbers of infections in India are still increasing.

At the time of finishing the draft of this article, at the end of August 2020 the number of daily new cases in India had become larger than anywhere else in the world (Drèze 2020 ); the number of cases (and recorded deaths) relative to the population has remained well below the world’s average ( https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ ; accessed 30 August 2020).

Toronto Public Health data, between mid-May and mid-July, quoted in the Globe and Mail , July 30, 2020 .

See for overviews by the World Bank ( 2020b ), and guidance from the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner ( 2020 ). On the impact of refugees, see, for example, Dempster et al. ( 2020 ), ILO ( 2020a ).

There is some information about the extent to which the migrants’ exodus from Indian cities: a study by Aajeevika Bureau showed that none of the migrants that returned to Rajasthan in the first phase of lockdown in March were infected, and that there were cases of infections amongst migrants returning in May (SciDev.Net 2020 ).

IOM 2020a . Estimates in West Africa indicated that regional migration decreased by 50 per cent (IOM 2020c ).

OHCHR ( 2020 ); extreme conditions for African labour migrants in Saudi Arabia were reported by Brown and Zelalem ( 2020 ).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1glhO8wJrzLClRytfIzvV98wYqf7anS5s/view .

For Bihar, see, for example, Priyadarshini and Chaudhury ( 2020 ), in the edited volume on the migrant crisis by Ranabir Samaddar.

Sood and Nath ( 2020 ), Thomas and Jayaram ( 2020 ) and Mander and Verma ( 2020 ). Bailwal and Sah ( 2020 ) describe the conditions of some workers that stayed behind including increases in working hours, and the reasons for doing so (lack of work in home villages, outstanding payments from contractors).

https://censusindia.gov.in/2011census/d-series/d-3.html ; in total, the Census 2011 enumerated 456 million people as migrants, with 211 million of them (mostly women) having moved for marriage.

Deshingkar et al ( 2008 a). Similarly, estimates of remittances by internal migrants are uncertain (Export–Import Bank of India 2016 ).

For example, in Munshi and Rosenzweig ( 2009 , 2020 ); see Deshingkar ( 2017 ). I believe that expectations of rates of urbanisation and observations that rates remain low (e.g. World Bank 2015 , which refers to India’s ‘messy urbanization’) have typically neglected the importance of circular migration (see Lucci 2016 for discussion on similar gaps in Africa).

See Aggarwal et al. ( 2019 ); the index shows varying degrees of support for migration in India’s states.

In international debates, there has been a growth appreciation of international migration and remittances, but with a continuously strong policy strand that sees development as a way to reduce (international) migration; see Clemens ( 2020 ) for a rebuttal of that view, in a context of continued debate.

Described, for example, by Subramaniam ( 2018 ) for tea sellers in Mumbai.

See, for example, the collection by Samaddar ( 2016 ) for a set of recent studies on workers in Indian cities.

On continued constraints for union organisation caused by circular migration, see Ghosh and Bandyopadhyay ( 2020 ), Menon ( 2020 ).

The pattern of migration varied across regional and perhaps religious communities; but across communities, female migration did occur (de Haan 1994 ; Fernandes 1997 ; Sen 1992 ).

This has remained the case of international migrants as well, described, for example, for migrants from Punjan, and by Gardner ( 1995 ) for Sylhet, Bangladesh; see also Gardner and Osella ( 2003 ).

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See Srivastava ( 2020a : pp. 15–22), describing these as inadequate. The GoI (GoI 2017 ) working group describes a range of needed long-term measures. Following the crisis, the Central government increased support to MNREGA and food subsidies (the latter to 800 million people); The Wire (30 June 2020); Livelaw News Network ( 2020 ). In Rajasthan, the demand for work in MNREGA increased by some 20 per cent during April–July compared to the sae period in the previous year (Kumar 2020 ).

The international community too tend to prioritise attention to international migrants (and remittances), despite the much larger numbers of internal migrants (see, for example, World Bank 2020a or https://migrationdataportal.org/themes/migration-data-relevant-covid-19-pandemic that focuses on international migration while using the generic term migration).

The idea of regularisation during crisis was put forward by the UN (2020) and derives partly from efforts in Europe, Portugal and Italy in particular, providing, for example, health care to undocumented migrants, in fact implementing long-standing European commitments (Fanjul and Dempster ( 2020 ).

As widely described (e.g. Pierce and Bolter 2020 ), the US administration moved forward its policy reforms started in 2017 during the pandemic.

See, for example, Deshingkar et al ( 2008a ) for India; Leighton (undated) and UNHCR (undated) for international migrants, and Solomon and Sheldon ( 2018 ) on the Global Compact. See ILO ( 2020b ) for a discussion on social protection for migrants workers

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de Haan, A. Labour Migrants During the Pandemic: A Comparative Perspective. Ind. J. Labour Econ. 63 , 885–900 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-020-00283-w

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Global migration’s impact and opportunity

Migration is a key feature of our increasingly interconnected world . It has also become a flashpoint for debate in many countries, which underscores the importance of understanding the patterns of global migration and the economic impact that is created when people move across the world’s borders. A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), People on the move: Global migration’s impact and opportunity , aims to fill this need.

Refugees might be the face of migration in the media, but 90 percent of the world’s 247 million migrants have moved across borders voluntarily, usually for economic reasons. Voluntary migration flows are typically gradual, placing less stress on logistics and on the social fabric of destination countries than refugee flows. Most voluntary migrants are working-age adults, a characteristic that helps raise the share of the population that is economically active in destination countries.

By contrast, the remaining 10 percent are refugees and asylum seekers who have fled to another country to escape conflict and persecution. Roughly half of the world’s 24 million refugees are in the Middle East and North Africa, reflecting the dominant pattern of flight to a neighboring country. But the recent surge of arrivals in Europe has focused the developed world’s attention on this issue. A companion report, Europe’s new refugees: A road map for better integration outcomes , examines the challenges and opportunities confronting individual countries.

While some migrants travel long distances from their origin countries, most migration still involves people moving to neighboring countries or to countries in the same part of the world (exhibit). About half of all migrants globally have moved from developing to developed countries—indeed, this is the fastest-growing type of movement. Almost two-thirds of the world’s migrants reside in developed countries, where they often fill key occupational shortages . From 2000 to 2014, immigrants contributed 40 to 80 percent of labor-force growth in major destination countries.

Moving more labor to higher-productivity settings boosts global GDP. Migrants of all skill levels contribute to this effect, whether through innovation and entrepreneurship or through freeing up natives for higher-value work. In fact, migrants make up just 3.4 percent of the world’s population, but MGI’s research finds that they contribute nearly 10 percent of global GDP. They contributed roughly $6.7 trillion to global GDP in 2015—some $3 trillion more than they would have produced in their origin countries. Developed nations realize more than 90 percent of this effect.

Would you like to learn more about the McKinsey Global Institute ?

Employment rates are slightly lower for immigrants than for native workers in top destinations, but this varies by skill level and by region of origin. Extensive academic evidence shows that immigration does not harm native employment or wages, although there can be short-term negative effects if there is a large inflow of migrants to a small region, if migrants are close substitutes for native workers, or if the destination economy is experiencing a downturn.

Realizing the benefits of immigration hinges on how well new arrivals are integrated into their destination country’s labor market and into society. Today immigrants tend to earn 20 to 30 percent less than native-born workers. But if countries narrow that wage gap to just 5 to 10 percent by integrating immigrants more effectively across various aspects of education, housing, health, and community engagement, they could generate an additional boost of $800 billion to $1 trillion to worldwide economic output annually. This is a relatively conservative goal, but it can nevertheless produce broader positive effects, including lower poverty rates and higher overall productivity in destination economies.

People on the move: Migrant voices

A series of portraits tells migrants’ stories—part of the 'i am a migrant' campaign.

The economic, social, and civic dimensions of integration need to be addressed holistically. MGI looked at how the leading destinations perform on 18 indicators and found that no country has achieved strong integration outcomes across all of these dimensions, though some do better than others. But in destinations around the world, many stakeholders are trying new approaches. We identify more than 180 promising interventions that offer useful models for improving integration. The private sector has a central role to play in this effort—and incentives to do so. When companies participate, they stand to gain access to new markets and pools of new talent.

The stakes are high. The success or failure of integration can reverberate for many years, influencing whether second-generation immigrants become fully participating citizens who reach their full productive potential or remain in a poverty trap.

Lola Woetzel , Jacques Bughin , and James Manyika are directors of the McKinsey Global Institute, where Anu Madgavkar is a partner and Ashwin Hasyagar is a fellow; Khaled Rifai is a partner in McKinsey’s New York office, Frank Mattern is a senior partner in the Frankfurt office, and Tarek Elmasry and Amadeo Di Lodovico are senior partners in the Dubai office.

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Analysis and mapping of global research publications on migrant domestic workers

• Waleed M. Sweileh   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9460-5144 1  

Comparative Migration Studies volume  12 , Article number:  38 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Recognizing the importance of evidence-based research in informing migration policies and empowering migrant domestic workers (MDWs), this study aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of MDW research patterns and trends. Using a descriptive cross-sectional study design, research articles on MDWs were retrieved from the Scopus database. The findings reveal a substantial increase in research output in recent years, with notable contributions from journals in the fields of social sciences and humanities. Key contributors include scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom, and institutions such as the National University of Singapore and the Chinese University of Hong Kong . Journals in the field of migration have prominent role in publishing research on MDWs. At the author level, Yeoh, B.S.A, at the National University of Singapore was the most prolific author. Academic activities were the main driver of research and that funding was suboptimal in this field. Highly cited articles focused on topics such as transnational motherhood, the international division of reproductive labor, and the negotiation of citizenship rights. Major research hotspots in the retrieved articles included mental health aspects, caregiving especially of the elderly, and struggles for legal rights. Specific nationalities, such as Filipina/o and Indonesian MDWs, have been the focus of numerous studies, shedding light on their narratives, challenges, and agency within transnational contexts. Overall, this study underscores the urgency of addressing the needs and rights of MDWs, advocate for human rights, and enhance understanding of occupational health and safety in the unique context of domestic work.

Introduction

Globalization has spurred an influx of individuals seeking improved livelihoods, with migrant workers, defined as those who relocate within or beyond their country in pursuit of employment, becoming increasingly prevalent (Douglas et al., 2019 ). Among these migrants, particular attention has recently focused on migrant domestic workers (MDWs), predominantly women who migrate to engage in household tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and caregiving in foreign countries or regions (International Labour Organization (ILO), 2022 ; Yeoh & Huang, 2000 ). The majority of MDWs originate from low- and middle-income nations, migrating to host countries across the Arab Gulf, Europe, the Western Pacific, and Northern America. Currently, there are approximately 67.1 million domestic workers worldwide, with 11.5 million classified as MDWs, comprising 17.2% of global domestic workers and 7.7% of total migrant laborers (United Nations, 2016 ), the majority of whom are female. This surge in female migrant workers over the past two decades has been termed the “feminization of migration (Gabaccia, 2016 ).

MDWs occupy a unique employment status characterized by several factors: they are typically bound to a single employer, work within the employer’s private residence, may lack official work documentation due to illegal entry facilitated by human trafficking or smuggling, and in some instances, may be minors, rendering their employment a form of slavery (Basnyat & Chang, 2017 ). Gender disparities, language barriers, cultural disparities, inadequate regulation in host countries, social discrimination, and limited access to healthcare services further endanger the physical and mental well-being of MDWs (Hall, Garabiles et al., 2019a ; Hall et al., 2019 ), rendering them susceptible to various forms of abuse and human rights violations (Hargreaves et al., 2019 ). Despite these challenges, the allure of earning abroad remains a compelling aspiration for millions of women, driven by poverty, adversity, and a desire for international experience to enhance social standing and empowerment.

Addressing the needs and empowering MDWs necessitates an understanding of the existing literature on this migrant group. Future migration policies, both in sending and receiving nations, must be informed by evidence-based research. Similarly, funding agencies rely on comprehensive literature reviews to identify research gaps and allocate financial resources accordingly. Despite the significant body of research on migration, (Gao & Wang, 2022 ; Sweileh, 2018 ; Sweileh et al., 2018 ), studies on research trends and patterns, specifically focused on MDWs are scarce (Malhotra et al., 2013 ). Thus, this study aims to provide academics, researchers, and policymakers in the field of migration, particularly labor migration, with a detailed analysis of MDW research patterns and trends to identify existing research gaps and avenues for future exploration. Aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 08, which advocates for sustained economic growth while safeguarding labor rights and promoting decent work conditions, this research also supports the UN’s recognition of migration and mobility as integral components of national and global development (Aniche & order, 2020 ; Halisçelik & Soytas, 2019 ). Furthermore, it echoes the call from the International Organization for Migration for a comprehensive assessment of existing research, mapping of literature, and identification of focal points and deficiencies to inform a cohesive global research agenda on migration health (International Organization for Migration, 2017 ). Lastly, given the escalating numbers of MDWs and the gender disparities inherent in this field, there is an urgent need to spotlight research focal points to empower women, advocate for human rights and equality in labor laws, and enhance understanding of occupational health and safety, particularly in the unique context where home serves as the workplace for MDWs.

Study design

The current study was an observational, descriptive cross-sectional study.

All research papers published on MDWs available in Scopus database were retrieved and analyzed. Scopus has the advantage of being inclusive of PubMed and having double the number of indexed journals of Web of Science (Elsevier, 2023 ). Therefore, the use Scopus database alone is justifiable since it will retrieve the maximum number of publications.

Selection of research papers

We followed the recommendations laid out in PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) to include quality research papers in our review. Supplement 1 is a PISMA-adapted flow diagram showing the number of retrieved documents in each step in the search strategy (Page et al., 2021 ), as well as the keywords used in the search query. The retrieved documents were refined based on several inclusion and exclusion criteria. The search string was open for all times up to December 31st, 2023. The types of documents included in the analysis were journal research articles written in English. Other document types, such as editorials, notes, letters, conference abstracts, and review articles were excluded.

Investigated variables

The followings were the variables investigated and addressed in the current study:

The annual number of publications.

Key contributors to the retrieved publications such as core journals, countries, institutions, and authors.

Citation analysis and content analysis of top 10 cited articles.

Research hotspots identified through the most frequently encountered terms in the retrieved publications.

Content analysis of publications on various nationalities of MDWs.

Data management and visualization

The retrieved publications were exported from Scopus to Microsoft Excel and VOSviewer program for analysis and mapping. The VOSviewer map of research hot spots presents terms as nodes (circles) (van Eck & Waltman, 2010 ). Nodes with larger size are more frequently encountered in the retrieved articles. In the map, closely related terms have similar node color and exist in a cluster. Each cluster represents a research hotspot. The mapping of worldwide geographic distribution of publications was carried using Microsoft Excel Program. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the author upon reasonable request.

To confirm the absence of bias, the retrieved articles were sorted based on the number of citations received and the top 30 cited articles were reviewed to confirm that none was outside the scope of MDWs. Furthermore, the number of articles published by each of the top authors was matched to their actual contribution to the field and tested for correlation (Sweileh et al., 2018 ). Both approaches confirm the absence of bias regarding false-positive and false-negative results.

Statistical methods

Descriptive statistics and graphics were carried out using the Microsoft Excel and the Statistical Package for Social Sciences. For citation analysis, the mean and the Hirsch index (H-index) (Hirsch, 2005 ) were used. For mapping the content of the retrieved literature, VOSviewer was used in which the node size, color, and thickness of connecting lines reflect the frequency of occurrence, relatedness, and strength of relatedness respectively (van Eck & Waltman, 2010 ).

Annual number of publications and growth pattern

Based on the search query applied, 705 research articles were found. The earliest publication about MDWs appeared in 1988 and was about Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong (French & Lam, 1988 ). From 1988 to 1996, only 8(1.1%) articles were published. More than half ( n  = 359, 50.9%) of the articles were published between 2018 and 2023 (Fig.  1 ). The annual number of publications reached the peak in 2021 with 70 (9.9%) articles. Of the total retrieved articles, 579 (82.1%) were published in journals identified in the field of social sciences, 167 (23.7%) in the field of humanities, 101 (14.3%) in the field of medicine, and 51 (7.2%) in the field of psychology with certain potential overlap between different subject areas.

Linear graphic presentation of the annual growth of research publications on migrant domestic workers

Key contributors

The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies was the leading journal and published 22 (3.1%) articles, followed by the Asian and Pacific Migration Journal (21; 3.0%) (Table  1 ). The top active 10 countries in publishing articles on MDWs were shown in Table  2 . Scholars from the United States made the most contribution to the field with 107 (15.2%) articles, followed by scholars from the United Kingdom (UK) ( n  = 102, 14.5%). Figure  2 shows the worldwide distribution of the retrieved articles. The South-East Asian region, the Western Pacific region, the region of North America, and Latin American countries have noticeable contribution. In the African region, contributions of South Africa and Ethiopia were visible.

Worldwide distribution of research publications on migrant domestic workers. The map was created by Microsoft Excel

The National University of Singapore ( n  = 42, 6.0%) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong ( n  = 23, 3.3%) were the most active institution in publishing articles on MDWs. The University of Toronto and the University of Hong Kong were among the top active institutions. The top 10 active institutions were academic institutions. At the author level, Yeoh, B.S.A, at the National University of Singapore was the most prolific author in the field with 25 (3.5%) articles. Regarding funding, the National University of Singapore was the most active funding sponsor in the field with 13 (1.8%) articles being funded by the university. Of the total retrieved articles, only 291 (41.3%) articles stated receiving funding.

Citation analysis and content analysis of top 10 cited articles on MDWs

The retrieved articles received 13522 citations and an H-index of 53. The top 10 cited articles on MDWs cover a range of topics related to the experiences, challenges, and impacts of migrant women engaged in domestic work. “I’m here, but I’m there: The meanings of Latina transnational motherhood” explores the concept of transnational motherhood among Latina immigrant women in Los Angeles, focusing on how they redefine motherhood due to spatial separation from their children (Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila, 1997a ). “Migrant Filipina domestic workers and the international division of reproductive labor” discusses the global politics of reproductive labor, particularly the three-tier transfer of labor involving migrant Filipina domestic workers (Salazar Parreñas, 2000 ). “Negotiating public space: Strategies and styles of migrant female domestic workers in Singapore” examines the marginalized position of migrant domestic workers in Singapore and their negotiation of public space (Yeoh & Huang, 1998 ). “From registered nurse to registered nanny: Discursive geographies of Filipina domestic workers in Vancouver, B.C.” explores the occupational limitations faced by Filipina domestic workers in Vancouver, highlighting discursive constructions of identity (Pratt, 1999 ). “Migrant female domestic workers: Debating the economic, social and political impacts in Singapore” analyzes the socioeconomic and political implications of migrant domestic workers in Singapore (Yeoh & Huang, 1999 ). “A very private business: Exploring the demand for migrant domestic workers” investigates the demand for migrant domestic workers in the UK and the role of immigration status in recruitment and retention (Anderson, 2007 ). “Care workers, care drain, and care chains: Reflections on care, migration, and citizenship” discusses the care chain phenomenon and its impact on sending and receiving countries (Lutz & Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2012 ). " ‘Home’ and ‘away’: Foreign domestic workers and negotiations of diasporic identity in Singapore” explores the construction of diasporic identities among migrant domestic workers in Singapore. “Consuming the transnational family: Indonesian migrant domestic workers to Saudi Arabia” examines the narratives of Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Saudi Arabia and their consumption desires (Silvey, 2006 ). Finally, “Negotiating citizenship: The case of foreign domestic workers in Canada” argues for a re-conceptualization of citizenship as a negotiated relationship, focusing on the experiences of foreign domestic workers in Canada in navigating citizenship rights within restrictive national and international contexts (Stasiulis & Bakan, 1997 ).

Research hotspots in the retrieved articles on MDWs

Visualization of the most frequently encountered terms in the titles/abstracts of the retrieved articles showed the presence of the three main research hotspots (Fig.  3 ): (1) the green cluster focuses on the health aspects of MDWs; (2) the second blue cluster focused on the caregiving, especially the elderly, by MDWs; and (3) the third green cluster focused on the social aspects, specifically, the struggle for citizenship by MDWs.

Network visualization map of terms in the titles/abstracts with a minimum occurrence of five times. Each cluster of grouped nodes represents a research hotspot. The map was created by VOSviewer

The health-related research hotspot explored (1) the mental health challenges and psychosocial impact experienced by MDWs, including stress, depression, anxiety, and coping strategies [43]; (2) the working conditions, occupational hazards, safety concerns, and experiences of aggression faced by MDWs in various countries [13, 44]; (3) the social support and coping mechanisms, which investigated the role of social support networks, coping mechanisms, and their impact on the mental well-being of migrant domestic workers [10, 45]; (4) the caregiving and elderly care that focused on the caregiving responsibilities, challenges, and relationships between MDWs and elderly care recipients [46, 47]; and finally (5) access to healthcare and behavior, which examined healthcare access, utilization, health behaviors, and the impact of stress on the health and quality of life of MDWs [48, 49]. For the caregiving research hotspot, the research publications collectively contributed to understanding the complex dynamics of caregiving and highlight the interconnectedness between MDWs, caregiving, and employment conditions (Akalin, 2007 ; Asis & Carandang, 2020 ; Ayalon et al., 2013 ; Basnyat & Chang, 2017 ; Tay & Kong, 2020 ). For the final research hotspot focusing on citizenship and legal issues of MDWs, articles within this cluster collectively contributed to a deeper understanding of the legal challenges and citizenship issues confronting MDWs, highlighting areas for policy reform and advocacy efforts (Cheng & Choo, 2015 ; Gabriel & Macdonald, 2014 ; Henderson, 2021 ; Husni & Suryani, 2018 ; Ito, 2016 ; Karachurina et al., 2019 ; Kontos, 2013 ; Lutz & Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2012 ; Stasiulis & Bakan, 1997 ; Tan, 2010 ).

Nationalities of investigated MDWs

Analysis showed that there were 153 (21.7%) articles about Filipino/Filipina MDWs. The collection of articles on Filipina/o MDWs delves into the experiences of Filipina/o, examining various aspects such as the international division of reproductive labor, discursive constructions shaping labor market experiences, representations of workers in receiving countries, negotiations of class identities, and determinants of health and well-being (Chin, 1997 ; Hall, Garabiles et al., 2019b; Holroyd et al., 2001 ; Lan, 2003 ; Pratt, 1999 ; Salazar Parreñas, 2000 ). They reveal the complexities and challenges faced by Filipina domestic workers, including their intermediary role within the global division of labor, marginalization within host societies, and adverse working conditions impacting their physical and mental health. These studies underscore the need for greater awareness, advocacy, and policy interventions to address the rights, well-being, and empowerment of migrant domestic workers, particularly those from the Philippines.

There were 87 (12.4%) articles about Indonesian MDWs. The articles on Indonesian migrant domestic workers offer insights into various aspects of their experiences and challenges. One article focused on women migrants’ narratives of transnational migration to Saudi Arabia, highlighting their consumption desires and practices, religious influences on mothering practices, and the larger struggles within Indonesian state relations with women and Islam (Silvey, 2006 ). Another article analyzed representations of foreign female domestic workers in Malaysia, uncovering how state officials, employers, and agencies depict these workers, obscuring their status as protected laborers (Chin, 1997 ). A separate study examined the gender politics of scale in activist approaches to MDWs’ rights, showcasing how activists construct and deploy different scales in advocating for these workers (Silvey, 2004 ). Another article explored migration governance in Asia, particularly the role of private recruitment agencies in shaping migration flows and circumventing formal cooperation with origin countries (Goh et al., 2017 ). Additionally, an investigation into grassroots movements and networks in Hong Kong sheds light on Indonesian MDWs’ agency, gender roles, and class formation within transnational political spaces (Rother, 2017 ). Finally, research on technology usage among Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore reveals their negotiation of social relations and agency within the constraints of Singapore’s migration regime (Platt et al., 2016 ). These studies collectively offer nuanced understandings of Indonesian migrant domestic workers’ lives, challenges, and agency within transnational contexts. There were 19 (2.7%) on Sri Lankan, 18 (2.6%) Latino/Latina MDWs, and 17 (2.4%) Ethiopian MDWs.

In the current study, research trends and patterns were investigated using the Scopus database. Despite that domestic work is an old phenomenon, research on MDWs started in the late 1980s and was not visible until after 2010. The increased research activity on MDWs in the last decade was secondary to human rights advocacy groups and feminist activist groups (Brigham, 2004 ; Figueiredo et al., 2018 ; Huang & Yeoh, 2007 ; MenjÍVar & Salcido, 2002 ; Momsen, 2003 ), the increasing number of MDWs in the context of labor migration (Bastia et al., 2019 ; M. Gallotti & I. J. G. Branch, Switzerland, International Labour Organization., 2015 ; Marchetti et al., 2021 ), and the feminization of migration which led to the increase in the number of females in the field of domestic work (Pande, 2021 ).

The current study indicated that research on MDWs was mainly published by journals in the field of migration. However, journals in the field of human rights, law, and occupational health were under-presented. The field of MDWs is a multidisciplinary field that involve social, legal, health, and human rights researchers. The under-presentation of journals in the field of law and health keeps the problems of MDWs uncovered and unseen.

The current study showed that research from the Middle East region was relatively low given the high number of MDWs in the Arab Gulf countries. Approximately 27.4% of MDWs across the world are found in Arab states, particularly the Arab Gulf (M. Gallotti & I. J. G. Branch, Switzerland, International Labour Organization., 2015 ). However, only 13 (2.0%) articles on MDWs were contributed by researchers in Arab countries. Research articles on MDWs from scholars in Arab countries discussed issues such as human trafficking (de Regt, 2010 ; Demetriou, 2019 ; Jureidini, 2010 ; Shah et al., 2002 ), health issues (Abder-Rahman et al., 2021 ; Shah et al., 2012 ; Zahreddine et al., 2014 ), and abuse and discrimination (Amin, 2022 ). Therefore, more research is needed on health, human rights, cultural adaptation, and psychology of MDWs in Arab countries. It is also important that male MDWs in the Arab States be adequately addressed by researchers, given that about half of all male migrant domestic workers are in the Arab States, working as gardeners, drivers, and security guards (M. Gallotti & I. Branch, 2015 ). The Asia Pacific region is another world region with a high percentage of MDWs, with a relatively high proportion being illegal and financially exploited by employers (GLOBE, 2022 ; International Labour Organization, 2022 ). The majority of Asian MDWs travel from Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand to the Arab Gulf States, particularly Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei for domestic work (Lim & Oishi, 1996 ).

The article on transnational motherhood among Latina migrant domestic workers garnered an exceptionally high number of citations, indicating the profound significance of this topic (Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila, 1997a ). The challenges and narratives surrounding working migrant mothers and their families back home, particularly regarding the children left behind, are complex and deeply impactful. These mothers often experience significant emotional strain due to the separation, grappling with feelings of guilt, sadness, and longing as they are unable to actively participate in their children’s daily lives and milestones (Pineros-Leano et al., 2021 ). Moreover, the experience of transnational motherhood involves reimagining traditional notions of maternal roles within the context of migration, as migrant mothers must find ways to maintain connections with their children across geographical distances, often through frequent communication and financial support. Financial pressures also weigh heavily on migrant mothers, who undertake domestic work abroad as a means to provide better financial support for their families but must balance financial obligations with personal well-being (Gamburd, 2000 ). Additionally, they may face social stigma both in their host countries and home communities, perceived as neglectful mothers or inadequate workers (Parrenas, 2001 ). Children left behind by migrant mothers may experience feelings of abandonment and loneliness, struggling with the absence of parental figures in their lives. Despite these challenges, many migrant mothers demonstrate resilience and adaptability, developing creative coping strategies to maintain strong bonds with their children, such as sending audio and video messages and organizing periodic visits whenever possible (Qu et al., 2020 ). Understanding the complexities of transnational motherhood among migrant domestic workers is crucial for developing policies and support systems that address their unique needs and challenges while recognizing their agency and contributions to both their host and home communities.

Research articles on MDWs working in Singapore received relatively a higher number of citations. In 2019, there were approximately 262 thousand MDWs in Singapore relative to 215 thousand in 2013 (Statista, 2022 ). The majority of MDWs working in Singapore originates from neighboring Asian countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, India, Thailand, and Bangladesh (Dutta et al., 2018 ). Reports of abuse of MDWs working in Singapore were present in national news where MDWs reported to emotional abuse, violence, intimidation, and invasion of privacy (Strangio, 2022 ). The presence of relatively large numbers of MDWs and the absence of protective regulations placed the Singaporean scholars and academic institutions in the leading positions in the field. The highly cited articles emphasize the vulnerability of Asian MDWs, particularly the Filipino and Indonesian. Despite the fact that not all MDWs are legally employed, none of the top-cited articles discussed issues related to undocumented MDWs or the smuggling and human trafficking of MDWs (Raijman et al., 2003 ; Siruno et al., 2022 ). It is possible that these issues are difficult to research given that most MDWs are living-in and difficult to reach by researchers. It is also possible that MDWs themselves are not willing to talk since most of them are part of poor societies. Of particular interest is the top-cited article, which discussed Latina mothers working as MDWs in the United States and how they adapt and practice motherhood for children left behind in their original countries (Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo & Ernestine Avila, 1997 ). This is a serious social and health problem facing migrant workers who leave their family members behind in their original countries (Cortes, 2015 ; Peng & Wong, 2015 ). The price that family members left-behind pay may be greater than the benefits of remittances sent by the migrant parent(s).

The findings of the current study showed several research gaps in the field. Despite the fact that the majority of MDWs are women, research on women’s health issues was limited. Health-related issues of female MDWs should be the responsibility of both the sending and receiving countries (Malhotra et al., 2013 ). The working conditions negatively affect the general and sexual health of female MDWs (Anjara et al., 2017 ; Yi et al., 2020 ). Occupational stress and distance from family generate emotional stress and depression among MDWs with no or limited access to mental healthcare services. MDWs should receive pre-departure training on coping with stress and building resilience to stressful events at work (Regmi et al., 2020 ). A second research gap in the field is the relationship and communication of MDWs with family members left behind, especially children. Information about family members left behind in the context of migration needs to be collected to understand and evaluate the pros and cons of migration and leaving family behind (Hugo & Ukwatta, 2010 ). A third research gap is about MDWs in the Middle East. Reports of abuse and human rights violations of MDWs in the Middle East have been published (Al Rifai et al., 2015 ; Fernandez, 2018 ; Shewamene et al., 2022 ; Wickramage et al., 2017 ). More publications are needed to implement appropriate protective national regulations regarding MDWs. The “Human Rights Watch” reported thousands of human rights violations against female MDWs by their employers in Lebanon and other Arab countries. Such violations included long working hours with no breaks; less than average monthly wages; sexual and verbal abuse, and a lack of protective regulations under the Lebanese labor code (Blog, 2019 ). The Kafala or sponsorship system plays a negative role in the mistreatment of MDWs in several Arab countries (Malit Jr. & Naufal, 2016 ; Parreñas & Silvey, 2021 ). In many cases, the passport of the MDWs is confiscated, and the movement of the MDWs is restricted by the employer and the recruiting agency (Parreñas, 2021 ; Rak, 2021 ).

The finding that the National University of Singapore was the most active funding sponsor in the field of MDWs, supporting 1.8% of the articles, sheds light on the dynamics of research funding in this area. It suggests that academia, particularly institutions in Singapore, plays a significant role in driving research in the field of MDWs. This involvement of academia in funding research aligns with the academic community’s commitment to addressing pressing social issues and advancing knowledge in relevant domains. However, the fact that approximately 41% of publications received funding indicates a potential gap in research funding for MDWs. While academia, represented by institutions like National University of Sigapore, may provide some financial support for research projects, the overall level of funding appears to be insufficient to meet the needs of researchers in the field. This suggests that research publications in the area of MDWs may not be primarily driven by governmental bodies or external funding agencies. The lack of adequate funding for MDW research raises concerns about the scope and depth of studies conducted in this area. Insufficient funding may limit researchers’ ability to conduct comprehensive investigations, gather robust data, and address complex issues facing MDWs. It may also hinder efforts to explore innovative solutions, develop effective interventions, and influence policy decisions. Overall, while academia, exemplified by institutions like the National University of Singapore , plays a crucial role in supporting research on MDWs, there appears to be a need for increased funding from governmental bodies, non-governmental organizations, and other external sources. Adequate funding is essential to ensure that researchers have the resources they need to conduct high-quality studies, generate meaningful insights, and contribute to positive outcomes for MDWs and the communities they serve. The finding that several journals in the field of migration were among the top active journals publishing research on migrant domestic workers suggests a strong alignment between the research focus and the editorial scope of these journals. This alignment indicates that editorial decisions may have played a role in driving research publications in this area. When journals specialize in a particular field or topic, they are more likely to attract submissions related to that subject matter. In the case of migrant domestic workers, researchers may have chosen to submit their work to migration-focused journals because these outlets offer a targeted audience of scholars, policymakers, and practitioners interested in migration issues. Additionally, editorial boards of migration journals may actively seek out and encourage submissions on topics such as labor migration, gender dynamics, and human rights, which are central to the study of MDWs. Furthermore, the prominence of migration-focused journals among the top active list suggests that these outlets may have provided a platform for researchers to disseminate their findings and contribute to the ongoing discourse within the field. By publishing in these journals, researchers may have sought to reach a broader audience and engage with the academic community working on migration-related issues. Overall, while other factors such as funding priorities and academic mentorship may have influenced the research agenda on migrant domestic workers, the presence of migration-focused journals among the top active list suggests that editorial decisions likely played a role in driving research publications in this area.

The prevalence of articles focusing on Filipina and Indonesian MDWs in the bibliometric analysis likely arises from several interconnected factors. Firstly, both Filipina and Indonesian migrant workers constitute substantial proportions of the global domestic worker population, owing to the significant numbers of individuals from these countries engaged in labor migration. As major sending countries for migrant workers, particularly in the domestic work sector, their large presence in destination countries across various regions makes them prominent subjects of study. Additionally, Southeast Asia has a robust tradition of academic research on migration, driven by the region’s historical, economic, and social dynamics. Consequently, academic institutions and journals in Southeast Asia may prioritize research on MDWs from these countries, contributing to the higher number of articles focusing on them. Moreover, Filipina and Indonesian migrant domestic workers are employed in a diverse array of destination countries across different continents, including Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Their global presence attracts attention from researchers worldwide, resulting in a greater volume of literature examining their experiences, challenges, and contributions to host societies. Issues related to Filipina and Indonesian migrant domestic workers, such as labor rights violations, social integration, and health concerns, have gained international visibility due to advocacy efforts, media coverage, and policy debates. This visibility may drive academic interest and research funding, leading to a higher number of publications focusing on these specific migrant groups. Finally, the availability of researchers proficient in the languages and cultures of the Philippines and Indonesia may also contribute to the abundance of literature on Filipina and Indonesian MDWs. Scholars from these countries or with connections to these regions may be more inclined to study and publish research on migrant workers from their respective countries of origin.

While this bibliometric analysis provides valuable insights into the research landscape concerning migrant domestic workers (MDWs), it is important to recognize several limitations. Firstly, there is the potential for database bias, despite using Scopus, a comprehensive database, as some publications on MDWs may not have been indexed or included in the analysis. This could be due to variations in indexing practices across disciplines and regions. Secondly, the analysis focused solely on articles written in English, which may have excluded significant research published in other languages, leading to an incomplete representation of the global research landscape on MDWs. Thirdly, the inclusion criteria were limited to journal research articles, excluding other potentially relevant document types such as editorials and conference abstracts, which may have resulted in the omission of important perspectives or findings. Additionally, there may be a temporal bias, as efforts were made to include articles published up to December 31st, 2023, potentially overlooking recent publications and emerging research developments. Furthermore, despite efforts to minimize bias through rigorous methodology, the interpretation of data and identification of research hotspots involved subjective judgment, which could have led to variations in results among different analysts. Lastly, the analysis revealed regional imbalances in research output, with certain geographic areas being underrepresented, which may skew the overall understanding of MDW research trends and priorities.

Conclusions

In conclusion, the analysis reveals several significant findings regarding research on MDWs. Firstly, there has been a notable increase in research activity surrounding MDWs over the past decade, propelled by factors such as human rights advocacy and the feminization of migration. Secondly, while journals in the field of migration have been the primary contributors to MDW research, there is an evident underrepresentation in areas like human rights and health, suggesting potential avenues for further exploration. Thirdly, despite the global scope of MDW research, certain regions, notably the Middle East, remain underrepresented despite hosting a significant population of MDWs, indicating the necessity for region-specific research to address context-specific challenges. Additionally, articles focusing on MDWs in specific countries, such as Singapore, have received relatively higher citation counts, emphasizing the importance of localized research in generating scholarly impact. However, despite the growing body of literature, significant research gaps persist, particularly concerning women’s health, family communication dynamics, and the experiences of MDWs in the Middle East. Addressing these gaps is crucial for informing policy and advocacy efforts aimed at improving the rights, well-being, and working conditions of MDWs globally. Future research should prioritize investigating the physical and mental health challenges faced by female MDWs, examining the impact of migration on family dynamics, especially communication and relationships between MDWs and their family members left behind, and focusing on the Middle East region, where MDWs are significantly present, yet underrepresented in research. Encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers in fields such as migration, health, law, and human rights can provide more comprehensive insights into the multifaceted challenges facing MDWs, ultimately informing evidence-based policies and interventions aimed at advancing the well-being and rights of this vulnerable migrant population.

Data availability

Not Applicable.

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Sweileh, W.M. Analysis and mapping of global research publications on migrant domestic workers. CMS 12 , 38 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-024-00401-3

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