COVID-19 and Migration: The Legacy of Economization

One of the tendencies observed when studying migration governance during the COVID-19 pandemic globally, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), has been a quick return to the pre-pandemic logic of the neoliberal state. This is remarkable when compared with the anti-immigrant rhetoric within official discourse and the rapid expansion of re-bordering practices on Poland’s borders. These observations coincide with the remarks of Roi Livne (2021), who argues that “habituated ways of formulating problems economically persist during disaster times.”

The more time has passed since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the less obvious it is that the pandemic has been a critical juncture, in the way migration or mobility are being governed. It actually appears that the opposite may be true – the occurrence of the pandemic has exacerbated some existing patterns of governance. Nevertheless, in the context of diverse trajectories of social change and the social tendency to routinize crises, COVID-19 legacies are not easy to grasp. Discovering them requires rigorous critically oriented research into the social practices embedded in both global and local contexts.

One way of studying the migration-related legacies of the pandemic is to examine them through the lens of the “doing migration” approach, focusing on the examination of historical, political, and economic contexts in which individuals are socially produced as “migrants” (Amelina 2021). When routinized ways of “doing migration” meet discursive knowledge about belonging, membership, etc., of a certain historical period, they form together specific social orders of migration.

Migration’s Securitization

Existing research points to the aggravation of securitization trends after the outbreak of COVID-19. Governments applied securitization introducing emergency measures limiting various individual rights, particularly those of foreigners or pertaining to border crossing. The way migration limitations were framed and implemented further reproduced unequal access to mobility and protection. Together with curfews, lockdowns, and the isolation of labor migrants and asylum seekers, states found new ways to use surveillance techniques to control and separate “desirable” mobility from its undesirable version.

Poland was among the first in the EU to enforce severe lockdowns and close international borders. The rights of asylum seekers were severely hampered as they could not get to the border and submit an asylum claim. Over time, Poland relaxed the rules of border crossing at the EU internal borders as well as at the border with Ukraine (where the majority of labor migrants come from), while keeping the borders with Belarus and Russia essentially closed (extending post-COVID rules for other reasons, such as the geopolitical ones). This move demonstrated a tendency to establish new bordering practices as a long-term governance technique (Tazzioli & Stierl 2021).

Economization as the Main Form of the Pandemic Migration Regime

Economization understood as a tendency to optimization and wealth accumulation (Livne 2021) has turned out to be the dominant form of emergency governance applied by Poland to govern migration during the pandemic that was treated as a hindrance to economic activity rather than the most significant social phenomenon existing independently of the economy. The Polish economy has been dependent on migrants in many dimensions, and the pandemic strengthened this tendency. Additionally, the economization of migration as the main state approach was largely driven by lobbying from employer organizations, which influenced the simplification of issuing work and residence permits to foreigners. This can be confirmed by the steadily growing number of foreigners who received legal status in Poland during the pandemic, as well as new legal regulations. The most crucial regulation stipulated that residence permits for foreigners expiring during the emergency were prolonged automatically.

Polish reaction to the pandemic should be understood in the context of its economic and political transformation after 1989. The Polish model of neoliberalism, built quickly upon the ruins of communism, is strongly market-oriented with limited welfare offered to the more vulnerable parts of the population. Secondly, the economization logic is not only aimed at “speeding up” economic growth but also “catching up” with the West, which is portrayed as almost a “civilizational” necessity (Nowicka-Franczak 2021). Thus, at the beginning of 2000 when Poland started to accept a more significant number of foreigners, migrants were automatically framed as workers.

Migration Governance Through Economic Imperatives and Securitization

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated some of the existing patterns of governance, rather than leading to the appearance of novel approaches. I argue that the discourse and practices of economic growth were dominating Poland’s migration policies. Despite being a relatively young immigration country and having a populist right-wing government in power, during the pandemic, the interests of the national economy and labor market were prioritized in migration policies over the strategy of control and deterrence. It demonstrates how firmly entrenched in the post-communist environment the strategy of developing and performing economically is, and how deeply immigration has been socially uprooted in the context of the national economy.

Yet the Polish case also revealed the dialectical relationship between migration’s securitization and economization. Those indistinct links can be reflected in the phenomenon of the “essential workers” concept, by which migrant workers were described as those helping to save the national economies during the pandemic and therefore welcomed (Fiałkowska & Matuszczyk 2021). When looking in terms of the possible emergence of a novel mobility regime, COVID-19 has led to the creation of a new chasm in the social production of migrants: Irregular/unwanted ones (in practice asylum seekers were added to this category and “legal”/desired ones. This latter category is authorized to cross the border and settle when they can show they are “essential” to protect the national economy.

Marta Jaroszewicz is an Assistant Professor, and the Head of the Migration Policies Unit, Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw. She co-leads the Polish-Lithuanian project on governing mobility and migration through the lenses of emergency governance.

The research presented is financed by the National Science Centre, Poland, within the project “Mobility, migration and the COVID-19 epidemic: governing emergencies in Lithuania and Poland”, grant number 2020/38/L/HS5/00155 in the DAINA2 funding scheme.

This blog post is part of our series “Towards a Novel Mobility Regime.”

References:

-Amelina A. (2021) After the reflexive turn in migration studies: Towards the doing migration approach. Popul Space Place 27:e2368.
-Fiałkowska, K., Matuszczyk, K. (2021). Safe and fruitful? Structural vulnerabilities in the experience of seasonal migrant workers in agriculture in Germany and Poland. Safety Science, 139(3), 105275.
-Livne R. (2021). COVID, Economized. Sociologica. V.15 N.1, p. 35
-Nowicka-Franczak, M. (2021). Self-Criticism in Post-Communist Times: The Polish Debate on the Democratic Transition in the Eastern European Context. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 54 (4), 28–53.
-Tazzioli, M., Stierl M. (2021). Europe’s unsafe environment: migrant confinement under Covid-19. Critical Studies on Security, 9(1), pp. 76-80.