While governments restricted movement and access to workspaces at the height of the pandemic, many also declared certain jobs “essential”, exempting them from the most severe restrictions. Migrants play an important role in essential sectors in many countries.3 As a consequence, migrants doing essential work – including those typically considered “low-skilled” workers, such as crop pickers, care assistants and cleaners in hospitals – have in many countries been designated “key workers” whose supply needs to be protected and in some cases even expanded during the health emergency. The Italian Government has decided to grant temporary legal status to migrants employed irregularly in agriculture and the care sector. Austria and Germany made special exemptions to their international travel bans and admitted new migrants to fill labour shortages on farms and in care homes. In the United States of America, special arrangements were made to ensure that foreign farm workers could still obtain work visas, even as normal consular operations abroad were suspended. The United Kingdom announced that expiring visas of migrant doctors, nurses and paramedics were to be automatically extended.
While these immediate measures have been widely accepted as necessary to deal with the COVID-19 emergency in the short term, they also raise important questions about whether, why and to what extent migrant workers are really “needed” to provide essential services and to help ensure their resilience in the longer term. While migrants often represent a substantial share of the workforce in essential sectors, these shares can vary strongly between countries. We know from existing research that cross-country variations in the reliance on migrant labour are, at least in part, linked to the considerable differences between national systems (i.e. the national institutional and public policy frameworks) for providing essential goods and services, and their particular interlinkages with global supply chains. This existing research has primarily focused on employers’ incentives and has not yet considered the potential effects of systemic resilience on the demand for migrant workers. Indeed it appears that the concept of systemic resilience has been notably absent from research on migration and migration policy.
This short paper argues that concern for the resilience of essential services should make us rethink how the impacts of migrant workers are assessed and how labour immigration and related public policies are designed. The authors integrate key insights from research on the role of migrant workers in addressing labour and skills shortages (section 2) and the essentially disconnected studies of the resilience of systems (section 3) to suggest how considerations of systemic resilience can be built into analyses and policy debates about the effects and regulation of labour immigration. While resilience strategies may vary across countries with different labour markets and other institutions and policies, they emphasize that taking systemic resilience seriously as a policy goal requires us to think globally and consider the role and contributions of migrants not only in essential sectors in particular countries, but also along global supply chains.