Liminal Lives: How Ireland’s Labour Migration Regime Entraps Migrant Households in Hyper-precarity

More than two decades have passed since 1996, when Ireland first became a net recipient of immigration. Following significant economic changes and movement from boom to bust to recovery, from 2015 onwards Ireland is again experiencing positive net migration. However, we know little about the work and life experiences of those migrants who made Ireland home. This research aims to fill key knowledge gaps relating to how migrants have experienced labour market progression in Ireland, the traps and structural barriers they have encountered and how these spill over to realities of precarious work and family lives. In particular, the research seeks to assess how labour migrants experience precarity traps in Ireland and the degree to which Irish government policy has been responsible for and responsive to labour migrants’ experience of precarity. The research also seeks to discern the impacts of precarity on migrants’ agency and decision-making as well as on family life. Qualitative data from over 49 semi-structured interviews of labour migrants – men and women – and their family members, from 15 countries, is used to build a picture of migrants who first entered Ireland on work permits in the period 1999 to 2004. Participants, who first worked in the Accommodation and Food Sector or the Domestic and Care Sector, were selected through an analysis of the case files of the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland - the leading NGO working with immigrants in the country. The lens of the concept hyper-precarity is used to interrogate the labour market trajectories and experiences of participants, with analysis of different barriers, and forms of both entrapment and agency experienced by migrants in the different sectors. It identifies strategies households use to improve their labour market position and the extent to which precarity in employment bleeds into precarity in their daily lives. The findings of this thesis are timely and the learning from migrants’ experiences is used to make recommendations for policy changes that can prevent the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage in migrant households