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

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.