Dialect Anthropol (2013) 37:357362

DOI 10.1007/s10624-013-9325-y

The dialectics of migration

Winnie Lem Pauline Gardiner Barber

Published online: 21 November 2013

Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

In these troubled economic times where we see yet further evidence of capitalisms
tendency toward periodic crises, analysts within the academy and beyond turn
increasingly to political economy and Marxism. They question whether and how the
current moment can be historically situated in the periodic crises that continue to
beleaguer the capitalist world.1 These paradigms, so many contend, are inherently
suited to the study of social and economic turbulence, for their conceptual and
methodological schemata are wholly committed to illuminating mutations of
capitalism and its cyclical fluctuations (see Harvey 1990). For scholarship on
migration, the turn to these diagnostics is also salutary, as it has long been
established that migration and capitalism are entwined in a relationship between
reciprocal formation and transformation. This relationship is made most vivid under
the long shadow cast by financial meltdowns, bailouts, monetarism, economist
restructuring, state rescaling, rising unemployment, and various modes of dispos-
session of people from their means of livelihood (Harvey 2003; Kasmir and
Carbonella 2008). In this, as in other tumultuous periods, the movement of people
across spaces and boundaries has escalated, and the entangled relationship between
capitalism and migration has been thrown into stark relief. This relationship is no
less extricable now than in previous eras as the development of capitalism
proceeded apace.2 Indeed, capitalisms nascent formations were premised upon the
transatlantic movement of people. Under the regimes of imperialism and
1
See for example Ho (2009), Wade (2008) and McNally (2008). Also relevant are Masse (2008), Fox
(2008), and Collins (2008) whose articles appear in conservative newspapers.
2
See for example Sassen (1999), Castles and Miller (2009) and also Lem and Barber (2010).

W. Lem (&)
Trent University, Peterborough, Canada
e-mail: wlem@trentu.ca

P. G. Barber
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

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colonialism, the dislocation, displacement, and relocation of human populations

were crucial to the initiation of capitalism as a world system at least from the
nineteenth century onward.3 This system was founded upon the formation of
distinctive classes of mobile people traveling between far-flung regions and
metropolitan societies, both within nations and overseas. Mobile laborforced and
freeformed the backbone of emergent capitalist economies as their labor regimes
on haciendas, plantations, mines, and industries were based on slavery, indenture,
and proletarianization.4 Some might argue that today, no less than in the past,
various mobile populations confront the same kinds of exploitative and degrading
labor contracts as die their forbearers traveling along the well worth pathways from
south to north and intercontinentally from rural or deindustrialized communities to
urban metropolises.
Migration, then, is crucially a salient force in the many different iterations of
capitalism. In the early twentieth century, the military and industrial complexes of
developed nations were premised on a supply of labor from non-industrial, often
agrarian-based societies and regions of the globe. As capitalist development
crystallized into what some have called the Fordist era of industrial production,
buttressed by state involvement in national economies, the movement of people
across national and regional borders sustained mass production in industrialized and
industrializing nations in the global north and south. However, as Fordism gave way
to post-Fordism, the restructuring of capitalist economies across the globe under the
doctrines of neoliberalism has intensified migration both within and between
nations. Moreover, within these geographies of mobility, there remains the long
familiar social polarization of populations into the bourgeoisie and proletariat,
which, so some analysts have observed, is lodged within the very nature of
globalization.5 Further, this intensification of the differentiation of populations into
classes has been accompanied by the formation of a class of proletariat that is
mobile. In sum, overtime and across space, in as much as the transnational and
regional movements of people have been precipitated by capitalist change,
capitalism itself has been fueled through migration. The longue duree of the
reciprocal formation of capitalism and migration suggests that the relationship is
one that is truly dialectical.
It is our contention, in this special section, that the complexity of the dialectic is
best viewed through the lens of Marxism and Marxian political economy. This is the
case, so the papers here suggest, because as a distinctive conceptual framework,
Marxist paradigms begin and end with deciphering the logics of capitalism and its
effects on ordinary people in the world around us.6 Such logics or laws are not
unfamiliar to analysts, or to those who lives are premised upon making a living
within capitalism. In essence, one such law suggests that capitalism must
continually expand in order to sustain and reproduce itself. The reproduction of
capitalism requires that economies be set on the course of accumulation. In turn, this
3
See Wallerstein (1980).
4
See Wolf (1982).
5
See for example Friedman (2003, 2004), Kalb (2005), and Davis (2006).
6
Also see Lem (2012).

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implies a process of value creation, as things in nature must be transformed into

commodities to be exchanged for the generation of profits. As Marx insisted, the
mobilization of labor itself from wherever it can be drawn is central to the
accumulation processes both in terms of production and social reproduction.
Further, these social and geographic arrangements, which situate people in
differential relationships to the production processes of capitalism, also suggest
that people are inserted into that economy differentially according to class, either as
workers whose labor power has been commodified or as capitalists themselves who
derive the benefits from the process of accumulation.
Across the globe, the process of remaking places into sites of sustained, rapid,
and increasing accumulation conditions the emergence of mobile populations.
Drives to achieve these goals have eroded or redrawn political barriers making
national borders simultaneously more permeable, or more fortress-like. Moreover,
as demands for accumulation become more generalized and insistent, the states role
in governing populations must be matched by their role in servicing accumulation in
its various forms.
As the papers in this collection demonstrate, the capitallabor relationship has
many manifestations and the analyses of divisions of labor under capitalism,
gendered and spatialized, surely deepen current understandings of the mechanisms
by which value is created and expressed. While it is clear that capitalism, in order to
expand and reproduce itself must adhere to these laws, how these laws materialize
in concrete settings is a subject for investigation. The papers in this collection
illustrate the complexity of ways in which these laws and forces manifest
themselves in relation to human mobility. The idea that migration may be viewed as
the function of a set of laws or universal logics has been long since abandoned in the
light of findings that cannot predict systems or patterns of relationships.7 Yet,
standing pre-eminently as one of those key processes that constitute capitalism is the
circulation of people across regional and national borders. The turbulence of
capitalism not only provokes the formation of migrant populations and the
intensification of migration itself, but it also informs the character of migration as
people reckon with the exigencies of an everyday life that has become more
exposed, through neoliberal restructuring to entanglement in trajectories of capital
accumulation.
The papers in this collection share as their purpose, the amplification of this
complexity. Each uses different aspects of the conceptual apparatus of political
economy and the paradigm of Marxism to illuminate the ways in which those forces
condition the quotidian life of migrants in different contexts. A common strand
running through the paper is the intent to reveal migration as both a product of and
at the same time a part of these processes of globalization, taken here as the
accumulation of capital on a global scale. Further, papers illustrate that migration
itself results from struggles over accumulation. For example, the subject of struggle
is problematized in Winnie Lems contribution. Her article focuses on the ways in
which different class segments of the migrant population in Paris exercise urban
citizenship in a context in which the norms and practices of citizenship have come

7
See Ravenstein (1885).

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to be redesigned under the imperatives of neo-liberal transformation. Her

contribution explores the ways in which two classes of migrantspetty capitalists
on the one hand and wageworkers on the othercontend with changing ideals of
citizenship. Drawing on the notion of a citizenship regime, Lem problematizes the
ways in which the state-capital nexus intervenes in the formation of subjects as
citizens. She argues that efforts to rework models of citizenship within neoliber-
alism contribute not only to the reformations of the class structure but also provoke
class polarization and ethnic divisions in France and also in Europe.
Pauline Gardiner Barber also explores questions of citizenship, gender, and class.
She notes that under increasingly competitive conditions in the global political
economy, state policies in migrant sending and immigration countries are being
restructured to better match labor to the needs of capital. For example, Canada has
restructured its immigration system to include a just-in-time model for the
recruitment of skilled workers, combined with a new emphasis upon temporary
foreign workers. Under such conditions, borders may seem to be more malleable,
but this is illusory and the class contradictions associated with migrants
citizenships are becoming more pronounced. Drawing upon transnational ethno-
graphic research on how Philippine migrants prepare themselves and are prepared
by others for migration to Canada and other global labor markets, Barber examines
how class differentiated migrants are rendered socially homogenous as they
disciplined to be grateful transnational citizen subjects. Given the extensive
periods of time and the considerable costs associated with migration, migrants
become preconditioned to accept, uncritically, and to accommodate themselves
to new immigrant/citizen/worker identities. So too these same processes allow for
the devaluing of migrants labor and of their social and citizenship identities in the
gendered and transnational complexities of global migration.
These complexities are also addressed in Maya Shapiros intervention which
directs attention to the dynamics of economic turmoil, political crisis, and its effects
in the trans-regional and trans-national movement of mobile labor. Shapiro focuses
on the development of what she calls the privileged underclass in South Tel Aviv
that has emerged as a result of the introduction of the Foreign Worker Program in
1991. This program was itself a response to a labor deficit in the economy provoked
politically by border closings and worker boycotts during the first Intifada in the late
1980s. This dramatic response to a volatile political issue was intended to, and
indeed has, greatly reduced the number of Palestinian workers whose low-wage
labor had previously upheld Israels construction and agriculture industries. At the
same time, neoliberal reform of the countrys healthcare services contributed to an
increased demand for labor. This demand occurred in the increasingly privatized
healthcare sector of the economy for contracted, live-in eldercare workers.
Shapiro notes that with the inception of the Temporary Foreign Worker program,
hundreds of thousands of men and women from the Global South were issued work
visas that would allow them to live temporarily in Israel. Many extended their stays
beyond the expiration of their visas to now live as undocumented residents in
Israels urban centers. Many such women have also had children. Her article focuses
on temporary migrant women, to explore how these undocumented women and
their children have come to occupy a unique class position in the diverse urban

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landscape of Tel Aviv. Shapiro argues that while they share public spaces and are
partially integrated by sojourning in the world of their privileged employers, as a
result of their poverty, they are in fact precariously positioned in Tel Aviv society.
In this way, Shapiro argues, these women and their children have come to constitute
a privileged underclass, likely to change social structures in unprecedented ways.
The tensions of economic turmoil, locality, and class are also pursued by Shu Fan
Wen. Her discussion focuses on how the recent turbulence and instabilities of the
global economy have conditioned a process of return migration. Wens research is
based on skilled workers in the US health sector who migrated from China to the
USA in the 1980s and 1990s. After settling to work for extended periods of time in
health and pharmaceutical companies, a number of members of this professional
class responded to the recent economic downturn through repatriation to China.
Chinese market reform, commencing in 1979, created favorable economic
conditions that in turn informed the decision to return. Wen focuses on the
experience of return to Shanghai, which in the post-reform era developed rapidly to
become the most commercialized modern city in China. She then examines the
challenges posed by the reinsertion of such transnational populations, who were
formed as a product of global change, into a national context which has also itself
been transformed by global capitalism and neoliberalism.
Sharon Rosemans article pursues an issue raised in Wens contribution on the
difficulty of entry into geographically available wage labor markets. Drawing on
research in northern Spain, Roseman focuses on internal or regional migrations of
young adult workers from rural parts of Galicia. She records how the quest for wage
work (involving multiple job entries and reentries) literally involves moving back
and forth to enter into dispersed labor markets. Rural Galicia is a region that has
experienced a prolonged history of very high levels of unemployment. Unemploy-
ment, and particularly youth unemployment, is one of the most serious issues facing
Spain, but also to varying degrees other countries of the EU, and indeed states all
over the world. In Spain, this problem is at crisis levels of over 50 % in the current
period, but the issue has been longstanding. Rosemans article examines the
shifting, interrelated contexts for unemployment and the push to seek waged work
outside of local labor markets during the period from the 1960s to the present. Her
contribution takes an approach to labor migration that includes daily commuting as
well as travel over longer distances and durations. Such varied mobilities include
both temporary displacement and seemingly more permanent resettlement. Her
article then considers the role of various government policies overtime in instituting,
supporting, or discouraging different geographic trajectories and forms of move-
ment for young rural Galician workers, and under shifting conditions in the
economy of capitalism.
These articles and the articles that will follow in Part 2 of this special issue show
that as capitalism continues to prevail as the dominant system which organizes our
world, it also conditions the livelihood and social circumstances of mobile people.
Because of this, so we argue here, analyses centered on capitalism are most relevant
to the task of illuminating the transformations, processes, and crises in the
contemporary world. Drawing on cross continental examples of the transregional
and transnational circulations of people, these papers embed the analyses of

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migration in an exploration of the processes of differentiation, accumulation,

dispossession, and exploitation in the formation and transformation of capitalism
across space and time. In these respects, the papers offered here illustrate the
expansive theoretical and analytical reach of a political economy of migration. Our
common approach is to position our research within the dialectics of capitalism and
migration to enable a critical engagement with questions of gender, hegemony,
ethnicity, and citizenship. Such questions are crucial in apprehending how the lives
of migrants are entangled in different formations of capitalism.

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