Taxing Migrants will document how pandemic-related strains on the UK's fiscal infrastructure have affected migrants from Central and Eastern Europe since March 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic has radically altered migrants' abilities to act as taxpaying residents, impacting their access to work, residency, and welfare. From March to December 2020, the Department of Work and Pensions suspended the allocation of National Insurance Numbers (NINos) to new EU migrants, preventing many from obtaining employment. The closure and/or the move online of other vital services (the EU Settlement Resolution Centre, Citizen Advice Bureaus) made it difficult for migrants to clarify and regularise their employment and residence status, and to access housing assistance or benefits such as Universal Credit. For migrants who obtained a NINO before the DWP closure, however, taxpayer status and access to a Personal Tax Account provided an unexpected way of checking on the activities of employers (e.g. fraudulent claims for furlough).
Taxing Migrants will bring together the expertise of front-line advisors from the Work Rights Centre (WoRC) with scholars of migration and tax at the University of Oxford (COMPAS/OSGA) in order to exchange knowledge about
- the fiscal challenges created by Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic for CEE migrants,
- how CEE migrants understand and make use of key pieces of fiscal infrastructure (National Insurance Numbers and Personal Tax Accounts), and
- how these could be used to empower migrants to understand their rights and hold employers to account.
The UK Government has taken a "digital first" trajectory in its provision of fiscal and public services, but research on vulnerable residents' engagement with fiscal infrastructures is scarce. This knowledge exchange activity will contribute significantly to our understanding of the dual impact of Brexit and COVID-19 on already existing digital and linguistic barriers to regularisation for CEE migrants.
