Mig-Res-Hub - Migrants and Systemic Resilience: A Global COVID19 Research and Policy Hub

The Hub concentrates on three essential goods and services around the world: food and agriculture; health services; and social care. MigResHub aims to take a comparative and transnational approach that includes countries and supply chains covering all major regions of the world. A particular focus will be on exploring how the relationships between reliance on migrant workers and the systemic resilience of the provision of food, health, and social care vary across countries with different institutional and policy frameworks for the provision of these essential services.

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