Points of tension and resistance in labour mobility regimes: migrants’ logistics

As we considered the political regulation of migration in Chapter 1 and 2, we found that the tempo, patterns, and dynamics of labour mobility today are the outcome of formal and informal processes shaped by a variety of actors or agents: from state agencies and governments directly controlling the flows of migrants across borders; to private brokers and organizations profiteering from restricted entry; to migrants’ own informal networks following, adapting, and circumventing existing barriers through their own infrastructures of mobility and support.

In terms of the logic or logistics of such cross-border movements, while migrant labour has been historically seen in the Global North as a ‘supplement’ to the domestic workforce, todays’ reorganization of the labour market takes rather the shape of a more layered, ‘porous’, or ‘differential’ border regime (Bojadžijev et al, 2004), reflecting the need for an increasingly flexible and just-in-time supply of labour, structural to the current modes of production (Chapter 3). Against this background, we argue that a central tension in contemporary migration regimes is that the greater complexity of regulation requires more rather than less intermediation, which in turn gives rise to new forms of informalization and deregulation, that ultimately tend to increase the exploitability of labour on the move.

Within the field of economic sociology, Shire (2020) has recently injected a more dynamic view into mainstream institutional perspectives of labour markets and migration infrastructures, by arguing that migration contributes to the making of transnational markets, which however remain relatively unstable and far from consolidated institutions. Similarly to Bauder (2006), Shire (2020: 442) highlights the regulatory functions of migration in the management of labour circulation, but differently from previous accounts she sees more positively the action of multiple entities (from states, to migrant organizations, and trade unions) in ‘re-embedding regulatory paths to transnational labour exchanges’. While for Xiang and Lindquist (2014), infrastructures are mainly forces of deregulation and neoliberalism, Shire believes that these intermediaries can also intervene positively by negotiating the rules and practices of selling and buying labour across borders.