Europe’s essential workers: Migration and pandemic politics in Central and Eastern Europe during COVID-19

Abstract How do countries navigate the tradeoffs between public health and economic reopening? What explains variation in state responses to COVID‐19? Historically, governments have tackled pandemics as external, nonconventional security threats, restricting immigration to protect citizens from contagious outsiders. Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries could not frame COVID‐19 this way because European integration and free‐movement migration blur the line between insiders and outsiders. This article examines the conditions and coalitions that shaped policy outcomes, and argues that migration systems played a double role in policy change: as structures for policy diffusion and as venues for migrants’ agency. Governments learned from one another's experiences, but diffusion occurred unevenly according to countries’ position within migratory systems.