The effect of the global economic crisis on Asian migrant workers and governments’ responses

It will take more time for the full scale of the global economic crisis to unravel and for its impact on the cross-border movements of labour, their conditions of employment and possible return to become manifest. Although the recession in the United States started well over a year before the collapse of sub-prime financial market migration and remittances grew strongly and rapidly in many parts of the world obscuring any early signs of the effects of the oncoming crisis. Many factors remain uncertain even today, including how the fiscal and monetary stimuli that many governments have hurriedly crafted are working to revive afflicted economies. While there have been daily reports of firms shutting down and laying off workers since October last year, it is still uncertain how these have affected migrant workers who are mostly in jobs that have been rejected by national workers, or are in occupations for which there is growing demand like for health care workers in spite of economic downturns.