The end of free movement and the introduction of the post-Brexit migration system represent the most important changes to the UK migration system in half a century. Coinciding with the aftereffects of the pandemic, the result has been very large changes both to the numbers of those coming for work and study, and to their composition, both in terms of countries of origin and in the sectors and occupations of new migrants. It has also resulted in a political backlash, resulting in significant further changes to the system announced in December 2023. I discuss the evidence to date of the impact of recent migration trends on the UK economy and labour market, distinguishing between different sectors.

Identifying the impact of remittances on household members remaining behind is difficult due to selection into migration. In this paper, we exploit an unexpected embargo on Qatar, the second major destination among Nepali migrants. Using longitudinal data on about 1,500 Nepali households with migrants prior to the embargo, we assess how this shock translates into changes in remittances and development outcomes. We find a 56% reduction in remittances for households with a migrant in Qatar. At least in the months immediately after the shock, such a fall in remittances does not seem to translate into recipient household's welfare. However, we cannot exclude that such effect might materialize in the medium run. That is particularly true for poor and credit-constrained households, especially vulnerable to the remittance windfall and lacking the ability to move their migrants or other household members to other destinations.

This study examines disparities in health and nutrition among native and Syrian refugee children in Turkey. To understand the need for targeted programs addressing child well-being among the refugee population, we analyze the Turkey Demographic and Health Survey (TDHS) – which provides representative data for a large refugee and native population. We find no evidence of a difference in infant or child mortality between refugee children born in Turkey and native children. However, refugee infants born in Turkey have lower birthweight and age-adjusted weight and height than native infants. When we account for a rich set of birth and socioeconomic characteristics that display substantial differences between natives and refugees, the gaps in birthweight and age-adjusted height persist, but the gap in age-adjusted weight disappears. Moreover, the remaining gaps in birthweight and anthropometric outcomes are limited to the lower end of the distribution. The observed gaps are even larger for refugee infants born before migrating to Turkey, suggesting that the remaining deficits reflect conditions in the source country before migration rather than deficits in access to health services within Turkey. Finally, comparing children by the country of their first trimester, we find evidence of the detrimental effects of stress exposure during pregnancy.

In this paper, we introduce a unique dataset derived from a survey conducted among 450 Syrian refugee workers and the owners/managers of the firms in which they are employed in Istanbul, Turkey. We utilise this data to investigate the connection between the wage-productivity gap and perceived economic and social discrimination. The findings of the study indicate that individuals facing a wider wage-productivity gap tend to report higher levels of economic and social discrimination. These results remain consistent even after incorporating various variables at both the worker and firm levels into the analysis. These findings imply potential policy recommendations that policymakers should take into account.

Existing empirical literature provides converging evidence that selective emigration enhances human capital accumulation in the world's poorest countries. However, the within-country distribution of such brain gain effects has received limited attention. Focusing on Senegal, we provide evidence that the brain gain mechanism primarily benefits the wealthiest regions that are internationally connected and have better access to education. Conversely, human capital responses are negligible in regions lacking international connectivity, and even negative in better connected regions with inadequate educational opportunities. These results extend to internal migration, implying that highly vulnerable populations are trapped in the least developed areas.

The predictions of the adverse effects of greenhouse gas emissions on climate change are now accepted. Somewhat less attention has been given to the economic, social, and political consequences. The three interact: the former will have social and political effects, which in turn will harm economies and economic well-being. This analysis of poor countries draws on much recent evidence and various projections. Climate damage contributes to internal political instability and conflict. There is a risk that poor countries will be driven down economically, so reducing the capacity of their governments: some will become fragile states. Internal migration is likely to become a central policy issue. However, international migration will also grow. Climate damage will drag countries into both cooperation and conflict with each other. The effects on sending countries, contiguous countries, and destination countries are examined. This scenario presented is predictive but should be taken as a warning.

For migrant workers who do not have access to other means of income, the platform economy offers a viable yet exploitative alternative to the conventional labour market. Migrant workers are used as a source of cheap labour by platforms – and yet, they are not disempowered. They are at the heart of a growing platform worker movement. Across different international contexts, migrants have played a key role in leading strikes and other forms of collective action. This article traces the struggles of migrant platform workers in Berlin and London to explore how working conditions, work experiences, and strategies for collective action are shaped at the intersection of multiple precarities along lines of employment and migration status. Combining data collected through research by the Fairwork project with participant observation and ethnography, the article argues that migrant workers are more than an exploitable resource: they are harbingers of change.

We use novel survey data to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Libya. Our analysis compares the effects of the pandemic for displaced and non-displaced citizens, controlling for individual and household characteristics and geo-localized measures of economic activity and conflict intensity. In our sample, 9.5% of respondents report that a household member has been infected by COVID-19, while 24.7% of them have suffered economic damages and 14.6% have experienced negative health effects due to the pandemic. IDPs do not display higher incidence of COVID-19 relative to comparable non-displaced individuals, but are about 60% more likely to report negative economic and health impacts caused by the pandemic. We provide suggestive evidence that the larger damages suffered by IDPs can be explained by their weaker economic status—which leads to more food insecurity and indebtedness—and by the discrimination they face in accessing health care.

This paper presents the results of research, which highlights the situation during the pandemic in sectors characterised by low wages and a high turnover of workers. The empirical basis is formed by company case studies in the meat industry, postal services, and mask production in Germany and Austria. This paper discusses the significance of different locations (at and beyond the workplace) and forms (‘exit’ and ‘voice’) of labour unrest in sectors of the economy that are characterised by a predominance of the use of migrant labour. It questions how conflicts over migrant labour have been articulated and possibly changed in the pandemic, and what factors may have contributed not only to an upsurge but also to the containment, regulation, and repression, of labour unrest.

This paper focuses on the migrant pay gap in Spain. Going beyond descriptive evidence of the differences between immigrants and nationals in terms of wages, we analyse which part of the gross wage is most affected by features that cannot be captured using econometric models. Relying on microdata from the Wage Structure Survey, we divide the total gross wage into two main parts: base wage and wage supplements. Then we decompose the migrant wage gap into the explained and the unexplained terms, using a simple decomposition methodology, the Oaxaca-Blinder model. Our results show that a part of the differences in wage supplements does not seem to be explained by the set of control variables introduced in the model and that this effect is more pronounced when only men are considered. These findings offer a new perspective on the migrant pay gap in Spain and point to the importance of wage-setting practices related to wage supplements in explaining (and widening) the total migrant pay gap in our country.

The H-2A temporary agricultural workers visa program is a federal program allowing agricultural employers to bring in foreign workers on a seasonal basis. The extent to which H-2A workers earn more compared to their domestic unauthorized counterparts is of interest for both producers and workers. Using novel data on citrus harvest workers in the state of Florida, we estimate hourly earnings differentials by legal status using Classical and Bayesian inference. Findings suggest that participation in the H-2A program is associated with 18–23% higher hourly earnings for migrant harvesters in Florida after controlling for observable demographic and work-related variables.

This study investigates the impact of the massive and unexpected influx of Syrian refugees on the job vacancy rates (JVRs) and job-finding rates (JFRs) in Turkey between 2009–2015 and 2009–2018. We employed the instrumental variable approach to address potential endogeneity issues. While we found no significant causal impact of the Syrian refugees on JVR, they decreased JFR between 2009 and 2018. A reduction in JFR indicates that the Beveridge Curve shifted inwards, thereby raising matching efficiency and facilitating an improvement in labour market conditions. Furthermore, our research indicated differences in coefficients and significance in JVR and JFR across occupations, as well as different effects in these areas between the short and long term. However, the results demonstrate that the rapid and unexpected influx of Syrian refugees alleviated JVR and JFR in most of the occupation groups.

A number of reports have shown that workers with certain characteristics are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since these characteristics are associated with vulnerable workers, we hypothesise that the income distribution in the pandemic era will be polarised compared to the pre-pandemic period. This article compares the pre-COVID income distribution (February 2020) with the one that prevailed just after the hard lockdown (April 2020). Consistent with the hypothesis, the result shows evidence of polarisation. Disaggregating the analysis by worker characteristics, we find that the polarisation was stronger in vulnerable groups. Our decomposition result suggests that, apart from job losses, returns to gender and job characteristics explain the location and shape differences in the COVID-19 era income distribution. Although this analysis only looks at the short-term effect of the pandemic on income distribution, the result suggests that the structure of labour markets in developing countries is not conducive to a future of work where disruptions (or pandemics) may become more frequent.

Foundling hospitals spread across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, taking in hundreds of thousands of children each year. In Spain, the hospitals of major cities had staffs of more than 1,000 external wet nurses, who worked mainly in rural localities. Their cash wages were key for the household economies of the poor rural and urban populations. This article presents a methodology to interpret wet-nurse wages and explains their utility with respect to other occupations for men and women. Our results include a series of nominal and real wages for wet nurses and a calculation of their contributions to family income. The level of wages these institutions could offer was a major determinant in the supply of wet-nurse labour.

Have people in China moved from more polluted cities to less polluted ones? We merge city-level air pollution data from 2003 to 2016 with migration data from a nationally representative sample. We estimate a linear model and a conditional logit model, and employ air pollution from distant sources carried by the wind as an instrument for local air pollution to address the potential concern that air pollution is endogenous to local economic activities. We make a distinction between out-migration that left some family members behind and whole-household out-migration, and discover that the former was more responsive to air pollution than the latter. The decline in net in-migration in response to an increase in air pollution was driven by both a decrease in gross in-migration and an increase in gross out-migration. We find suggestive evidence that out-migrants brought their children with them, but some aged parents were left behind.

This article aims to provide insight into the employment relations in China-based multinational companies internationalising to Europe, a still relatively unexplored topic. We investigate the transfer of work and employment practices from Foxconn’s manufacturing headquarters in mainland China to its subsidiaries in Czechia and the factors that influence the firm’s internationalisation of production. By drawing upon original ethnographic fieldwork, the study makes a two-fold contribution. First, it shows the analytical inadequacy of the ‘latecomer’ model which assumes that the Chinese firm is an asset seeker. Second, it illustrates the relevance of diversity of labour and non-institutionalised forms of workers’ agency for theorisation of internationalisation. These topics are still insufficiently addressed by the literature that favours managerial agency and the model of distinctive and stable national labour forces. The study contributes to the theoretical debates on internationalisation by illustrating the limits of the national institutionalist perspective, the importance of considering a multi-scalar analytical framework and the relevance of labour composition in shaping multinational employment relations.

Chinese domestic rural–urban migrant workers have played a substantial role in economic development since the late 1970s. This article makes an attempt to establish a two-period hiring model interpreting the impact mechanism of social networks on migrant workers’ wages. The findings indicate that the extension of social networks of both firms and workers facilitates a decrease in the information gap between them and improves extra common benefits to both.

This article presents an historical and comparative analysis of the bargaining power and agency conferred upon migrant workers in Australia under distinct policy regimes. Through an assessment of four criteria – residency status, mobility, skill thresholds and institutional protections – we find that migrant workers arriving in Australia in the period from 1973 to 1996 had high levels of bargaining power and agency. Since 1996, migrant workers’ power and agency has been incrementally curtailed, to the extent that Australia’s labour immigration policy resembles a guest-worker regime where migrants’ rights are restricted, their capacity to bargain for decent working conditions with their employers is truncated and their agency to pursue opportunities available to citizens and permanent residents is diminished. In contrast to recent assessments that Australia’s temporary visa system is working effectively, our analysis indicates that it is failing to protect temporary migrants at work.

This article brings together labour relations, sociological and political perspectives on precarious employment in Australia, identifying local contexts of insecurity and setting them within the economics of regional supply chains involving the use of migrant labour. In developing the concept of precarious work-societies, it argues that precarity is a source of individual and social vulnerability and distress, affecting family, housing and communal security. The concept of depoliticisation is used to describe the processes of displacement, whereby the social consequences of precarious work come to be seen as beyond the reach of agency. Using evidence from social attitudes surveys, we explore links between the resulting sense of political marginalisation and hostility to immigrants. Re-politicisation strategies will need to lay bare the common basis of shared experiences of insecurity and explore ways of integrating precarious workers into new community and global alliances.

This article investigates the time allocation choices of US workers between farm work and other job alternatives. Results indicate that green card farm workers tend to allocate fewer workweeks to farm employment than citizens and undocumented workers, in favour of better opportunities in the non-farm sector. There is evidence of an assimilation effect, whereby undocumented workers also tend to re-allocate their time from farm to non-farm employment as their residence tenure increases, even though they experience constrained mobility and visibility during periods of strict immigration control. In the context of employers’ violations of the existing labour laws that currently protect even the rights of undocumented workers, such turnover decisions seem justified. The findings raise concerns about whether any governmental effort to legalise the immigration status of such workers would reduce farm job turnover rates and increase farm employment retention, so long as labour standards are not enforced. Moreover, external economic shocks could more easily induce citizen and green card farm workers to abandon farm employment, whereas undocumented workers tend to remain in their farm jobs during such difficult times.