Search results

The economic literature on labor migration has incorporated insights from various disciplines with regard to content and method, although the representation of migrants has not fully moved away from the neoliberal, market-dominated framework. This paper addresses the issue of women migrant workers using the particular example of Sri Lankan migrant women workers to the Middle East. It aims to highlight the need for more diversity in economic research without which conceptual representation, as well as empirical reach, is limited.

After a brief overview of the representation of migrants in economic literature, I develop the concept of vulnerability. I refer to qualitative and quantitative analyses on Sri Lankan migrant women workers to the Middle East from a variety of disciplines in order to differentiate the “vulnerable,” that is, the workers in need of protection, from the “vulnerabilities.” The latter concept refers to the debilitating effects on workers, produced by market forces, which are often perpetuated by underlying assumptions, as well as policies. A broader, inter-disciplinary perspective, which considers the agency of women, can go a long way toward removing some of the limitations and preconceptions ingrained in most economic representation. This in turn could help to improve the protection of the vulnerable and empower them to better face market forces.

Within the labor-intensive construction industry characterized by distinctly structural shortages in the labor force worldwide, efficient and effective migration of construction workers across regions is critical for the smooth operation of construction activities. This study aims to investigate how the interregional migration patterns of construction workers are impacted by the disparities in both employment opportunities and environment amenities between the origin and destination provinces.

Drawing on the push and pull theory and the archival data on 13,728 migrant construction workers in China, descriptive analyses are first performed to characterize the interregional migration patterns of the investigated construction workers. Combining regional data in the National Bureau of Statistics of China, this study uses hierarchical regression modeling techniques to empirically test the relative importance of the employment-related and environment-related factors in driving the interregional migration of construction workers after controlling for the effects of related economic and geographic factors.

The results provide evidence that the interregional migration of construction workers is principally driven by the disparities in employment opportunities while disparities in environment amenities (including climate comfort disparity, medical service disparity and educational service disparity) generally play much fewer substantive roles. With regard to the impacts of employment opportunities, the results provide evidence that compared with the disparity in job market size, the disparities in job income and industry development level are more significantly relevant factors, which positively pull and adversely push the interregional migration flows, respectively.

This study contributes to a deepened understanding of how workers specifically balance their employment and amenity needs to make temporary migration decisions in the “laggard” labor-intensive construction industry. This study also adds to the literature on population migration by characterizing the specific characteristics of construction workers and the temporary nature of the workers' migration activities. The findings hold important practical implications for construction organizations and policymakers for effectively managing the mobility of migrant construction workers.

The extant literature on migrant construction workers has primarily focused on the consequences of international migration and the generalization of empirical findings on population migration mechanisms in other domains to the construction industry is substantially limited by the specific characteristics of construction workers and the temporary nature of their migration activities. In addressing this gap, this study represents an exploratory effort to quantitatively characterize the interregional migration patterns of construction workers in the labor-intensive construction industry and examines the roles of employment opportunity and environmental amenity in driving interregional migration.

Moral consideration is significantly important as social responsibility of economic actions. This article aims to analyze the moral embeddedness of labor market using the typology of moral behavior in market exchange by Beckert (2005).

This study contributes to methodological novelty through a digital research design using Gephi and NVIVO software. Textual Network Analysis (TNA) is used to analyze the moral embeddedness of labor market transaction of Chinese migrant workers.

Overall, the results show that the presence of Chinese migrant workers in Indonesia is a form of Trojan altruism and harmful to local labor market. This study also provides a theoretical debate that morals are always embedded in markets.

The data and focus of this study are the Indonesian side, particularly the local labor market. In addition, access to interviews with the Chinese government and companies is very challenging and cannot be done because they cannot carelessly provide information to journalists and researchers.

In contrast to previous studies on Chinese migrant workers that tend to use the economic perspective, this study applies the moral perspective that is more sociological and discusses social responsibility of market actions.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2022-0737

This study aims to answer if inter-state migrants in India play a more active role than their intra-state counterparts in labor force participation and entrepreneurship.

A recursive bivariate probit model is used with an instrumental variable (IV) of the total of inter-state migrants in a city over their historical numbers to tackle the endogeneity issue of the migration decision of the migrants.

Inter-state migrants did a better job than their intra-state counterparts in labor force participation and female inter-state migrants did a better job than their counterparts in wage employment and being day laborers.

The data are from IPUMS and there is no updated nationwide data regrading migration and employment for recent years.

A randomized controlled trail can be carried out near the borders of two states where there are both significant amounts of inter-state and intra-state migrants.

The government and international organizations shall focus on cultivating the skills of the female migrants as well as encouraging the entrepreneurship of both types of migrants.

The study focus is on the comparison between intra- and inter-state migrants based on nationwide survey data and the usage of recursive bivariate model and an effective Instrumental Variable.

Migrant women face unique difficulties, such as labour discrimination, limited sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services, obstacles to family reunification, gender-based violence (GBV) and human trafficking. ¹ The European Commission's labour integration approach currently fails to account for these difficulties. Civil society organisations (CSOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) attempt to fill these gaps but lack capacity and funding. The European Commission's current approach does not respect human dignity and impedes the migrant community's integration and inclusion. This chapter discusses sexual assault and gender-based violence, which may be disturbing to some readers.

This issue is relevant and important because migrant women comprise a large portion of the migrant population ² and are a vital part of the migrant community. The methodology used in this chapter is a human security framework with a people-centred approach to policy that empowers those impacted by it. Research for this chapter was conducted using news articles, academic articles, UN reports and publications. Based on this, the European Commission must take a holistic and binding approach that protects the rights and dignity of migrant women.

There are multiple approaches that the European Commission can take to incorporate human dignity into its policies towards women and migration, such as applying international conventions and implementing policies that account for migrant women. All approaches must be realistic and required of all member states.

This paper aims to explore the determinants of the livelihoods of return migrant workers in Vietnam. The findings will help authorities updating their regulations on migration, thus grasping the economic benefit from documented but low-skilled return migrant workers.

The sample is collected when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the Vietnamese economy severely. The author considers six issues of income and employment, including total income, stable income, financial pressure experiences, unemployment, stable job and time to find a job. For this purpose, through a pre-structured questionnaire, the primary data is collected from 258 Vietnamese return migrant workers in various foreign countries. Notably, all respondents in the sample are documented but low-skilled return migrant workers. The author uses various empirical regression analyses to conclude that personal traits, family characteristics and their characteristics before and after migration play a critical role in determining the livelihood of migrants returning to Vietnam.

The author finds that personal traits, family characteristics and their characteristics before and after migration play a critical role in determining the livelihood of migrants returning to Vietnam.

The findings are critical for Vietnamese authorities in finalizing and updating their regulations on migration, thus grasping the economic benefit from documented but low-skilled return migrant workers.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to exploit the drivers of the livelihoods of return migrants in Vietnam, a rich, two-wave panel survey of respondents in Vietnam aimed at characterizing the history of migration of low-skilled and documented migrants back to Vietnam and to use these histories to gain insight into Vietnamese return migrants’ economic status, access to financial, welfare and health insurance benefits and employment prospects.

This study examines the transformation of labour non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in Mainland China since the enactment of the 2017 Overseas NGO Management Law, which aims to regulate foreign concerns functioning outside the direct control of the state. It focuses on the extent to which these organisations have responded to the rapidly changing political and social environment by altering their goals and strategies in support of migrant workers. It also considers the relevance of Western social movement theories (SMTs) to China's grassroots labour movement in the 2020s. 

The research is based on case studies of ten labour NGOs operating in Beijing, Tianjin and Yunnan. It draws upon fifteen semi-structured interviews with the founders, leaders and activists affiliated with those organisations, as well as records and documented information of each of those organisations.

While the power and influence of labour NGOs markedly diminished, most have been able to adapt their goals and the strategies remain sustainable amidst both China's changing political and social climates and the global pandemic. It suggests that conventional SMTs can still offer valuable insights into understanding the development of labour NGOs in China, although they might not fully interpret the specific conditions and challenges faced by these organisations.

This study stands out as one of very few to offer empirical evidence on the inner workings of China's labour NGOs over the last six years. It also contributes to our understanding of social movements in a non-Western context.

This chapter explores the empowering potential of research conducted with an activist orientation. It focuses on the story of four migrant workers employed in a Norwegian fish-processing plant, who, supported by the local trade union and along with 67 colleagues, resisted against exploitative working, employment, and living conditions. Meant as a study of the emergence and dynamics of criminological activism, this chapter reflects the capacities in which researchers tend to act to challenge the normalisation of state-corporate harms and to empower those victimised by these harms, as well as on the pitfalls of these approaches. In so doing, this chapter points to the parallels between state-corporate criminology, labour perspective on human trafficking, social harm, and zemiology. Ultimately, it calls for heightened reflexivity and critical intellectual distance from activist researchers.

Compared to younger and older generation migrants, middle-aged migrants in the diaspora seem to be more conflicted regarding their belonging. This paper aims to explore how middle-aged migrants in the diaspora define themselves in space and time.

The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork done among Malawian migrants (herein referred to as Lydiatians) settled at Lydiate informal settlement in peri-urban Zimbabwe.

The paper reveals that, while younger migrants have a “radical transnational stance”, and older migrants regard their place of settlement as their final home, middle-aged migrants prefer to maintain a “strategic dual sense of place” regarding their place of settlement in the diaspora. These middle-aged migrants can be entrepreneurs considering their current settlement as a strategic place for petty commodity trading or those who find informal settlements to provide needed opportunities for cheap housing as the migrants pursue work in the nearby towns.

The paper offers a deeper understanding of how middle-aged migrants navigate their sense of place and contribute to host nations by functioning as key resources, dynamizing local economies through entrepreneurial activities and labour provision for various industries. The implications of this research should encourage states to positively interact with migrants, leveraging their potential for societal and economic development.

The finding that migrants in the diaspora have a dual, strategic view of their settlements is fascinating, if not new. Before this, scholars presented migrants as transnational figures, successively moving to a better place, which finally becomes home. However, the data presented in this paper suggests that this characterization associating migrants with maintaining a “stable, sedentary, bounded and fixed perception of home” is oversimplified. This is because migrants can sometimes continue to cherish the idea of informal settlements in the diaspora as home, just as the migrants also entertain the nearby established towns as useful places in their life.

In this chapter, rephrasing Spivak's question into ‘can subaltern children speak?’, I reorient the research on China's gigantic population of children and youths in rural migrant families towards a critical interpretative approach. Based on life history and longitudinal ethnographic interview gathered with three cases, I unpack the multiple meanings migrants' children attach to mobility in their childhood experiences. First, despite emotional difficulties, children see their parents' out-migration more as a ‘mobility imperative’ than their abandonment of parental responsibilities, which should be contextualized in China's long-term urban-biased social policies and the resultant development gaps in rural and urban societies. Second, the seemingly ‘unstable’ and ‘flexible’ mobility patterns observed in migrant families should be understood in relation to a long-term family social mobility strategy to promote children's educational achievement and future attainment. The combination of absent class politics in an illiberal society with an enduring ideology of education-based meritocracy in Confucianism makes this strategy a culturally legitimate channel of social struggle for recognition and respect for the subaltern. Last, children in migrant families are active contributors to their families' everyday organization amidst mobilities through sharing care and household responsibilities, and developing temporal and mobility strategies to keep alive intergenerational exchanges and family togetherness. The study uncovers coexisting resilience and vulnerabilities of migrants' children in their ‘doing class’ in contemporary China. It also contributes insights into our understanding of the diversity of childhoods in Asian societies at the intersection of familyhood, class dynamics and cultural politics.