Meet the team member of JPI MYBL funded project CAREWELL TF + policy summary
Introduction
Raquel Martínez Buján is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of A Coruña (Spain).
The CAREWELL TF project
Carewell project approaches care and social protection practices that transnational families developed across frontiers, keeping the sense of family beyond mobility in contemporary globalized world.
Most important message from the policy brief
The Covid-19 pandemic arose at a time when there was an upward cycle of population migration from abroad to Spain. The restrictions of the health crises affected this mobility and had a high impact on migratory trajectories, both in the settlement processes and in those in which family regrouping was being planned. In addition, the consequences on the labour market were very significant. On the one hand, unemployment rates increased considerably due to job losses. On the other hand, those immigrants who continued to work did so in precarious and unprotected conditions due to the employment sectors to which they had access (agriculture, cleaning, care for the elderly, etc.). In this sense, the pandemic visualised the dependence of its economy on immigrant labour in occupations that were classified as “essential”. Paradoxically, the policy measures that were taken especially benefited regular workers, where the presence of the immigrant population is lower, and for those who were employed in sectors not considered as “essential” during this period. The social programmes that mitigated the situation of vulnerability to a greater extent were those organised by third sector entities, associations and the self-managed mutual aid processes that emerged during this period.
What message do you want to give to the readers?
In times of systematic crisis, the migrant population is the most affected in terms of vulnerability. The effects usually result in massive job losses without the existence of adequate public administration mechanisms capable of reversing this situation. It is therefore essential that public social protection be programmed to take into account the particularly precarious situations of the immigrant population, such as irregularity, the fragmented history of contributions in their labour trajectories and the difficulty of maintaining housing.