0000000001101271
AUTHOR
Sergei Shubin
Rethinking Labour Migration Channels: the Experience of Latvia from EU Accession to Economic Recession
With the onset of recession in the UK in 2008, it was assumed that immigration from other European Union countries would decline. However, this has been shown to not be the case, with the volume of new arrivals from most of the East-Central European ‘Accession 8’ countries actually increasing. The focus of this paper is Latvia, a country that had a relatively buoyant economy following its accession to the European Union in 2004 but that now has one of the highest unemployment and emigration rates in Europe. Interviews carried out with labour providers, policymakers, and employers are used to examine the labour migration channels that reflect and structure labour migration flows from Latvia …
The role of recruitment agencies in imagining and producing the ‘good’ migrant
This paper focuses on representations of labour migrants and interrogates how such imaginaries shape migrant recruitment and employment regimes. The recruitment and employment of labour migrants inevitably involves a range of knowledge practices that affect who is recruited, from where and for what purposes. In particular, this paper seeks to advance understandings of how images of ‘bodily goodness’ are represented graphically and how perceptions of migrant workers influence the recruitment of workers to the UK from Latvia. The research described in this paper is based on interviews with recruitment agencies, employers and policy makers carried out in Latvia in 2011. The analysis results in…