Abstract
The major themes in this edited volume centre on how migration within the era of the current crisis of neoliberal globalisation confronts the challenges of precarious work and precarious citizenship. These challenges are further exacerbated in the post-9/11 environment by the management and securitisation of migration and its accompanying discourses and practices. The authors in this volume all tend to agree that the securitisation of migration, with its inherent restrictions and impediments toward legal migration, have led to irregular migration.
On one hand, only one of the eight contributions in the book (Stephen Castles) utilises a Marxist analysis to examine contemporary migration focusing on, among other things, the relationship between irregular migration and the re-commodification of labour. The volume’s paucity of Marxist theorising may be a drawback for many regular readers of Capital & Class. In fact, only two of the eight contributions in the book attempt to frame their arguments within a historical-materialist analysis. On the other hand, however, the overarching themes of precarious labour and precarious citizenship do offer rich contributions to both Marxist and non-Marxist theories of migration.
Castles stresses this point by arguing in his essay that migrants are not simply economic actors who follow income maximisation motives; but they are social beings capable of creating resistance to structural inequality and human insecurity via new forms of agency. While the volume does acknowledge that migrants comprise an exploitable ‘reserve army of labour’, the book attempts to move beyond this notion to incorporate the concept of citizenship.
It must be pointed out that the issue of citizenship has been a source of long-term contention within Marxist scholarship. Mary Dietz (1987) argued that the historical-materialist perspective, including Marxist feminism, has had very little to say on the issue of citizenship, and that most Marxists dismiss the issue of citizenship as a ‘bourgeois conceit.’ Furthermore, the issue of citizenship, if addressed at all, is conflated with labour and class struggle. Etienne Balibar, moreover, lamented that citizenship and the relationship to nationality were not objects of Marxist study, which in his opinion, created absolute limits to Marxist theorisation (see Reid 2008).
To the extent that Balibar is accurate in his critique, and given the contributors’ overall assessment that within the new global order, the EU has privileged the Anglo-US vision of the neoliberal competitive state over the attempt to construct a ‘fair globalisation’, the contributors attempt to theorise what will be the role of migration in terms of the labour markets and the modalities of political citizenship in the wake of the current economic crisis. While the editors’ point out that uneven development on a global scale is a spur to many who seek to improve their quality of life by moving, they contend that the issue of precarious citizenship and its effect upon social movements may slow down or alter ‘the disembedding of the market from social control and its corrosive impact’.
Focusing on the issue of citizenship, Castles argues that neoliberal globalisation has created a global underclass within the international division of labour, in which a worker’s specific status and conditions of work and life are less dependent on an individual’s human capital endowment than the importance of ethnicity, gender and class, thus creating hierarchies of citizenship. Therefore, for the majority of the contributors to this volume, citizenship, (or the lack there of) has become the new terrain for not only exploitation, marginalisation, exclusion, but also resistance.
One of the critiques proffered by Castles and Miller (2009) is that Marxist-oriented migration theories concentrate too heavily on the interests of capital, and thus pay inadequate attention to the motivations of individuals and groups, as well as dismissing the role of the state. For them, a Marxist approach to migration may be too narrow to fully examine and explore the complexity of contemporary migration patterns.
To that end, the volume seeks to expand upon the effects of the contradictions inherent in the globalised political economy upon contemporary migration, and effectively includes a far more holistic approach to migration, including research on the EU’s racist and colonial discourse with respect to African migrants. As Hansen and Jonsson argue in their contribution to the volume, the presence of African migrants living in the EU on a permanent basis conjures up images of the post-World War I occupation of ‘white’ Germany by black African solders from the Francophone nations. This leads Hansen and Jonsson to suggest that the EU wants African labour, but not Africans as future EU citizens.
Moreover, the volume also contains Rodolfo Casillas’s essay regarding violence perpetrated on Central American migrants at the hands of Mexican criminal smuggling networks. He goes on to suggest that violence directed toward undocumented Central American migrants traversing through Mexico on the way to the USA, becomes the intersection of not only the dark side of the globalised economy, but also the vision that undocumented persons as a subordinate social group ‘best meets the characteristics of vulnerability combined with impunity for the perpetrator’.
One of the more interesting contributions contained in the book is the essay by Goldring and Landolt regarding immigrants in Toronto. Their work is instructive to the extent that they construct the ‘work-citizenship matrix’ in which they examine the perceived benefits of immigrants whose status becomes regularised. Their ‘work-citizenship matrix’ does allow for a useful typology for further research. While regularisation may, in the long term, ameliorate the more exploitive aspects of immigration, Goldring and Landolt concur that regularisation does not necessarily eliminate precarious work, which has come to characterise the new global order.
The book suggests that precarious citizenship has become a new terrain for resistance. The book’s final two contributions, one dealing with irregular migration and citizenship in the UK and France (Chimiemti and Solomos) and the other, focusing on immigrant workers and the US labour movement (Milkman), stress the exercise of agency. Yet these respective researchers arrive at different conclusions. In their essay, Chimienti and Solomos proffer that irregular migrants mobilise (or exercise ‘weak agency’) in order to claim the right to continue to work and live in the country for which they have migrated as opposed to a struggle for equality or redistribution. While they laud these efforts at resembling James Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’, the immediate gains secured by irregular migrants through this type of mobilisation only permits them to focus on survival rather than structural transformation.
In contrast to the conclusions of Chimienti and Solomos, Milkman in her contribution regarding irregular migrants and the US labour movement, argues that undocumented Latino workers participate in labour organisation efforts at considerable risk. However, their fear of employer retribution is greatly outweighed by the fear they experience in crossing the Mexico–US border. To the extent that irregular migrants examined in both contributions ‘have nothing to lose’ by engaging in acts of resistance, Milkman concludes that Latino immigrants have revitalised the US labour movement with a new sense of energy and vision.
It should be noted that the book has several shortcomings. One is that the editors have attempted to bring about a volume on migration that deals not only with the host country, but the countries of origin. In reality, there is only one essay – Casillas’s contribution – that does not deal with migration vis-à-vis a developed nation. Even the essays on Eurafrica (Hansen and Jonsson) and EU enlargement (Likic-Brboric) expend an appreciable amount of text on the effects of migration upon the host countries. Another shortcoming of the book is its lack of a concluding chapter, which would have assisted the reader in drawing together all of the cross-cutting themes contained in the volume.
Regardless of its shortcomings, it is hoped that regular readers of Capital & Class might consider reading literature on contemporary migration which goes beyond a political economy approach, while, for the most part, eschewing historical materialism. Notwithstanding that there is a noticeable lack of Marxist theorising contained in the book, in the opinion of this reviewer, the editors have effectively produced a series of essays that attempt to bring a more nuanced approach to migration. This more nuanced approach addresses the intersecting themes of economic crisis, migration, precarious work and precarious citizenship, which may provide a significant contribution not only to migration literature, but to both Marxist and non-Marxist scholarship in general.