Overview

Migration narratives are exhausted almost everywhere: flattened into security and crisis talk in destination countries, and into remittance statistics in sending countries. Labor mobility still carries a public legitimacy that other migration narratives have lost. This session asks how the sector can use that opening well: which evidence actually moves the undecided public, how to avoid reducing people to interchangeable labor, and what network and distribution it would take to get the story in front of new audiences. The argument is then tested against a sending-country perspective.

Key questions

• What stops an honest public conversation about labor mobility: a lack of evidence, or not knowing which evidence moves which audience, and when?
• Can the case for labor mobility rest on economic usefulness alone, or does it risk treating people as interchangeable labor? How does it look from sending countries?
• What would it take to build a network and distribution channels that get the labor mobility story in front of audiences who aren’t already following it?

Who should join

Primarily recruiters, employers and investors attending GWX26 for commercial reasons, alongside funders, policymakers, communications and media professionals, researchers, and sending-country institutions.