scholarly journals Migrant Labourers and Remittances Flow to India

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 1996-2015
Author(s):  
Dr. DEBASIS MUKHOPADHYAY ◽  
Dr. Asim K. Karmakar

Remittances are defined as the money transmitted from one place to another. Although remittances can also be sent in-kind, the term remittances usually refers to cash transfers. Migrant worker remittances are the part of total remittance flows that is transmitted by migrant workers, usually to their families or friends back home. Remittances are an important and stable source of income for households, in particular in developing countries. Analytical studies have shown that the flow of remittances is the least influenced by economic downturn and remains a stable source of income. Remittances have been identified as the third pillar of development as their volume is second to foreign direct investment and higher than overseas development assistance.Under the altruistic view, the migrant sends remittances home because he cares about the well being of his / her family in the home country, and the remittance satisfies the immigrants concern for the welfare of his family. Opposite to the altruistic motive is the immigrant who sends remittances to the home country mainly for economic reasons and financial self-interest. This paper tries to focus on choice between formal and informal channels which depends on a variety of factors, including the efficiency, the level of charges and exchange rates, the availability of facilities for transferring funds, the prevalence of political risks and the degree of flexibility in foreign exchange rules. It also put an insight into the size and frequency of total remittance flows  determined by several factors, such as: the number of migrant workers, wage rates, economic activity in the host country/region and in the sending country/region, exchange rates, political risk, facilities for transferring funds, marital status, level of education of the migrant, whether or not accompanied by dependents, years since out migration, household income level, relative interest rate between labour-sending and receiving and peeps into its effect on the BOP of the country.

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 249
Author(s):  
Maria Ulfah Anshor

<p>This article is part of dissertation research on childcare of Indonesian Women Migrant Workers (TKIP) in pesantren, using a qualitative approach and analysis unit in child and their environment. This study uses the ecological system theory of Bronfenbrenner and the<br />concept of Global Care Chain with the perspective of child protection. The results showed that the children of TKIP who abandoned by their mothers abroad became losing care, disrupted their social welfare psychically and socially; there is interdependence between the child’s of TKIP and his/her family with TKIP abroad; pesantren is an option for TKIP family because there is no professional childcare for the children of TKIP when their mother abandons her/him. Institutionally pesantren has potential to break the Global Care Chain injustice on the care of TKIP children with the support of religious values and traditions of pesantren. However, policy support is needed to ensure the care and social welfare of TKIP’s children that based on community and which integrated comprehensively in<br />blueprint of Indonesian migrant worker policy.</p>


BMJ Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. e045949
Author(s):  
Kaisin Yee ◽  
Hui Peng Peh ◽  
Yee Pin Tan ◽  
Irene Teo ◽  
Emily U Tong Tan ◽  
...  

IntroductionThe health, psychological and socioeconomic vulnerabilities of low-wage migrant workers have been magnified in the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in high-income receiving countries such as Singapore. We aimed to understand migrant worker concerns and coping strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic to address these during the crisis and inform on comprehensive support needed after the crisis.MethodsIn-depth semi-structured interviews were carried out with migrant workers diagnosed with COVID-19. The participants were recruited from a COVID-19 mass quarantine facility in Singapore through a purposive sampling approach. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and thematic analysis performed to derive themes in their collective experience during the crisis.ResultsThree theme categories were derived from 27 interviews: migrant worker concerns during COVID-19, coping during COVID-19 and priorities after COVID-19. Major stressors in the crisis included the inability to continue providing for their families when work is disrupted, their susceptibility to infection in crowded dormitories, the shock of receiving the COVID-19 diagnosis while asymptomatic, as well as the isolating conditions of the quarantine environment. The workers coped by keeping in contact with their families, accessing healthcare, keeping updated with the news and continuing to practise their faith and religion. They looked forward to a return to normalcy after the crisis with keeping healthy and having access to healthcare as new priorities.ConclusionWe identified coping strategies employed by the workers in quarantine, many of which were made possible through the considered design of care and service delivery in mass quarantine facilities in Singapore. These can be adopted in the set-up of other mass quarantine facilities around the world to support the health and mental well-being of those quarantined. Our findings highlight the importance of targeted policy intervention for migrant workers, in areas such as housing and working environments, equitable access to healthcare, and social protection during and after this crisis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-375
Author(s):  
Hande Turkoglu ◽  
Lorraine Brown ◽  
Philippa Hudson

PurposeEmployees eat at least one meal per day in the workplace on a regular basis, carrying implications for their physical and emotional well-being. For migrants, this can be challenging, owing to food culture differences. This study explores migrant workers’ perceptions of the food eaten in the hospitality workplace.Design/methodology/approachEleven in-depth, face-to-face, semi-structured interviews were carried out with migrant workers in three- and four-star hotels in the southwest of England.FindingsThe findings show that the food eaten in the workplace is perceived as unhealthy and fattening and therefore unappealing. This partly informs a decision to eat home country food away from work.Research limitations/implicationsFurther research is needed across many more organisations to investigate whether this would actually have the positive impact on employee well-being (migrant or home national) and employer reputation.Practical implicationsProviding additional “off-menu” meals for migrant employees is recognised. However, staff turnover within the hotel environment may mean that dishes acceptable to one nationality may not be acceptable to another. Alternatively, it may be that attention to such details and the provision of a food offering that is seen as fit for purpose by staff may reduce turnover and demonstrate “care” on the part of the employer. An annual staff survey could be conducted to gauge employee opinion.Social implicationsThis study helps to show the significance of food for migrant well-being. It highlights that in increasingly globalised workplaces, food provision is important for both emotional and physical health. The study's findings have relevance to other multicultural workplaces where the food provided to staff may have consequences for employee well-being.Originality/valueLittle research has focused on the link between the food consumed in the hospitality workplace and migrant worker well-being. This study therefore makes an important contribution to knowledge by exploring feelings about the food eaten at work from the perspective of migrant workers themselves.


Author(s):  
Emily Q. Ahonen

Occupational health and safety concerns classically encompass conditions and hazards in workplaces which, with sufficient exposure, can lead to injury, distress, illness, or death. The ways in which work is organized and the arrangements under which people are employed have also been linked to worker health. Migrants are people who cross borders away from their usual place of residence, and about one in seven people worldwide is a migrant. Terms like “immigrant” and “emigrant” refer to the direction of that movement relative to the stance of the speaker. Any person who might be classified as a migrant and who works or seeks to work is an immigrant worker and may face challenges to safety, health, and well-being related to the work he or she does. The economic, legal, and social circumstances of migrant workers can place them into employment and working conditions that endanger their safety, health, or well-being. While action in support of migrant worker health must be based on systematic understanding of these individuals’ needs, full understanding the possible dangers to migrant worker health is limited by conceptual and practical challenges to public health surveillance and research about migrant workers. Furthermore, intervention in support of migrant worker health must balance tensions between high-risk and population-based approaches and need to address the broader, structural circumstances that pattern the health-related experiences of migrant workers. Considering the relationships between work and health that include but go beyond workplace hazards and occupational injury, and engaging with the ways in which structural influences act on health through work, are complex endeavors. Without more critically engaging with these issues, however, there is a risk of undermining the effectiveness of efforts to improve the lot of migrant workers by “othering” the workers or by failing to focus on what is causing the occupational safety and health concern in the first place—the characteristics of the work people do. Action in support of migrant workers should therefore aim to ameliorate structural factors that place migrants into disadvantageous conditions while working to improve conditions for all workers.


Author(s):  
Huajun Wu ◽  
Zhiyong Cai ◽  
Qing Yan ◽  
Yi Yu ◽  
Ning Neil Yu

A paucity of public service afforded to migrant workers often begets a wide range of social problems. In China, hundreds of millions of migrant worker parents have to leave children behind in their hometowns. This paper investigated the long-term effects of the childhood experience of being left behind on the mental well-being of late adolescents. Mandatory university personality inventory (UPI) surveys (involving psychosomatic problems such as anxiety, depression, and stress) were conducted at a university in Jiangsu, China, during 2014–2017. The study sample consisted of 15,804 first-year college students aged between 15 and 28 years. The PSM method and the OLS regression model were employed. Controlling for the confounding factors (gender, age, single-child status, hometown location, ethnicity, and economic status), our empirical investigation demonstrated that childhood left-behind experience significantly worsened the mental health of the study sample, increasing the measure of mental ill-being by 0.661 standard deviations (p < 0.01). Moreover, the effects were consistently significant in subsamples divided by gender, single-child status, and hometown location; and the effects were greater for females, single-child students, and urban residents.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205015792110011
Author(s):  
Piper Liping Liu ◽  
Tien Ee Dominic Yeo

This study investigates the contextual and relational characteristics that underlie people’s information and communication technology (ICT) use and the implications for their well-being. We contextualize this investigation according to migrants, because they are faced with disruptions to their personal networks in the migration process that may attenuate the availability of social support and negatively affect their mental health. Migrants tend to be proficient in using mobile ICT to connect with different social ties to fulfill their needs, which potentially makes a difference to their psychological well-being. Through a survey of 504 internal migrant workers in China, we examined the social network factors that underlie multiple mobile ICT use and the attendant influences on social support and psychological well-being. Redressing the overemphasis on the importance of strong ties in extant literature, this study highlights the salience of mobile media multiplexity (i.e., the use of multiple mobile communication channels for social interactions) in weak tie communication and the greater contribution of weak ties toward social support and psychological well-being than strong ties. Our findings suggest that mobile-mediated communicative relationships with newer and more distanced social connections outside their immediate circles enhance the well-being of migrants. We contend that media multiplexity vis-à-vis weak ties underscores the reconfiguration of migrants’ communicative relationships following the separation from original ties and facilitates rewarding interactions with new ties.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (262) ◽  
pp. 97-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans J. Ladegaard

AbstractMany people in developing countries are faced with a dilemma. If they stay at home, their children are kept in poverty with no prospects of a better future; if they become migrant workers, they will suffer long-term separation from their families. This article focuses on one of the weakest groups in the global economy: domestic migrant workers. It draws on a corpus of more than 400 narratives recorded at a church shelter in Hong Kong and among migrant worker returnees in rural Indonesia and the Philippines. In sharing sessions, migrant women share their experiences of working for abusive employers, and the article analyses how language is used to include and exclude. The women tell how their employers construct them as “incompetent” and “stupid” because they do not speak Chinese. However, faced by repression and marginalisation, the women use their superior English language skills to get back at their employers and momentarily gain the upper hand. Drawing on ideologies of language as the theoretical concept, the article provides a discourse analysis of selected excerpts focusing on language competence and identity construction.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 238212052097719
Author(s):  
Crystal Lim ◽  
Jamie Xuelian Zhou ◽  
Natalie Liling Woong ◽  
Min Chiam ◽  
Lalit Kumar Radha Krishna

Background: With nearly 400 000 migrant workers in Singapore, many from Bangladesh, India and Myanmar, language and cultural barriers posed a great many challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was especially so as majority of the COVID-19 clusters in Singapore emerged from their communal dormitories. With concerns arising as to how this minority group could be best cared for in the intensive care units, the need for medical interpreters became clear. Main: In response, the Communication and Supportive Care (CSC) workgroup at the Singapore General Hospital developed the ‘Medical Interpreters Training for ICU Conversations’ program. Led by a medical social worker-cum-ethicist and 2 palliative care physicians, twenty volunteers underwent training. The program comprised of 4 parts. Firstly, volunteers were provided with an overview of challenges within the COVID-19 isolation ICU environment. Discussed in detail were common issues between patients and families, forms of distress faced by healthcare workers, family communication modality protocols, and the sociocultural demographics of Singapore’s migrant worker population. Secondly, key practice principles and ‘Do’s/Don’ts’ in line with the ethical principles of medical interpretation identified by the California Healthcare Interpreters Association were shared. Thirdly, practical steps to consider before, during and at the end of each interpretation session were foregrounded. Lastly, a focus group discussion on the complexities of ICU cases and their attending issues was conducted. Targeted support was further provided in response to participant feedback and specific issues raised. Conclusion: As a testament to its efficacy, the program has since been extended to the general wards and the Ministry of Health in Singapore has further commissioned similar programs in various hospitals. In-depth training on the fundamentals of medical terminology, language and cultural competency should be provided to all pertinent healthcare workers and hospitals should consider hiring medical interpreters in permanent positions.


2021 ◽  

More than 150 million international migrant workers and an unknown number of internal migrant workers toil across the globe. More than workplace exposures affect migrant worker health; their health is also affected by exposures in the sociocultural milieu from which they came and in which they currently live. Although some of these migrant workers include professionals in high-status occupations such as doctors, nurses, engineers, and computer scientists, most are low skill workers employed in the most dangerous jobs in the most hazardous industries. The health of these migrant workers has been a long-term concern in public health, and this concern has increased with the rise of greater globalization, the recent growth of displaced and refugee populations that will need to enter the workforce in their new host countries, and the anticipated effects of climate change. The domain of migrant worker health is expansive, and is necessarily limited in this bibliography. This bibliography focuses on workers and not the family members who may accompany them, although other family members also may be workers. It focuses on low-skill migrant workers, rather than on professionals who migrate for work. Low-skill migrant workers are the individuals for whom health and public health are concerns. Additionally, research on the health of migrant professional workers is scant. At the same time, this bibliography attempts to place migrant worker health in a holistic context; because migrant worker health is affected by more than workplace exposures, the bibliography addresses exposures in their current sociocultural milieu. This bibliography has three major sections. The first section summarizes general resources that provide information on migrant workers, including International Agencies, Nongovernmental Organizations, Data Sources, Reference Works, and Journals. The second section addresses the characteristics of migrant workers that affect their health, including their Personal Characteristics, the Circumstances of Migration, Forced Migration, Industries which employ migrant workers, and 3-D Jobs: Dangerous, Dirty, and Demanding. The final section considers the health status of migrant workers, with discussions of Conceptual Frameworks for understanding migrant worker health, Work Organization Exposures, Environmental Exposures, Sociocultural Exposures, Health Conditions, Approaches to Improve Migrant Worker Health, and Policy/Regulations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 2411-2415
Author(s):  
Milind Abhimanyu Nisargandha ◽  
Shweta Dadarao Parwe

Migrant workers are a valuable community for developing the Indian economy; adverse effect occurs on their mental and physical health during this pandemic situation. The coronavirus disease 2019 epidemic emerged in India due to spread nationwide from China, Wuhan city, and then Spread overall, 213 Countries and Territories worldwide have been reported. The Indian Government immediately set up a lockdown and quarantined the patients in the hospital and declared that area as a contentment Zone to avoid infection transmission. In this pandemic situation, many labour workers were living with their families in metropolitan cities. The urgent demand for public transport in the migrant workers from different states in India. For reaching them to the native place. These lead to spreading the coronavirus infection and increase the cases of nCOVID-19. It concluded that public health services and transportation for the migrant worker to reach the native place from all states. A maximum number of trains were needed, rather than travel restriction aware of them regarding wearing of Mask, Handwashing, and Quarantine after travelled. It has been six months since COVID -19; many questions remain unanswered about the coronavirus and its pathology. It was clear by global authorities that countries need to plan and increase health clear awareness and facilities for the migrant workers. 


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