Migration As Economic Imperialism How International Labour Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries 1nbsped 1509553983 9781509553983 - Compress
Migration As Economic Imperialism How International Labour Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries 1nbsped 1509553983 9781509553983 - Compress
Migration As Economic Imperialism How International Labour Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries 1nbsped 1509553983 9781509553983 - Compress
Economic Imperialism
Migration as
Economic Imperialism
How International Labour
Mobility Undermines Economic
Development in Poor Countries
Immanuel Ness
polity
Copyright © Immanuel Ness 2023
The right of Immanuel Ness to be identified as Author of this Work has been
asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose
of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of
the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5398-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5399-0(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external
websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to
press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make
no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain
appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been
overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any
subsequent reprint or edition.
Introduction 1
1 Neoliberal Capitalism, Imperialism and Labour Migration 27
2 Underdevelopment and Labour Migration as Economic
Imperialism 54
3 Labour Migration and Origin Countries 80
4 Labour Migration and Destination States 116
5 The Damage of Borders 146
Conclusion: Dismantling the Migration–Development Nexus 180
References 208
Index 244
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
Tables
at home but have encouraged the most skilled and talented to work
abroad.
This book will present new evidence that labour migration is a
net loss and hindrance to growth and sustainable economic devel-
opment. Throughout the Global South, young adults are educated
at private training centres in medicine and health care, technology
and engineering, business services, food preparation, construction,
industrial production, domestic and caring work, and logistics to
prepare themselves for work overseas (Rodriguez 2010). The skills
which workers acquire in these training centres in origin states are
not intended to build national economies or to become a source for
national development and self-sufficiency, but for export to foreign
developed countries.
Contrary to the position of multilateral development agencies (the
World Bank, IMF and western capitalist countries), the premise of
this book is that labour migration obstructs economic development
and exploits migrant workers in developed countries, who are subject
to discrimination, xenophobia, arrest and deportation. If we are
to ameliorate poverty, climate disaster, perpetual war and higher
levels of political conflict via populism, nationalism and intolerance
in developed countries, then national development which fosters
sustainable self-reliant economies – avoiding mass dislocation in the
Global South – is a crucial corrective.
Chapter outlines
Since the end of the Second World War and political independence,
the West has advanced three major forms of foreign revenue devel-
opment for the Global South to encourage development: foreign
aid, foreign investments and, most recently, labour-migration remit-
tances. This book contends that the most recent development
programme, remittances from migrant labourers, is largely a failure
which accentuates economic inequality and does not contribute to
the growth of economies in the Global South; rather, it exposes their
subservience to developed countries in the international system. The
system of temporary labour migration today is far more essential for
the Global North and developed countries with economic demands
for labour. Meanwhile, remittances are not the remedy for allevi-
ating poverty and inequality. Migrant labourers may be able to send
monies to assist their families with basic needs, but they represent an
individualistic solution to a systemic crisis of inequality. Temporary
labour migration mainly develops rich countries at the expense
of skilled and unskilled labourers who would otherwise form the
labour-supply pillar of a developing country’s bona fide policy for
human and national development, and thus can be seen as a modern
form of economic imperialism (Crossa and Delgado Wise 2022;
Delgado Wise 2022).
Most observers agree that developing countries learn through
labour migration the historic lessons of economic development which
have occurred over decades and centuries in order for developed
countries to gain the capacity for their economic, social and even
political modernization. In understanding the significance of the
migration–development nexus, migration scholars fail to recognize a
clear distinction between advanced capitalist and poor countries of
the South. Rather than dividing global migration between rich and
poor nations, migration and development scholars tend to apply a
nuanced, yet unfocused, distinction. Ronald Skeldon observes ‘we
can best conceptualize the relations between migration and devel-
opment by dividing the world into five development tiers. The term
tier is used, first, to give the impression of hierarchy, from more
economically developed areas to less economically developed areas,
and second, to try to convey the idea that the boundaries between
them are fluid’ (Skeldon 2014: 15). As such, there are many grada-
tions of development from countries that are impoverished in Africa
or South Asia to highly advanced affluent societies in Western
Europe and North America. In addition, migration is not a single
Capitalism, Imperialism and Labour Migration 31
The IOM claims that global migration has held at a fairly steady
pace in the first two decades of the century, rising from 2.8 per cent
to 3.5 per cent. Yet this growth does not consider the expansion
of the global population over the same period. Drawing on IOM
statistics, global migration increased 45 per cent from 150 million in
2000 to 281 million in 2020 and has continued to grow in the 2020s
(see Table 1.1).
The expansion of the global labour migration regime from the 1990s
to the 2020s coincides with the withdrawal of the state’s capacity for
economic regulation and the rise of neoliberal capitalism, which has
allowed capital to be far more mobile than at any time since the late
nineteenth century. This shift from regulated to neoliberal capitalism
has also unleashed the global population of migrant labourers. While
in the nineteenth century migrants tended to become permanent
residents, today’s migrants are primarily low-skilled and low-waged
migrant labourers. Even if wages of transnational and internal
migrant workers are higher than in their locations of origin, most
international migrant labourers will not experience sustained wage
Europe and North America. Profits are inured to the benefit of inter-
national capital located in the Global North, which benefits from
the creation of international migration zones in the South as well
as EPZs. While labour now has the capacity to cross international
borders, temporary migrants are constrained under the time limita-
tions imposed on them by destination states, and thus they can only
cross borders on a temporary basis, being forced to return home
upon completion of their contracted work assignments or to fall into
undocumented status.
The policy and scholarly premises of the ‘remittances as devel-
opment’ model are highly flawed. In reality, international labour
migration does not contribute to an appreciable improvement of the
economies of countries of origin, most of which are in the Global
South. These countries are not developing in the mould of those
in the North which, though extracting surplus value, are far more
prosperous than nations in the South. Labour migration extends the
exploitation of natural resources and agriculture to tapping human
resources of the developing world’s most skilled and able-bodied
people.
The dominant perspective that remittances are a crucial factor
in improving the conditions of countries in the Global South is
not supported by the historical and empirical evidence in these
countries. In this way, labour migration cannot be considered as an
equivalent form of economic activity which fosters development,
as is claimed by proponents in leading multilateral organizations
(UN, IOM, World Bank, etc.) and western economists and social
scientists. Instead, this chapter critiques the dominant perspective of
labour migration as beneficial to sending countries, whereby foreign
workers remit a portion of their wages to fund national development
of essential infrastructure, healthcare systems, education, sanitation
and essential services. The majority of migrant labourers do assist
their families through sending remittances to home countries, but the
research drawn from case studies in chapter 3 shows that the current
process of sending money to families back home is insufficient to
meet essential economic needs for community and national devel-
opment. Even as annual international remittances have grown from
US$126 billion to US$689 billion in the past 20 years, the majority
of those who send significant funds home are highly skilled migrants
from states in the Global North and South. Hence contemporary
labour migration perpetuates a global system of economic inequality,
Capitalism, Imperialism and Labour Migration 37
In 2018 and again in 2022, the rise in global inequality has been
documented by the World Inequality Report at the Paris School of
Capitalism, Imperialism and Labour Migration 43
workers. Notably, since the 1990s, China and India have relied on
extensive internal migration of labourers from rural regions to work
in newly established greenfield zones. Each country has relied heavily
on foreign capital for investments. Indeed, the Arab Gulf states and
Malaysia have depended on foreign migrant labourers to work on
new projects and industries. While Arab Gulf countries have funded
SEZs independently through petrodollars, Malaysia has attracted
foreign capital from Singapore and elsewhere to develop an extensive
network of technology industries (Adhikari and Hobley 2011;
Kathiravelu 2016; Schielke 2020).
How significant and dependable is FDI in the Global South’s
economic development? Since 1990, FDI has grown dramatically
to overtake foreign aid as the leading source of external capital for
development projects, which are primarily concentrated in production
industries and generally do not advance sustainable development
goals (SDGs) such as health, education, housing, sanitation and
mass transit. In addition, over more than 30 years, FDIs have had
a record of high volatility and are often unpredictable due to shifts
in global investment. For instance, the World Financial Recession
of 2008–9 had deleterious consequences for developing countries.
FDI to the Global South had barely recovered when the Covid-19
pandemic disrupted the global economy once again in 2020. This
was compounded in 2022 by rising inflation and the threat to
greenfield investments by MNCs in the Global South as northern
multinationals shifted investment priorities to energy projects (UN
2022). According to the World Investment Report in 2019, FDI and
SEZs are not a panacea for most of the poorest countries, even if they
represent a significant share of capital inflows. It concludes that ‘[t]he
least developed countries (LDCs), with a combined population of 1
billion, receive just 3 per cent of those cross-border capital flows. For
these countries, remittances remain substantially higher than FDI.
They increased by 11 per cent to $40 billion in 2018, compared with
FDI inflows worth $24 billion’ (UN 2019a: 12; see Table 1.3).
wages than equivalent workers were in the North when it was indus-
trializing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Global mobility
also fails to solve the problem of inequality, as migration is a complex
process involving affluent and poor countries. More importantly,
labour migration as economic development policy in the Global
South is a chimera since it does not provide a remedy to the problem
of unequal exchange. Though the transfer of migrant worker wages
to peripheral countries through remittances provides fleeting benefits
to the lives of their families by funding education, paying medical
expenses, buying household appliances or paying for marriage
ceremonies, no lasting benefits have been conferred to nation-states
as a consequence of international labour mobility. Instead, migrant-
sending states foster a warped system of development through
funding skilled workers who go on to perform necessary tasks like
medical care in the North. For example, the most skilled workers in
India, Mexico, the Philippines and Nepal are working abroad, often
for multinational corporations (Rodriguez 2010).
Proponents of labour migration and remittances have claimed that
remittances are crucial to the development of democracy as they
circumvent states in the Global South, regarded by political scientists
Abel Escribà-Folch, Covadonga Meseguer and Joseph Wright as
authoritarian and autocratic. Not only do migrant workers returning
from their assignments abroad bring with them democratic practices,
but they also send money to political parties and social movements
which oppose established leaders, and therefore contribute to the
participatory process. These commentators consider remittances to
be a gift to migrant labourers and poor states from rich economies,
but they also judge neoliberal capitalist states as the custodians of
liberal democratic ideals which will democratize the Global South
(Escribà-Folch, Meseguer and Wright 2022). This interpretation
contributes to an imperialist stand that the developing countries in
the Global South are economically and politically backward and their
leaders far less responsible than those in the North, and thus must
be defeated in elections or through political movements for change.
Conclusion
This chapter has claimed that the introduction and growth of migrant
labour remittances since the 1980s into the international economy
has been rendered ineffective in advancing national economic
development and essential social needs. Rather, the remittances
refrain which has dominated international economic organizations
Capitalism, Imperialism and Labour Migration 53
Rather than a genuine concern for the status of global poverty, the US
federal government advanced economic development in the Global
South to exercise imperial power (Hickel 2018). In 1960, W. W.
Rostow – the conservative and classical political economist, national
security adviser (NSA) to Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War
and author of The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist
Manifesto, an abstract and mechanistic theory of modernization –
intended to draw intellectual support in the Global South away from
the USSR and China’s existing models of socialism through an alter-
native capitalist form of development, one which had never before
or since been replicated by nation-states (Rostow 1960). The work
was primarily a polemic against the Soviet Union and communism,
and it advocated foreign assistance for governments embracing the
existing western capitalist paradigm of economic development. On
no occasion did poor countries of the South apply the model, and,
in most instances, minimal US and western aid was appropriated by
authoritarian governments in the western camp which had suppressed
socialist forces. As NSA to Lyndon Johnson, Rostow encouraged and
orchestrated US military intervention to suppress and thwart leftist
popular organizations, socialist movements and political leaders.
In the ensuing years, the US Agency for International Development
(USAID) continued to oppose the redistribution of land and resources
to the poor in favour of investment in private enterprise. But the
major goal of US foreign aid during the Cold War was to curry
favour and gain influence over the Soviet Union in the Global South
(Engerman 2017; Kapstein 2022; Lee 2022; Wiegersma and Medley
2000).
(known as IITs), the highest skilled Indian workers parlay their skills
into well-paying jobs in the United States and elsewhere, serving
western financial and technological corporations. The benefits of this
system do not accrue to most Indians but rather to multinationals in
the Global North, highly skilled workers and their families and, to a
lesser extent, Indians with technological and business-services training
who are employed in subsidiaries in major Indian cities. India has
among the highest unemployment rates in the world. More than 90
per cent of all Indians do not have secure work and are compelled
to work in the informal sector at low wages and without health and
pension benefits, even if they work for major companies which are
integrated into global supply chains. Workers employed in production
industries for national and multinational corporations are divided
between a minority of workers employed full time for the firm and a
majority who are not permanent workers: a 1:4 ratio.
Though manufacturing workers may engage in the same tasks on
the job, they earn a fraction of the wages, have no job security and
can be dismissed at any time (Barnes 2014). The beneficiaries of this
integrated global migration system for highly skilled workers are a
thin layer of India’s privileged population rather than most Indians
labouring in menial jobs and the unemployed. This pattern corrobo-
rates the conclusions of the UNDP Human Development Report
2009, which contends that remittances are not reinvested within
origin states, particularly underserved communities. Notwithstanding
the limitations of migration as a form of development, the UNDP
calls for a more benevolent system of migration for migrant labour
and refugees. Surely, skilled migrant labourers to the Global North
must not be exposed to rising xenophobia or condemnation from
western politicians and media (Menjívar, Ruiz and Ness 2019).
Concomitantly, these migrants do not serve the purpose of national
economic development, nor do they contribute to SDGs, as they
amass remittances for the benefit of already educated, highly skilled
and wealthy populations while increasing the profits of MNCs, and
they therefore do not contribute to national economic development
for most origin states (Agrawal et al. 2011; Ness 2011).
Not more than 10 percent of all workers in India appear to form part
of the formal sector. This greatly distorted distribution is caused above
all by the almost complete lack of formal working arrangements in
agriculture. But even in industry and in the service sector, the other
aggregated components of the economy, employment is predominantly
on an informal basis. . . . That lack of constancy is due primarily to
considerable seasonal fluctuations, not so much in the supply as in the
demand for labour power in the informal sector . . . (Breman 1996: 5)
we must account for both the privileged highly skilled labourers, with
established business networks, and most migrant workers, who are
low-wage workers and do not have the capacity to generate remit-
tances that contribute to development in their home communities.
In 2020, only 8 per cent of India’s workforce had a job and 92 per
cent were precarious workers, without steady work (ILO 2018). This
precarity contributes to the disposition to migrate overseas. The ILO
states that while India has among the highest rates of annual recorded
international migration in the world (approximately 8 million), it is
dwarfed by the enormous size of the available national workforce.
According to the ILO, formal migration is:
Over the past two decades, origin states in the Global South
have supplied destination states with foreign workers. But labour
migration is not a new experience. For two centuries, migrant
workers have frequently provided funds to families in their home
86 Labour Migration and Origin Countries
the world’s wealth would not have any financial obligation to assist
the development of poor countries in the Global South.
As the United States was the major migration corridor from 1990
to 2010, research tended to discount the position of intermediaries,
apart from those who trafficked highly indebted foreign labour into
the United States. The migration literature was dominated by the
significance of home-town communities in the United States, which
were responsible for supporting migration to locations throughout
the country. Douglas Massey’s assertion that home-town commu-
nities were a facilitator of migration dominated migration literature,
and there was a scarcity of research on intermediaries and recruiters.
But this position was rooted in a North American view of migration
and, while correct in the 1990s–2000s, it is now outdated (Massey
et al. 1994; Orozco and Lapointe 2004).
The US economy depends on foreign labourers who successfully
evade border control under great risk as no formal system of major
temporary migration has been enacted for low-wage workers. The
United States maintains the H-2A migration programme for highly
skilled workers, which permits migration for (renewable) three-year
periods. Low-skilled workers are governed by the H-2B programme,
which permits about 100,000 guest workers who work seasonally
in agriculture and hospitality industries during harvesting, and far
lesser numbers of Jamaican and West Indian labourers during busy
months. The scholarship on the formation of migrant home-town
communities in destination states has become less relevant to
understanding labour migration as state policies have increasingly
regulated migration.
As demand has grown for low-wage migrant labour, the number
of destination states has expanded dramatically, and bilateral
labour-migration programmes have consequently been established
to facilitate the recruitment process. The formal system of migration
management using labour recruiters emerged as the global demand
for temporary workers grew. Accordingly, informal recruitment
corresponding to home-town associations has declined, as migrant
workers are temporary and governments have established extensive
border control to monitor the activities and status of labourers. If
migrant workers shift employers or overstay their visas, the private-
market relationship between foreign employer and temporary worker
shifts to a state relationship with the migrant labour. Since the 1990s,
the Mexican government has monitored migrant working conditions
through regional consulates throughout the United States (Bada and
Gleeson 2015; Délano 2009; Uribe 1997).
Labour Migration and Origin Countries 89
highly desired as they work for longer hours at lower wages than
their male counterparts and with no benefits. However, as migrant
workers must pay a significant share of their wages to labour
contractors and to cover travel, many women remit money to their
families at home but return there highly indebted. To accelerate the
repayment of loans and fees, migrant labour outsourcing agencies
in Vietnam and Malaysia have worked with their respective govern-
ments to deduct fees from workers’ monthly salaries through the
transnational banking operations of both countries (Tran and Crinis
2018: 32, 49).
As the IMF and World Bank have promoted privatization and
neoliberal capitalism, Vietnamese state agencies have become active
in overseeing international migration, as most recruitment and
employment agencies are fully owned by government agencies or
are public–private ventures. Those private recruitment companies
that emerge are dominated by former state officials with links to the
government (Tran and Crinis 2018: 46).
A significant component of temporary international labour
migration is reintegration upon completion of the work visa and
return to Vietnam. For women, return to Vietnam poses unique
and significant challenges. On arriving back after a three-year
absence, Vietnamese women especially often encounter obstacles
to establishing ties with families and communities and identifying
gainful employment. Vietnam’s Ministry of Labour, Invalids and
Social Affairs, the labour agency overseeing migration, found that
around 50 per cent of returning women migrants end up far from
their original homes, due to lack of job opportunities, and face
stigma from their families and communities. Many fail to gain
employment and encounter poverty, isolation and inadequate medical
services. In 2020, the Vietnamese government initiated reassimilation
programmes for women and children, offering legal support and
mental-health services for returning migrant workers.
In response to the distinctive problems confronted by women
migrants on their return, the Vietnamese government, with the
support of the IOM and Central Vietnam Women’s Union, has
established the Vietnam Capacity Building Project. This focuses
on reintegrating married and divorced women with their families
by developing regional support offices in five key provinces and
major cities where women originated. These offices provide advice,
awareness and vocational training programmes (MOLISA 2020).
Labour Migration and Origin Countries 101
wages than the rising number of informal and precarious jobs at home.
Therefore, essential aspects of economic development are foreclosed
as workers leave agrarian lands and urban jobs in construction and
services for equivalent jobs in the United States and Mexico, contrib-
uting to a severe domestic shortage of labour and basic, non-tradeable
social goods. As in analogous origin countries, external migration has
made El Salvador deficient in indispensable labour to fill essential
jobs. As the value of foreign remittances to families is far more than
one could obtain working domestically, many recipients stay home
rather than enter the workforce, where wages are barely enough to
pay for basic expenses (DIGESTYC 2021). This in turn has created
what Acosta, Lartey and Mandelman (2009) call the Dutch disease,
whereby growing remittances increase consumption and reduce the
supply of available labour. Under the remittance economy, which
appropriates labour for the United States, development is practically
impossible. El Salvador is ruled by oligarchs, who profit through the
expenditure of remittances in the construction and food-processing
industries, and from foreign trade in consumer goods. The primary
beneficiaries of the migration economy are the US economy, which
benefits from low-wage workers, and the Salvadoran oligarchy,
which profits from controlling remittance spending and displacing
class conflict away to low-wage and informal workers and their
families. As political scientist Hannes Warnecke-Berger contends:
Thus, since the Civil War, foreign remittances have been a mainstay
for El Salvador’s impoverished workers and poor who are unable to
find stable employment and opt out of the labour force. The country’s
oligarchs are indirect recipients of remittances through control
over non-tradeable consumption within the domestic economy
(construction, food services, housing and real estate, distribution,
repairs, transport and business services) where foreign funds are
106 Labour Migration and Origin Countries
Over the past two decades, the Great Financial Recession, national
recessions in destination states and the Covid-19 pandemic have
all contributed to the unpredictability of remittance income for
Moldovan guest workers and their families. The United Nations
Children’s Fund reported that households of Moldovan migrants
who became unemployed due to Covid-19 have lost their primary
source of income. The pandemic inflicted significant harm to about
25 per cent of households relying on remittances, which declined
more than 50 per cent. Joblessness among Moldovan migrant
workers has intensified the economic instability of many families
of migrants who remained abroad or returned home, forcing the
Moldovan government to provide social assistance to households left
in dire financial straits (UNICEF 2021: 9–10). A potential positive
outcome of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the return of migrant
labourers who may remain in Moldova and alleviate the country’s
critical labour shortage. Still, as so many families were dependent
on foreign workers before the pandemic and the country has
been ravaged by the absence of a stable workforce, the Moldovan
government is compelled to support resettlement through financial
assistance and organizational programmes which train workers and
generate employment (Hachi, Morozan and Popa 2021: 55).
Conclusions
as the Arab Gulf, East Asia, South East Asia and other southern
emerging countries. Once the industrial infrastructure is developed,
the state and foreign employers join to develop a foreign-labour
force, which is not only essential for production but is far more
compliant than local workers who can mobilize permanently into
trade unions and strike to improve wages, working conditions
and job security. In advanced capitalist economies with labour
shortages, surplus labour in foreign states is thus recruited to
fill strategic positions without the political power to effectively
challenge the highly exploitative conditions (Ford 2019). Even in
states where temporary migrant labourers are granted greater rights
and higher wages, such as Korea, workers who have organized into
unions will have to return to their origin countries on completion
of their work assignments.
Chapter 4 explores the condition of migrant workers in destination
regions and their capacity to contribute to economic development
through remittances. Temporary migrants lack political represen-
tation and decision making to increase wages so they can send higher
economic remittances home. Migrants may leave their initial job,
which in many countries renders them ‘illegal’ migrant labourers.
‘Illegal’ migration contributes to the rise of populist nationalism,
which demonizes immigrants (Menjívar and Kanstroom 2014). By
examining a host of destination countries in Europe, North America
and the Global South, this chapter explores and documents the
forms of resistance and mobilization which migrant workers engage
to challenge exploitative employer practices in destination regions.
In addition, migrant labourers often face high levels of discrimi-
nation and abuse in destination regions, filling essential positions yet
encountering significant resentment from nationals in these states.
While civil society organizations (CSOs) and labour unions may seek
to protect migrant labourers and facilitate mobilization, typically, as
the examples focusing on the Global South show, these efforts do not
significantly improve the lot of most workers. Since the end of the
Second World War, capital and corporations have benefited from the
movement of workers across national boundaries, which not only
lowers costs but creates social divisions which can be deployed to
undermine existing labour standards among all workers. However,
such movement also offers an opportunity to galvanize cross-national
demands to reduce economic insecurity (Bal and Gerard 2018;
Erdoğdu and Şenses 2015).
118 Labour Migration and Destination States
learn new skills. At best, workers may be able to pay for family
members’ education costs, new appliances or home improvements.
In some cases, J-1 educational visas have been issued to migrants by
the US government for business training, but recipients have found
themselves paying to work in factories or service jobs without compen-
sation (Preston 2011). Most foreign low-wage workers employed in
the United States, estimated at 11 million, have arrived without
documentation. According to the Pew Research Center, about 10.7
million unauthorized migrants were living in the United States in
2017, down from 12.2 million in 2007 (Pew Research Center 2018).
By contrast, Pew estimated that unauthorized migration to Europe in
2016 declined from a range of 4.1 million–5.3 million in 2016 to 3.9
million–4.8 million in 2017 (Connor and Passel 2018).
In Western Europe, following the formation of the Schengen
Area in 1985 and its implementation in 1999 through the Treaty of
Amsterdam, migration was open to workers from Central and Eastern
Europe, systematically expanding through accession to encompass 27
countries in 2023. It is significant that of almost 1.2 million migrants
in 2008, Poland and Romania (and by extension Moldova) were the
two leading origin countries of migrants to Germany, the United
Kingdom and Italy. The Schengen Area largely closed off temporary
migration from MENA, which had comprised an integral origin
region for temporary labour migration to Western Europe between
1955 and 1974. While destination countries in Western Europe
opposed immigration, they welcomed a restricted, rotating, guest-
worker labour programme allowing workers to stay for a designated
time before returning home and being replaced. Despite the restric-
tions, by the late 1960s, some 5 million workers and their families
had settled in Western Europe. Subsequently, MENA and other
workers excluded from the Schengen Area risked crossing into the
zone at their own peril, even though they were essential workers in
key industries due to a shortage of low-wage and low-skilled labour
(Estevens 2018; Penninx 2018).
Within the context of the Schengen Area, most migrant workers
entering North-West Europe will find jobs in low-wage sectors
of the economy with limited opportunity for labour mobility.
In the aftermath of Brexit, Britain is turning to a temporary
migration programme (TMP) approach, which makes available a
low-wage workforce for agriculture, food production, home care
and other employers while placating xenophobes by not allowing
Labour Migration and Destination States 129
jobs are far less likely to send money to their homelands due to this
‘structural exclusion’. Vickstrom and Beauchemin found a funda-
mental disparity between regular and irregular migrant statuses
among Senegalese migrants to France, Italy and Spain:
For migrants, this means that the ‘migration project’ is primarily about
earning money based on the opportunity to obtain, and remain in, paid
work over the course of their overseas contract. This project, however,
often fails migrants and their families as the result of a specific form
of transnationalism which provides severely constrained choices in
terms of destination country, type of job (labour market sector) and
working conditions (wage level, contractual specifications). Such a type
of transnationalism is, therefore, conceptualized here as a matter of
compulsion and hence involuntary. (Piper 2022: 3)
Table 5.1 Regional Shares of the Global Labour Force, 2022 (%)
North Africa 2.1
Sub-Saharan Africa 13.0
Latin America and the Caribbean 9.0
North America 5.0
Arab States 1.8
East Asia 27.0
South East Asia and the Pacific 10.0
South Asia 20.0
Northern, Southern and Western Europe 6.0
Eastern Europe 4.0
Central and West Asia 2.2
Source: Derived from: https://ilostat.ilo.org/topics/labour-migration/
products and services in global value chains which link poor countries
with northern regions, where profits are realized in affluent consumer
markets. Stringer and Michailova show that the undocumented
migrant workers in the Global South are the most vulnerable, as they
are subject to deportation, and wages there tend to be far lower than
for migrant workers in the northern regions.
employers and labour brokers, who can profit from the vulnerability
of migrant labourers’ loss of status as registered foreign workers.
In the United States, migrant labour embodies unfree labour.
Undocumented workers often enter the country with the support
of smugglers and brokers, who charge exorbitant fees thus creating
a system of debt peonage. Moreover, LeBaron and Phillips observe
that businesses factor the benefits of undocumented status into their
models to increase profits:
In South East Asia and most of the Global South, migrant labour
is used to reduce prevailing wages, which undermines wages and
The Damage of Borders 171
In this way, the historical record reveals that labour solidarity with
migrant workers in the United States expressed itself in the late
nineteenth century through influencing European workers to prevent
their members from migrating, as they represented a threat to US
unions’ monopoly of power. The treatment of migrant workers
mirrors the standard practice of established trade unions. When
workers are laid off by employers, most trade unions cease to
represent their erstwhile members, apart from craft and professional
unions, where there is a hiring hall.
174 The Damage of Borders
surplus from the rural economy and undermines the traditional forms
of subsistence upon which agrarian workers have relied for centuries.
Following the intrusion of the migrant infrastructure and dependency
on remittances, the capacity of the rural economy to revitalize itself
and return to the economic and ecological balance of subsistence
becomes far more problematical. After migrant workers stop sending
money back home, the rent-dependent origin community falls further
into destitution. Thus the international US$1.90 a day poverty rate,
as formulated by the MPI of the UNDP, measures deprivation only
in monetary terms rather than in the capacity of the poor to survive
through living off the land (UNDP 2020).
Remittances are the rent upon which a society depends, rather than
an instrument for genuine economic development which meets the
basic human needs of origin countries. Thus imperialism manifests
itself through consolidating a dependency on the capital of advanced
capitalist states. Once the money is withdrawn, the community
atrophies as the agrarian sector loses its capacity to produce.
Foreign currencies can buy a lot in the Global South. The evidence
overwhelmingly shows that temporary migrant labourers will not
return to farming and will become informal and precarious workers
whom Jan Breman characterizes as ‘footloose labourers’ (Breman
1996). Even worse, when the temporary labourers return and do not
go back to work in the agrarian sector, rural areas regress further
into poverty. Ali Kadri explains that remittances are a model of
neoclassical economics under which foreign firms paying higher
wages attract ‘choice’ peasant labourers, who remit wages back to
origin countries. Under this system, the injection of FDI, trade and
technology is transient and ends on the return of the migrant (Kadri
2020: 136).
the past century when migrating alone or with their children. From
the mid-nineteenth century to the present, women have migrated
principally to work as domestic and care workers and have been the
subjects of unique forms of oppression resulting from their work in
social reproduction. Employed in care work for families and social
reproduction in the home, women have suffered through labouring
long hours in the homes of affluent families overseas. Thus, even as
women could conceivably gain greater freedom outside their own
homes through migration, they have also faced more extreme forms
of exploitation as social-reproduction workers in the homes of
employers in foreign destinations.
Historian Francesca Biancani (2019) has researched the unique
disquieting experiences of thousands of Slovenian women who
were compelled by economic necessity to migrate to Egypt via
Trieste to work in the homes of wealthy families from the late
nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Upon their return to Slovenia
after long absences, they were ostracized and marginalized in their
own communities due to their gender and economic dependence.
Women were subjected to a double standard even as they supported
their families back home. Biancani reveals that they were subjects of
self-censorship in their origin societies, and their lives were rendered
meaningless.
In fact, the reason for this was the thorough internalization of socially
dominant stigmatizing discourses about women venturing beyond
normative understandings of gendered (im)mobility and economic
dependency. These discourses, in turn, were shaped by a deep-seated
tendency to conceive of migrant domestic and care work in a way akin
to prostitution and sex traffic. (Biancani 2019: 699–700)
And we hope that while we improve and upgrade the qualities and
skills of our workers and their professional training, we will head in
that direction. Once investments in Indonesia have grown and our
economy has grown further, then we won’t need to have our workers
overseas. . . . I observe that they receive salaries that are pretty good,
compared to other countries. I think this is very important. I believe
many are happy to be working in Hong Kong. (Siu 2018)
work in the gold mines, and then, when the mines were depleted
in the 1980s, shifted to informal jobs in South Africa’s production
sector, which primarily serves the domestic economy. Here they work
at a fraction of the local population’s wages (World Bank 2022f).
This book asserts that for over 75 years since the end of the Second
World War, western classical development economists (from W. W.
Rostow in the 1960s to Muhammad Yunis and Dilip Ratha in the
2000s and 2020s) have applied a sequence of failed market-driven
policies to achieve economic development for newly independent
countries in the Global South: FDA, development loans, IMF bailouts
combined with draconian fiscal policies, microfinance, FDI and,
over the past two decades, remittances from migrants working
abroad. Every single strategy has failed upon application and, rather
than developing, has arrested economic development and deepened
economic inequality between North and South. By contrast, this
book argues that the free-market development model and migration
as development are failed strategies which stem from an effort to
preserve and expand the market-economy dominance of the United
States and developed countries in the West, and to reinforce global
economic imperialism through preserving poor countries’ dependence
on the unequal exchange of resources: minerals, agriculture, indus-
trial commodities, services and low-wage labour from the South.
Marxist scholars have asserted that wage inequality and the
imbalance in the value of labour between North and South have
created a global class stratification that maintains the dominance of
countries in the capitalist core (Amin 1976; Emmanuel 1972). If the
calculus of unequal exchange and uneven development is to change,
open borders for all workers to migrate to the North would be
necessary. An international system with open borders would in part
ameliorate inequality and poverty in the South. However, the imple-
mentation of open-border policies is unlikely, due to nationalist and
populist policies imposed in rich countries which restrict southern
labour mobility. The removal of restrictive and militarized borders
for migrants from the South to enter the North would alleviate the
punishing government policies which discriminate against foreigners,
even in an environment of growing discrimination and xenophobia.
If rich countries were to approve and expand international mobility
from poor to rich countries by adhering to the Global Migration
Compact, the condition of low-wage migrant labourers, women, and
their families would certainly improve. But it would likely mitigate
systemic global poverty and inequality only partially. In the 2020s,
the world is far more unequal than in the independence era from
1945 to the 1980s, and economists project that inequality will soar
in the decades to come without meaningful rebalancing of the global
200 Conclusion
Abdih, Yasser, Chami, Ralph, Dagher, Jihad and Montiel, Peter (2010)
Remittances and Institutions: Are Remittances a Curse? Washington, DC:
International Monetary Fund.
Abdullah, M. S., Othman, Y. H., Osman, A. and Salahudin, S. N. (2016)
‘Safety Culture Behaviour in Electronics Manufacturing Sector (EMS) in
Malaysia: The Case of Flextronics’. Procedia Economics and Finance 35:
454–61. Accessed at: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2212-5671(16)00056-3.
Abdul Rahim, Rohani, Afiq bin Ahmad Tajuddin, Muhammad, bin
Hj. Abu Bakar, Kamaruddin, and Nizamuddin Bin Abdul Rahim,
Mohammad (2015) ‘Migrant Labour and Issues on Outsourcing System
in Malaysia’. SHS Web of Conferences 18, 01003. Accessed at: https://
www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/abs/2015/05/shsconf_icolass2014
_01003/shsconf_icolass2014_01003.html.
Abraham, Rebecca and Tao, Zhi (2021) ‘Funding Health in Developing
Countries: Foreign Aid, FDI, or Personal Remittances?’ International
Journal of Social Economics 48(12): 1826–51. Accessed at: https://doi.org
/10.1108/IJSE-02-2021-0130.
Acosta, Pablo (2007) ‘Entrepreneurship, Labor Markets and International
Remittances: Evidence from El Salvador’, in Çağlar Özden and Maurice
Schiff (eds), International Migration, Economic Development and Policy.
Washington, DC and Basingstoke: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan,
141–59.
Acosta, Pablo A., Lartey, Emmanuel K. K. and Mandelman, Federico
S. (2009) ‘Remittances and the Dutch Disease, Working Paper’, No.
2007–8a. Atlanta, GA: Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
Adhikari, Jagannath and Hobley, Mary (2011) Everyone is Leaving: Who
Will Sow Our Fields? The Effects of Migration from Khotang District to
the Gulf and Malaysia. Kathmandu: Swiss Agency for Development and
Cooperation.
References 209
at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13621025.2017.1380
602.
Krifors, Karin (2021) ‘Logistics of Migrant Labour: Rethinking How
Workers “Fit” Transnational Economies’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration
Studies 47(1): 148–65. Accessed at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full
/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1754179.
Kumar, Ashok (2020) Monopsony Capitalism: Power and Production in the
Twilight of the Sweatshop Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kwong, Peter (1998) Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and
American Labor. New York: New Press.
Lafleur, Jean-Michel and Yener-Roderburg, Inci Öykü (2022) ‘Emigration
and the Transnationalization of Sending States’ Welfare Regimes’.
Social Inclusion 10(1). Accessed at: https://www.cogitatiopress.com
/socialinclusion/article/view/4701.
Lainez, Nicolas (2018) ‘The Contested Legacies of Indigenous Debt Bondage
in Southeast Asia: Indebtedness in the Vietnamese Sex Sector’. American
Anthropologist 120: 671–83. Accessed at: https://doi.org/10.1111/aman
.13105.
Lazar, Sian and Sanchez, Andrew (2019) ‘Understanding Labour Politics
in an Age of Precarity’. Dialectical Anthropology 43: 3–14. Accessed at:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-019-09544-7.
LeBaron, Genevieve (2014) ‘Reconceptualizing Debt Bondage: Debt as a
Class-Based Form of Labor Discipline’. Critical Sociology 40(50): 763–80.
Accessed at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920513512695.
LeBaron, Genevieve and Phillips, Nicola (2019) ‘States and the Political
Economy of Unfree Labour’. New Political Economy 24(1): 1–21. DOI:
10.1080/13563467.2017.1420642.
Lee, Cheol-Sung and Yoo, Hyung-Geun (2022) ‘Unions in Society, Unions
in the State: New Forms of Irregular Workers’ Movements beyond the
Factory in South Korea’. Economic and Industrial Democracy. Accessed
at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0143831X221075648.
Lee, James (2022) ‘Foreign Aid, Development, and US Strategic Interests in
the Cold War’. International Studies Quarterly 66(1). Accessed at: https://
doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqab090.
Levitt, Peggy (1998) ‘Social Remittances: Migration Driven Local-Level
Forms of Cultural Diffusion’. International Migration Review 32(4):
926–48. Accessed at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2547666.
Levitt, Peggy and Lamba-Nieves, Deepak (2011) ‘Social Remittances Revisited’.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37(1): 1–22. Accessed at: https://
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369183x.2011.521361.
Lie, John (2018) ‘East Asian Exceptionalism to Western Populism and
Migration Crisis’, in Cecilia Menjívar, Marie Ruiz and Immanuel Ness
(eds), The Oxford Handbook of Migration Crisis. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 197–210.
Lin, Ching-yuan (1981) ‘Agriculture and Rural–Urban Migration: The
References 227
Massey, Douglas S., Arango, Joaquin, Hugo, et al. (1994) ‘An Evaluation of
International Migration Theory: The North American Case’. Population
and Development Review 20(4): 699–751. Accessed at: https://doi.org/10
.2307/2137660.
Mathew, Biju (2008) Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City. Ithaca,
NY: ILR Press.
McAdam, Jane (2019) ‘Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular
Migration’. International Legal Materials 58(1): 160–94. Accessed at:
https://doi.org/10.1017/ilm.2019.6.
McMichael, Philip (2016) Development and Change: A Global Perspective,
6th edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Menjívar, Cecilia (2011) Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in
Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Menjívar, Cecilia and Kanstroom, Daniel (eds) (2014) Constructing
Immigrant ‘Illegality’: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Menjívar, Cecilia, Ruiz, Marie and Ness, Immanuel (2019) The Oxford
Handbook of Migration Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mezzadra, Sandro and Neilson, Brett (2021) ‘The Geopolitics of Labour’, in
Leanne Weber and Claudia Tazreiter (eds), Handbook of Migration and
Global Justice. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 14–25.
Migration Data Portal (2021) ‘Migration Recruitment Costs’. Migration &
Development 5: (October). Accessed at: https://www.migrationdataportal
.org/themes/migrant-recruitment-costs.
Migration Data Portal (2022) Migration and Remittances, 7 June. Accessed
at: https://www.migrationdataportal.org/themes/remittances.
Migration Policy Institute (2019) ‘Profile of the Unauthorized Population:
United States’. Accessed at: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data
/unauthorized-immigrant-population/state/US.
Milanović, Branko (2011) ‘Global Inequality: From Class to Location, From
Proletarians to Migrants’. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper
No. 5820. Accessed at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract
_id=1935799.
Milanović, Branko (2016) Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age
of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Milkman, Ruth (2020) Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security (2020) Nepal Labour
Migration Report. Kathmandu: Ministry of Labour Employment and
Social Security.
Mishra, Manmaya and Kunwar, Laxman Singh (2020) ‘Overview of Foreign
Labour Migration in Nepal’. Patan Pragya 7(1): 123–34. Accessed at:
https://www.nepjol.info/index.php/pragya/article/view/35114.
MOLISA (Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs) (2020) ‘Sustainable
Reintegration for Returning Migrant Women’. Socialist Republic of Viet
References 229
in West Bengal’s Docks’, in Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter (eds), Logistical
Worlds: Infrastructure, Software Labour. London: Open Humanities
Press, 41–9. Accessed at: http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download
/Neilson-Rossiter_2017_Logistical-Worlds-Kolkata.pdf.
Ness, Immanuel (2021) ‘Temporary Labour and Worker Exploitation:
Southeast Asian Migration to Malaysia’, in Leanne Weber and Claudia
Tazreiter (eds), Handbook of Migration and Global Justice. Cheltenham,
UK: Edward Elgar, 26–48.
Neveling, Patrick (2015) ‘Export Processing Zones and Global Class Formation’,
in James G. Carrier and Don Kalb (eds), Anthropologies of Class: Power,
Practice and Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 162–84.
Nevins, Joseph (2010) Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War on
‘Illegals’ and the Remaking of the US–Mexico Boundary, 2nd edn. New
York: Routledge.
Newland, Kathleen (2020) Will International Migration Governance
Survive the COVID-19 Pandemic? Washington, DC: Migration Policy
Institute. Accessed at: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files
/publications/globalcompact-migration-governance-pandemic-final.pdf.
Newman-Grigg, E. (2020) ‘Between Migration and Development: The IOM’s
Development Fund’, in M. Geiger and A. Pécoud (eds), The International
Organization for Migration: International Political Economy Series.
Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Accessed at: https://link.springer
.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32976-1_5.
Ngai, Mae M. (2004) Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of
Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Niboye, Elliott, P. (2019) ‘International Labour Out-Migration in Mzimba
District, Malawi: Why Persistent?’ Tanzanian Journal of Population Studies
and Development 26(1): 20–37. Accessed at: https://www.arcjournals.org
/pdfs/ijrg/v4-i2/2.pdf.
Nijenhuis, Gary and Leung, Mary (2017) ‘Rethinking Migration in the 2030
Agenda: Towards a De-Territorialized Conceptualization of Development’.
Forum for Development Studies 44(1): 51–68. Accessed at: https://www
.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08039410.2016.1276958.
Nyberg-Sørensen, Ninna, Van Hear, Nicholas and Engberg-Pedersen,
Poul (2003) ‘The Migration–Development Nexus: Evidence and Policy
Options’. International Migration 40(5): 49–73. Accessed at: https://
publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/mrs_8.pdf.
OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development)
(2022a) DAC List of ODA Recipients. Accessed at: https://www.oecd.org
/dac/financing-sustainable-development/development-finance-standards
/daclist.htm.
OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development)
(2022b) Foreign Direct Investment, OECDiLibrary. Accessed at: https://
www.oecd-ilibrary.org/finance-and-investment/foreign-direct-investment
-fdi/indicator-group/english_9a523b18-en.
References 231
Siu, Phila (2018) (10 June). ‘Domestic Helpers Want 11 Hours Rest and for
You to Stop Treating Them like “Slaves,” Hongkongers Told’. Accessed
at: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/community/article/2150114
/domestic-helpers-want-11-hours-rest-and-you-stop-treating.
Skeldon, Ronald (2008) ‘Migration and Development’. United Nations
Expert Group Meeting on International Migration and Development
in Asia and the Pacific. Bangkok: United Nations. Accessed at: https://
www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/pdf/expert/14/P04
_Skeldon.pdf.
Skeldon, Ronald (2014) Migration and Development: A Global Perspective.
Abingdon: Routledge.
Smith, John (2016) Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization,
Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Sofi Arfat, Ahmad and Sasidharan, Subash (2020) ‘FDI, Labor Market and
Welfare: How Inequality Navigates Welfare Loss?’, in N. S. Siddharthan and
K. Narayanan (eds), FDI, Technology and Innovation. Springer: Singapore.
Solari, Cinzia (2019) ‘Transnational Moral Economies: The Value of Monetary
and Social Remittances in Transnational Families’. Current Sociology
67(5): 760–77. Accessed at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392118807531.
Sørensen, Ninna Nyberg (2012) ‘Revisiting the Migration–Development
Nexus: From Social Networks and Remittances to Markets for Migration
Control’. International Migration 50(3): 61–76. Accessed at: https:///doi
.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2012.00753.x.
Soto, Gabriella (2018) ‘Banal Materiality and the Idea of Sovereignty:
The Migration Funnel Effect and the Policing of the US–Mexico Border,
2000–2016’. Political Geography 66 (September): 113–29.
Spencer, Sarah and Triandafyllidou, Anna (eds) (2020) Migrants with
Irregular Status in Europe: Evolving Conceptual and Policy Challenges.
Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.
Spencer, Sarah and Triandafyllidou, Anna (2022) ‘Irregular Migration’, in P.
Scholten (ed.), Introduction to Migration Studies. IMISCOE Research Series.
Cham, Switzerland: Springer. DOI: org/10.1007/978-3-030-92377-8_12.
Stavrianos, L. S. (1981) Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age. New
York: William Morrow.
Stock, Inka, Üstübici, Ayşen and Schultz, Suzanne U. (2019) ‘Externalization
at Work: Responses to Migration Policies from the Global South’.
Comparative Migration Studies 7(48). Accessed at: https://doi.org/10
.1186/s40878-019-0157-z.
Stringer, Christina and Michailova, Snejina (2018) ‘Why Modern
Slavery Thrives in Multinational Corporations’ Global Value Chains’.
Multinational Business Review 26(3): 194–206. Accessed at: https://www
.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/MBR-04-2018-0032/full/html.
Sulima, Snejana (2019) ‘Parental Migration as Neglect: The Negative
Impact of Missing Parents on the Behaviour of Children Left Behind in
References 237
Moldova’. Research and Science Today 1(17): 9–23. Accessed at: https://
www.rstjournal.com/mdocs-posts/01-snejana-sulima-parental-migration
-as-neglect-the-negative-impact-of-missing-parents-on-the-behaviour-of
-children-left-behind-in-moldova/
Sunam, Ramesh (2022) ‘Infrastructures of Migrant Precarity: Unpacking
Precarity through the Lived Experiences of Migrant Workers in Malaysia’.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Accessed at: https://doi.org/10
.1080/1369183X.2022.2077708.
Surak, Kristin (2013) ‘Guestworkers: A Taxonomy’. New Left Review
84 (November/December). Accessed at: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/18000
/1/Surak%20-%20guestworker%20taxonomy.pdf.
Suwandi, Intan (2019) Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism. New
York: Monthly Review Press.
Tabac, Tatiana and Gagauz, Olga (2020) ‘Migration from Moldova:
Trajectories and Implications for the Country of Origin’, in Mikhail
Denisenko, Salvatore Strossa and Matthew Light (eds), Migration from
the Newly Independent States: 25 Years After the Collapse of the USSR.
Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 143–68.
Tagliacozzo, Serena, Pisacane, Lucio and Kilkey, Majella (2021) ‘The
Interplay Between Structural and Systemic Vulnerability During the
COVID-19 Pandemic: Migrant Agricultural Workers in Informal
Settlements in Southern Italy’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
47(9): 1903–21. Accessed at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10
.1080/1369183X.2020.1857230.
Tamara Lenard, Patti (2022) ‘Restricting Emigration for their Protection?
Exit Controls and the Protection of (Women) Migrant Workers’. Migration
Studies 10(3): 510–27. Accessed at: https://doi.org/10.1093/migration
/mnab045.
Tazreiter, Claudia (2019) ‘Temporary Migrants as an Uneasy Presence in
Immigrant Societies: Reflections on Ambivalence in Australia’. International
Journal of Comparative Sociology 60(1–2): 91–109. Accessed at: https://
doi.org/10.1177/0020715219835891.
Tharani, Loganathan, Deng, Rui, Ng, Chiu-Wan and Suyin Pocock, Nicola
(2019) ‘Breaking Down the Barriers: Understanding Migrant Workers’
Access to Healthcare in Malaysia’. PLoS one 14(7): e0218669. Accessed
at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6608924/.
Theng Tan, Theng and Romadan, Jarud (2022) ‘The Economic Case against
the Marginalisation of Migrant Workers in Malaysia’, in Hyun Bang Shin,
Murray Mckenzie and Do Young Oh (eds), COVID in Southeast Asia:
Insights for a Post-Pandemic World. London: LSE Press. Accessed at:
https://press.lse.ac.uk/site/books/e/10.31389/lsepress.cov/.
Theodore, Nik, Pretorius, Anmar, Blaauw, Derick and Schenck, Catherina
(2018) ‘Informality and the Context of Reception in South Africa’s New
Immigrant Destinations’. Population, Space and Place 24(3): e2019.
Accessed at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/psp.2119.
238 References
freedom, 41, 47, 61–2, 71–2, 74, system (in origin countries), 27,
148, 189 35–6, 58–9, 63, 77, 198
of association, 137; see also trade high-tech sector, 33–4, 48, 70, 83,
union 115–16, 127, 183–4
of movement, 34, 61–3, 65, 125, Hồ Chí Minh City, 99
152–3, 155–6 Honduras, 102, 106, 114
free-market policies, 29, 40, 56–8, 64, Hong Kong, 10, 49, 83, 90, 116, 191–3
68, 153, 199, 207 hospitality industries, 86, 88, 104,
127, 130, 132, 160, 177
gender, 19, 137, 168, 191, 201 housing, 48, 58–9, 70, 114, 134–5,
Germany, 41, 109, 119, 128, 166 139–40, 163–4, 167, 183–4, 186
Ghana, 33, 83, 113, 122 Hungary, 165
gig economy, 2, 131, 163, 191 hunger see food
Global Compact for Safe, Orderly Hyderabad, 33, 70, 84, 184
and Regular Migration (GCM),
63, 65, 152–3, 165–8, 182, 199, illegal migrants see migration,
201–2 unauthorized/undocumented
Global Knowledge Partnership on immigration authorities, 67, 75, 137,
Migration and Development 159, 161
(KNOMAD), 7, 66 Immigration Reform and Control Act
global labour arbitrage, 193, 195 (IRCA), 87, 107, 127
global supply chain, 44, 46–8, 58, 60, imperialism, 37–40, 57, 131, 147,
68–70, 78–9, 97, 135, 193–4, 150–2, 154, 185–8, 191–3, 195,
197 198
global union federations (GUFs), economic, 35, 38, 58, 76, 148, 182,
141–2, 145, 177–8 187, 189, 193–4, 199
global value chain see global supply social, cultural, and political,
chain 14–16, 50, 205
globalization, 75, 149, 182, 197 import substitution industrialization
Gordon, Jennifer, 46–7, 170 (ISI), 5
Grabel, Ilene, 56 imprisonment, 130, 161–2, 173, 205
gross domestic product (GDP), 44–5, indentured servitude, 125, 160
51–2, 83, 93–4, 97–8, 102, 104, independence, 28–9, 37–8, 40–1, 45,
109, 119, 196–8 54, 92, 108, 199
gross national product (GNP), 186 India, 34, 48, 51, 56, 64, 70–1, 82–5,
Guatemala, 102, 104, 106, 114 93, 169, 183–4
guest-worker model, 81, 86, 88, indigenous people, 152–3, 187
128–30, 192; see also migration, Indonesia, 90, 135, 171–2, 176,
temporary 192–3, 197
Guinea-Bissau, 54 industrialization, 5, 40, 49–50, 64, 101
inequality, 30, 207
Hà NộI, 99 global, 36–40, 42–3, 49–50, 53,
Haiti, 93 56, 147–53, 199, 207
Haley, Nikki, 166 internal, 34, 38–9, 42–3, 53, 56–9,
health care, 83, 102–3, 198, 205
access to, 75, 100, 137, 142, 159, informal sector, 71, 82, 107, 112,
162–3, 168–9 129–30, 139, 154–5, 175, 178,
expenses, 50, 77, 134, 192, 198 188
professionals, 17, 20, 33–4, 43, information technology (IT), 33, 84,
83–4, 104, 111, 113, 127 135, 183–4
248 Index
infrastructure, 44–5, 47, 69, 77, 93, in origin countries, 59, 94–5,
110, 163, 184, 202; see also 103–5, 111–12, 115, 198
migration labour standards see rights
injury see workplace safety labour union see trade union
insecurity, 35, 51, 61, 82, 117, labour value, 44, 81–2, 195, 199
122–4, 126, 133, 196 law,
interest rate, 57, 110 labour, 130, 136, 143, 154, 161,
intermediary see recruitment agency 163, 166, 175
International Labour Organization migration, 95–6, 106, 124, 152,
(ILO), 7, 78, 145, 174–8, 202, 158, 161
206 land reform, 45, 55–6
International Monetary Fund (IMF), landscaping, 127, 160, 184–5
46, 57, 68, 82, 98, 100–1, 114, language skills, 66, 99
125, 131, 199, 204 Lebanon, 51
International Organization for legal status, 67, 122, 129, 130, 132–3,
Migration (IOM), 7, 31–2, 36, 136, 143–4, 154, 156, 164
73, 100, 142, 145, 202 Lesotho, 11, 196–7
International Trade Union Levitt, Peggy, 14–15
Confederation (ITUC), 177 life expectancy, 58, 186
Iran, 5, 38 literacy, 186
Iraq, 159 logistics and delivery, 69, 135, 147,
isolation, 66, 78, 100, 134, 138, 157, 163, 168, 184, 191
162, 169, 203 London, 191
Israel, 109, 165
Italy, 86, 108–9, 122, 128, 133, 164, Malawi, 139–40, 181, 196–7
166 Malaysia, 48, 68, 93–4, 98–100, 119,
135–9, 158–9, 163–4, 170–2,
Jamaica, 86, 88 176–7
Japan, 54, 70, 101, 119, 186, 203 Mali, 148
job security, 64, 71, 117, 154 manufacturing, 47, 64, 78, 85, 92–3,
Johannesburg, 139–40 99, 106, 135, 163, 170–2, 174
Johnson, Lyndon, 55 electronics, 135, 137–8, 171, 181
Jordan, 10, 170, 176 garments, 99, 138, 191
marginalization, 28, 68, 78, 125,
kafala system, 67, 125 132–3, 182, 188–9, 205
Kathmandu, 80, 95–6 market economy see free-market
Kuala Lumpur, 49, 191 policies
Kuwait, 10 marriage, 50, 99, 122, 129, 135
Kyrgyzstan, 11, 51 Marx, Karl, 40, 116, 148, 155, 178,
187, 190
labour cost, 46, 69, 83, 132, 190, 201 Marxism, 29, 40, 42, 147, 199
labour force, 69, 84–5, 102, 110, mass transit, 48, 80
117, 128, 136, 149, 181 media, 71, 89–90, 107, 120, 123,
exiting the, 105, 111, 113 126, 131, 162
labour migration see migration medical professionals see health care,
labour organization see trade union professionals
labour shortage, men, 60, 94–5, 139, 156, 188
in destination countries, 43, 64, 76, mercantilism, 37
83, 116–17, 128–30, 151, 180, Mexico, 50–1, 86–8, 90–1, 102–7,
191, 206 130, 153, 160, 172, 187
Index 249
Tonga, 11, 51, 94 urban areas, 31, 40, 56, 71, 84–5, 95,
tourism, 76, 87, 93, 95, 132 122, 181, 184
trade, 29, 37, 39–40, 46–7, 72, 87, US Marshall Plan, 28
105, 125, 170
trade union, 64, 78, 98, 117, 131, Vietnam, 38, 55, 97–102, 113–14,
136, 138, 144–5, 148, 154, 135
169–79; see also global union violence, 103, 112, 114, 123–4, 126,
federations (GUFs) 147, 152, 173, 179
trafficking, 19, 88, 91, 123, 130, visa, 66, 127–8, 156, 169
137–8, 160, 166, 189 overstaying, 87–8, 96, 106, 113,
training, 33–4, 66, 86, 89, 92, 122, 158
100–1, 112, 128, 192; see also preferential, 33, 70, 83, 183
recruitment costs
transfer costs, 21, 51, 89, 186 wage,
transit state, 121, 130, 165–6, 168 deductions, 80, 100, 136, 164
transnationalism, 133–4 inequality, 40–2, 76–8, 81–2, 131,
transparency, 136 148–50, 199
transport, 31, 52, 66, 69, 77, 89, 95, level see worker, high-/low-wage
114, 130, 177 minimum, 69, 91, 137, 143
Truman, Harry, 54 theft, 67, 90, 99, 136–7, 141, 143,
Trump, Donald, 163, 166 160, 167, 173, 176
Tunisia, 159 wages, 44, 64, 78, 90, 111, 143, 153,
Turkey, 41, 109, 159 170–1, 174, 181–4
war, 25, 55, 115, 186;
Ukraine, 108 civil, 103, 105
underdevelopment, 29, 37, 40–1, 58, Cold War, 46, 55, 57, 148
83, 93, 125, 134 Second World War, 28, 54, 57, 86,
unemployment, 71, 82, 95–6, 130
110–12, 126, 132, 162, 167, see also military intervention
174, 205–6 water, 52, 69, 80, 164, 186
unequal exchange, 18, 39–42, 50, 82, wealth, 34, 39, 42–3, 45, 53, 85, 112,
131, 152, 182–3, 195, 198–9, 114, 147–52, 183–5
206 Widodo, Joko, 192–3
United Nations, 7, 61–3, 68, 152, women, 32, 51, 60, 66, 76, 99–100,
163–5, 182, 201–2, 204 123, 138–9, 156–7, 175–6,
United Arab Emirates, 10, 32, 93, 188–93
96 worker,
United Kingdom, 28, 34, 41, 109, domestic/native, 33, 70, 78, 83,
122, 128–9 157, 163, 169–70, 174, 206
United Nations Conference on Trade essential, 33, 75, 95, 105, 116–17,
and Development (UNCTAD), 120–3, 130–2, 163–4
47 high-skilled, 33–4, 36, 41, 65–6,
United Nations Development 70–1, 83–5, 116, 127, 183–5
Programme (UNDP), 61–3, 65–8, high-wage, 33, 62, 72, 83–4, 101,
71–3, 76–7, 186 172, 183
United States, 41, 54–7, 70–1, 87–8, low-skilled, 34, 65–6, 68, 78, 84,
91, 102–8, 126–9, 159–63, 88–9, 92, 98, 111, 128–9, 144
165–6, 173–4 low-wage, 64–7, 69, 94, 101–2,
United States Agency for International 105–6, 126–9, 135–6, 154, 171,
Development (USAID), 46, 55 205–7
Index 253
unskilled, 33, 63, 69, 73, 84–5, 92, World Federation of Trade Unions
101, 110–13, 136, 184 (WFTU), 177
working and living conditions, 61–2, World Trade Organization (WTO), 18
66–7, 88, 90, 134, 136–8,
156–7, 160, 163–4, 170–1 xenophobia, 70–1, 124, 128–9, 147,
working hours, 67, 100, 143, 160, 152, 162, 165, 169, 199–200,
189 203
workplace safety, 66, 78, 130, 136,
143, 163, 167–8, 173 Yunis, Muhammad, 199
World Bank, 46, 57, 68, 82, 93, 98,
100–1, 131, 142, 204 Zimbabwe, 181, 196–7
POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Go to www.politybooks.com/eula to access Polity’s ebook EULA.