“Domestic Push or Foreign Pull?” An investigation of European strategies for meeting low-end labour market shortages.

Great energy is spent by policy makers and academics discussing strategies of attracting highly educated migrants: they are thought to be lower risk for being a fiscal cost to the welfare state,more easily ‘integrated’, more likely to spur innovation and economic growth, and the public tends to have more favourable attitudes towards them. What receives less attention is countries’ reliance on migrants to fill socially necessary, but less socially valued, positions in the labour market (Ruhs & Anderson 2010). During the Covid-19 lockdowns and via labour market shortages around Europe since, the importance of being able to fill positions in these “low-skill” sectors - that are often overpopulated by migrants - has become ever more apparent. This paper investigates the strategies states pursue in ensuring these key tasks are performed, specifically the relationship between sourcing labour power domestically or from abroad. Apart from a reliance on migrants, the other key tool policy makers have for this issue is the incentivisation of natives to take such positions. Following trends in the US in the 1980s, unemployment benefits and social assistance programs across Europe have radically increased the conditionalities attached to the receiving of benefits (Lodemel & Moreira 2014). These various obligations, such as time limits, proof of job search and willingness to accept offered positions, have also been referred to as ‘workfare’ or ‘activation’. This analysis uses the concepts of “domestic pull” and “foreign pull”, and investigates how they relate, hypothesising an inverse relationship, mediated by national sectoral composition. Domestic Push is operationalised using a measure of unemployment benefit generosity combined with new OECD measures on welfare conditionalities. Foreign Pull is measured using the percentage of low-end jobs that are filled by migrants, combined with a measure of immigration policy restrictiveness towards low-skill migrants. Since there are significant differences between European economies in terms of the composition of different economic sectors, the analysis includes a measure of the overall amount of low-skill work. This is to control for the potential impact this might have on the relationship between the key variables of “Domestic Pull” and “Foreign Pull”, but also to test for its own sake if the size of a countries’ low skill sector has an independent influence on the recruitment of labour migrants, as others have hypothesised (Devitt 2011). Following King & Rueda’s calls (2008), this paper emphasises the importance of “Cheap Labour” for comparative political economy, and contributes to the migration policy literature by contextualising it within the broader institutional frameworks within which its made, rather than treating it as a sui generis subfield (Menz 2008; Afonso & Devitt 2016).