Labour Migration

This chapter will focus on labour migration, that is the movement of persons with the aim of employment or income-bringing activities (e.g., entrepreneurship), developing the topic which was also touched upon in Chap. 3 on conceptual understanding of migration drivers. Research on labour migration has developed across various disciplines (e.g., sociology, anthropology, and geography), but most prominently in economics. It has resulted in a range of theoretical frameworks, starting with neoclassical economic theories and advancing through the New Economics of Labour Migration (NELM), dual labour market theory, and social network theory, to more recent transnational approaches or theories dedicated to particular forms of labour migration. These diverse approaches offer insights into labour migration on macro-, meso- and micro-levels. Although a dichotomy based on skills (highskilled vs. low-skilled workers) can be seen as controversial or misleading as a division between workers representing these two types of skills is often vague or difficult to determine, the distinction does reflect recent debates on labour migration. Thus, a high /low-skills dichotomy serves as a guide to the structure of this chapter. This chapter outlines the development of the field of scholarship on labour migration and the key trends of thinking in this field. The section on high-skilled migration outlines three major research strands: (1) the effects of high-skilled migration, (2) policies related to this migration, and (3) the mobility of health professionals. In the section on low-skilled migration, the discussion is organised around key sectors of employment (construction, agriculture, domestic service/care, and sex work). This selection is arbitrary, but reflects the main strands emerging in the literature while focusing directly on the labour market rather than on the characteristics of migration itself.