Description
Although migration is as old as humanity itself, in the 21st century it has taken increasingly systematic, ‘industrialised’ forms. Northeast Asian economies facing labour shortages sign bilateral agreements with poorer nation-states who send tens of thousands of ‘standardised’ labourers, dressed in identical uniforms, to the airport on ‘labour export’ programs. Irregular migrants cross borders stowed away in the back of shipping containers, as if they were commodities – with occasionally deadly consequences, as seen in the ‘Essex 39’ tragedy in 2019 when 39 Vietnamese migrants died in the back of a lorry en route to the UK. Meanwhile, the ‘migration industry’ systematically targets and recruits prospective workers for specific industries based on gendered and racialised attributes. International institutions such as the World Bank use economistic language to describe migration ‘inflows’ and ‘outflows’, using market logics to calculate “trade-offs… between economic gains and migrants’ dignity”. And throughout migration trajectories, noncitizen migrants are subjected to processes of marginalisation, precarity and discipline which can be said to ‘produce’ exploitable subjects.
These examples allude to the ways in which migrants are themselves being ‘commodified’, or at least dehumanised, through contemporary labour mobilities. This paper is interested in applying existing concepts of global value/commodity/care chains to reveal and abstract the mechanisms by which labour migration contributes to new developments in the global capitalist economy. At the same time, people are not commodities and have their own aspirations and desires, with varying degrees of agency to resist, evade or make the best of top-down structures.
