Description
The demand and super exploitation of migrant workers in agricultural systems is a universal trend. The structural reliance on migrant labor in agriculture is global, the agri-food production system is contingent on it, and in turn consumerist habits and expectations of cheap produce rest upon it. This paper addresses how and why migrant labor became super exploited in agricultural regimes. Drawing on postcolonial and racial capitalism scholarship, I argue that the technologies that enable the exploitation of agricultural migrant workers today are a product of imperial governance, rooted in a state imperative and logic to control, subjugate and discipline. This paper homes in on the border technologies in agricultural production to illuminate the logics and productive powers of state violence, delineating four precise technologies of imperial governance that enable this exploitation: containment, malleability of membership, liberal subjectivity, and security. The paper demonstrates how exploitation is contingent on imperial statecraft, and in illustrating how productive powers of exploitative border regimes are rooted in a logic of imperialism, recenters the focus on imperialism rather than market imperatives as the cause of racial border regimes.
