Trends in Eastern Europe, with particular emphasis on Poland, are used in this article to analyse offshoring as a form of social dumping. Neoliberalisation and globalisation generate and utilise the mobility of both capital and labour. Meanwhile, labour migration is presenting a challenge to the observance of labour rights. Present-day methods of capital accumulation rely on the search for cheap labour and the relocation of production to territories that do not protect workers’ rights. Effective defence of labour rights must take place at the transnational level, where most capital is generated. Trade unions need to cross national borders in order to move social activity into this area. The defence of workers’ rights must go hand in hand with the struggle against nationalism and racist prejudices. In this context, migrant workers become one of the main potential driving forces of the modern global proletariat.

This article examines the Japan–Indonesia Economic Partnership Agreement, an agreement that has allowed Japan to supplement its local healthcare workforce while continuing to sidestep the thorny issue of labour and immigration policy reform and Indonesia to increase its skilled workers’ access to the Japanese labour market at a time when it was making a concerted effort to reorient migrant labour flows away from informal sector occupations. Despite the programme’s many problems, it has contributed to the use of trade agreements as a mechanism for regulating labour migration, and so to the normalisation of migrant labour as a tradable commodity rather than a discrete area of policy-making, with all the attendant risks that normalisation brings.

The purpose of this commentary article is to explain the causes and effects of the economic migration of health care workers from Poland to Western countries, and to analyse the impact of the migration of doctors and nurses on the functioning of the public health system. We use data from the National Central Statistical Office, our own preliminary research, social surveys and the Watch Health Care database. Domestic data are analysed and compared with trends in Western Europe as described in Eurostat and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports. The decreasing number of active physicians remaining in the health care system results in long waits for specialist appointments. The demand for doctors from Central and Eastern Europe will continue to grow. Consequently, there will be a further outflow of medical staff from Poland and other countries in the region and the current problems with access to health care will continue.

The end of free movement as a consequence of the United Kingdom (UK)’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU) meant that it was necessary for the UK to devise a new migration system when the transition period came to an end. One aim of this article is to determine in what respects the new system, which came into force on 1 January 2021, draws on or differs from the previous immigration system. To the extent that this inquiry reveals some similarities, another aim is to uncover how the policymaking process produced these continuities. Drawing on the concept of path dependency from the ‘new institutionalism’ literature, the analysis reveals that two critical decisions taken by the New Labour government (1997–2010) set in train a path dependent policy process that has shaped immigration law and policy today. Two mechanisms of path dependency are identified. First, there were continuities in the operation of conceptual frameworks, methodologies and conclusions amongst organisations tasked with designing the new immigration system. Second, the position adopted by employing enterprises favoured the retention of key features of the previous system.

The literature has described trade unions’ positions towards both precarious workers and migrant workers as ambivalent. By studying an extreme case, the meat-processing industries in the United Kingdom and in Germany, we show how trade unions were decisive in both countries in bringing exploitative working conditions on the political agenda and in advancing policy change. However, the strategies through which trade unions contributed to this differed remarkably, highlighting different causal pathways in both countries. The British case can clearly be seen as an example of successful union revitalisation by relying on innovative strategies. In contrast, the German story exhibits a strong reliance on a more traditional approach to improving workers’ rights, which was only successful after employers were willing to improve working conditions in the sector as well. Our analysis shows that policy change can happen despite unfavourable conditions and weak actors, especially if these actors make strategic use of situational conditions.

Parental investment theory predicts that biases in investment favour migration by driving some of the sibling group to disperse for resources. Here we test hypotheses arising from this theory to explain patterns of rural–urban migration in south-central Ethiopia considering familial and individual strategies. We focus on the migration of low-skilled men, predicting two scenarios based on a low level of resource availability. Firstly, last-born sons will be more likely to migrate in order to offset their intra-household disadvantage when resources are limited (sibling competition). Alternatively, in households facing livelihood insecurity, older sons will migrate in order to free resources for their younger dependant brothers (reflecting sibling cooperation). Demographic, economic and relational data were collected from 217 families of male migrants, including information for 830 male adults. We performed multivariate analyses, including Bayesian generalised linear models and mixed models, to analyse quantitative data with a focus on household and individual likelihood of out-migration. Consistent with the predictions from parental investment theory, migration is dependent on intra-household resource allocation. Depending on the stage of the family cycle and livelihood context, families and individuals present different strategies: labour migration may result from sibling competition or from cooperation for resource enhancement.

Migration was a crucial component of the spatially uneven formation of labour markets and export-oriented economies in colonial Africa. Much of this mobility was initiated by migrants themselves rather than by colonial authorities. Building on analytical concepts from economic history and migration theory, this study explains the changing composition and magnitude of one such uncontrolled migration flow, from Ruanda-Urundi to Buganda. Migrants’ mobility choices – when to migrate, for how long, and with whom – proved highly responsive to shifting economic opportunity structures on the sending and receiving ends. Initially, large differences in terms of land and labour endowments, socio-economic structures, and colonial interventions, combined with substantial scope for price arbitrage, created large spatial inequalities of opportunity and strong incentives for circular male labour migration. Over time, however, migration contracted as opportunities in Ruanda-Urundi and Uganda converged, not in the least as a result of large-scale mobility itself.

Within and across Southeast Asian national borders, there has been a growing circulation of labour, capital, people, and goods. Meanwhile, urbanisation, agrarian changes, and liberal economic restructuring have been drawing a large section of the rural population into mobile economies and trade networks. This special issue explores the linkage between mobility and the growing precaritisation of labour resulting from neoliberalised development policies, nationalist citizenship regimes, and discourses, and arbitrary state power. Arguably, the consequent insecurity and uncertainty have profound implications for the social and economic life of migrant labourers. Although these conditions engender dangers and risks, they also hold possibilities for crafting translocal livelihoods and social relations. In this introduction, we investigate the diverse trajectories of labour migration in Southeast Asia through a critical discussion on the concept of ‘precarity’ that underscores the resilience of labour migrants despite the precarious conditions of their lives. The special issue suggests that, while precarious labour has long been part of regimes of control and exploitation in the region, precarity today is shaped by the blurry boundaries between the legal and the illegal, between local and global lives, and between different worlds of belonging.

This paper identifies education, skills training and improved social infrastructure as key development issues to address population decline in regions of steady out-migration from the Russian Arctic. Migration flows have mostly stabilised after the sharp and unexpectedly large population decline in the Arctic in the 1990s, during the transition to a market economy. However, the trends set in motion during that collapse, including falling general levels of education, declining size of all but the largest cities, and ageing of the populace, are becoming more serious for some regions, even where government resettlement programmes exist. As young professionals continue to leave, resettling compatriots and hiring shift labour may contribute to the vitality of more resilient regions, for example, Krasnoyarsk and Yamalo-Nenets. However, the European part of the Russian Arctic, despite its critical importance to commerce and to military security, and despite assistance programmes and subsidies, is conforming more to the ageing, less productive contours of neighbouring Arctic states on the periphery of Europe.

Sweden used to be one of the most restrictive countries in the Organisation of Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) in terms of labour immigration policy. This was drastically changed in 2008 when a very liberal immigration law was passed. Why did one of the most restrictive labour immigration countries suddenly become one of the most liberal ones? The article argues that it is necessary to consider labour market institutions and their consequences for labour migration. These factors will influence the preferences, strategies and chances of success for various policy actors. A decline in union power and corporatism in Sweden had important consequences for its labour immigration. Following this decline, employers and centre-right parties became more active and adopted more liberal policy positions than previously. The article analyses policy developments since the 1960s and draws on official documents, position statements, party manifestos, media coverage and original elite interviews.

In this article, I argue that precarious migration status can be used as an organizing concept for an analysis of (im)migration law in Canada. After situating the regulation of precarious migrants in the historical context of the liberal/neo-liberal shift of the 1970s, I argue that the increase in migrant precariousness over the past few years is likely to increase as a result of recent legislative changes in both refugee and migrant-worker law. Finally, I offer a critique of the traditional liberal argument for migrant rights, inviting an alternative approach to establish migrant rights on the basis of economic participation.