COVID-19, migrant labor and inclusion in South America

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on migrant labour and inclusion in South America has been severe. Migrants play a critical role in labour markets across the region, but their largely informal employment left them especially vulnerable as governments sought to fight COVID-19 in a context of institutional precariousness, lack of reliable information and uncertainty about which measures to implement. Mandatory lockdowns and widespread border closures severely limited human mobility and exacerbated barriers to migrants’ socio-economic integration. Three key factors contributed to migrant vulnerability and exclusion in this context – first, the stark increase in voluntary and forced mobility across the region in the past twenty years, which already posed a serious challenge to states before the onset of the pandemic; second, the lack of permanent and sustainable migrant regularisation in most countries (Cerrutti, 2022); and third, the lack of effective mechanisms to remedy migrants’ socio-economic and labour precarity (Brauckmeyer, Padrón and Licheri, 2022).