The Covid-19 Crisis, Gender, and the Price of Migrants’ Invisibility

In the recent past, the global community has come together to confront the humanitarian challenges posed by natural disasters and epidemics, such as Ebola, SARS, earthquakes, tsunami, and hurricanes. But the Covid-19 crisis did not provoke the same unified response. The sudden absence of work, increased movement control, and social distancing have had disastrous consequences for an estimated 23.6 million international migrants in Southeast Asia and millions of internal migrants in countries like China and India. Whether migrants service rich countries like Singapore or Italy, toil as menial labor in workshops powering India’s and China’s industries, or work as seasonal farm laborers, their trait of being “invisible” has come with a steep price during the Covid crisis. This becomes especially distressing when media narratives fail to capture issues related to gender and increasing numbers of single women (international and internal) migrants.

This session seeks papers on various motivations, paths, and strategies for (im)mobility to cope with the Covid crisis and its unequal gender impacts, responding to questions such as:

- What circumstances shaped migrants’ (im)mobility decisions during the Covid crisis? What household strategies did disadvantaged people adopt to counteract recession and unemployment?

- What adverse economic impacts on migrants’ families were caused by lack of remittances?

- How have gender-blind welfare schemes impacted women migrant workers in informal employment sectors?

- How has migrant status interfered with social security provisions during the Covid crisis?

Although not restricted, contributions from empirically based studies from the global South are particularly welcome.