Labour relations and border regimes in a pandemic scenario. A comparative study of migrant labour in the EU agro-industrial sector

EU economies’ structural need for low-cost foreign labour is usually invisibilized by nationalistic and populist discourses on immigration. Similarly, border and migration studies tend to overlook states’ role in sustaining the demand of employers for low-cost migrant workers. However, the shortage of labour in the agro-industrial sector of western EU countries during recent border closures was calculated at around one million workers – mostly from Eastern Europe and Northern Africa. States responded with exceptional measures to ensure the cross-border supply of low-cost foreign workers. At the same time, the governance of the pandemic has created new borders and frontiers: while unnecessary mobility is forbidden or strongly discouraged, migrants and racialized labourers, overrepresented among essential workers, are often placed on the frontline of infection risk. LABOR-PAS will contribute to ‘de-problematizing’ migration by providing a theoretically informed, ethnographic and comparative account of state-promoted path dependence in the employment of migrant workers and analysing the consequences that multifarious border regimes have on labour relations through the heuristic prism of the current pandemic.