Exploited Lives: Methodological Nationalism and the Infrastructure of Labour and Migration

Abstract

What role does the nation state play in the exploitation of migrant workers? In this presentation, I explore how several disparate actors – from employer(s), brokers, and intermediaries, to national labour institutions - shape migrants’ transnational mobility, often leaving them in precarious situations. In particular, I examine how the state and the labour market institutions in the receiving society condition not only the exploitation of migrants’ labour power but also their broader life circumstances.
Based on extensive fieldwork in agriculture, hospitality, logistics, and cleaning in Denmark, and engaging with the concepts of ‘methodological nationalism’ and ‘migration infrastructures’, I analyse the ways in which migrants experience exploitation in the national labour market. This exploitation is shaped not only by their working conditions but by the entire transnational migration process. I show how this process produces convoluted mobilities of frictions, de-tours, stuckness, and obstacles that leave migrants in precarious positions across the sending and receiving societies.

Discussants

Paolo Boccagni, Università di Trento

Nicola Quondamatteo, Università di Trento

Chair

Katia Pilati, Università di Trento