Migrant-led research and meaningful participation 

When working to advance migrants’ rights, safe and meaningful participation of those affected is essential when rooted in trust, safety, and shared purpose. Involving people with lived experience not only strengthens the effectiveness and impact of such work, but also supports community leadership, collective empowerment, and more effective narratives. 

As a broad network including grassroots movements and migrant-led associations, at PICUM we have been working to make this a reality since our foundation in 2001. Our new Strategic Plan 2026-2030 places meaningful participation of people with lived experience at the heart of all areas of work – from advocacy and research to communications and governance. As part of this commitment, in 2025 we launched a Task Force on Meaningful Participation, including members of affected communities, to drive PICUM’s participation agenda. Our objective with this taskforce is to channel good practices and experiences from our network to further foster safe, meaningful and responsible participation and inform our policy and advocacy efforts. Over the last years, we have increasingly promoted Participatory Action Research (PAR), an approach that recognises the agency of migrants as active research actors and seeks to link evidence to action. 

PAR played an important role in the EU-funded DignityFIRM project, which studies the working and living conditions of migrant workers in food-related labour sectors such as agriculture or delivery riders, in seven countries. In this project, we subcontracted three grassroots organisations, Mujeres Supervivientes in Seville (Spain), NOMADA Association in Wroclaw (Poland) and Here to Support in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) to train former undocumented migrants as peer-researchers and lead focus groups to identify and analyse the challenges of migrant workers in food supply chain sectors. More importantly, the migrant groups in the three cities had a budget to address the problems they had identified with concrete actions to change their realities.  

In the words of Lina Marcela Rincón, the peer-researcher in Spain, “PAR is a process that, in itself, is an action that changes reality. It allows us to meet, to get to know one another, and, by seeing ourselves as active subjects with dignity, to do something that changes the realities we wish to change – and in the way we wish to change them.” 

Some of the peer researchers in DignityFIRM were able to address EU and national institutions to shine a spotlight on the condition of migrant workers. 

Hamo Salhein, leading a migrant-led campaign for labor regularisation alongside Here to Support in The Netherlands, addressed the Committee of the Regions in Brussels and highlighted how the human rights the European Union claims to uphold too often apply only to those with regular status. Rocío Flores, President of the Union of Latin American Workers in Poland, became one of the first migrant workers to address the Polish National Parliament. In her intervention, she reminded that migration status remains one of the main drivers of exploitation of migrant workers and denounced the exploitative agencies and intermediaries that systematically abuse migrant workers in Poland.  

At PICUM, we consider PAR a promising methodology to engage with academia whilst recognising the agency of migrants, valuing the expertise of grassroots organisations and shifting power in knowledge production. Based on this experience, we developed Guidelines on Participatory Action Research (PAR) in the work with undocumented migrants, also available in Spanish and Polish, which captures our experience and collective reflections, hoping this can be useful for future action-oriented research linked to migration.  

The Guidelines compile key considerations when working together with undocumented migrants, including tips and reflections from the fieldwork on DignityFIRM. 

For more information on the work done by the three PAR teams in Seville, Amsterdam and Wroclaw, check out: 

• Cross-country report by PICUM (in English, Spanish and Polish)  

• Summary of migrant-led actions taken in the three cities 

• Individual case studies: 
  • Amsterdam (Here to Support) (in English and Dutch) 
  • Seville (Mujeres Supervivientes) (in English and Spanish)
  • Wroclaw (Nomada Association) (in English, Spanish and Polish)  

Ultimately, meaningful participation is not an add-on but a fundamental shift in how knowledge is produced and how change is driven in migrant rights work. When people with lived experience are trusted as co-creators and leaders, research and advocacy become more grounded, impactful, and capable of transforming the very conditions they seek to address.