ABSTRACT
The main purpose of this chapter is twofold: First, it points out the similarities between the dynamics of migration in our age with that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and asks what these similarities suggest. Second, it argues that the basis of today’s principal modes of migrant labour management, urban governance with migrants crowding the cities, and practising humanitarian care and protection as part of state functions thereby contributing to the power of the state, was laid down in that age of colonial expansion of capitalism,. The foundations of a governing apparatus, which has as its two sides protection and labour regulation, were secured in that age. All these acted as a supplement to the apparatus of power that would enable the state and indeed the global system to get a grip on human mobility, direct it, and govern it. On the other hand, this power to govern migration produced in turn the migratory flows of our time, in the forms we know, such as regular, irregular, and the like. The chapter argues that while focusing on the dynamics of migrant labour today, it will be good to have a sense of history of empires, particularly colonial empires, their boundary-making exercises, and the bodies that repeatedly hurled themselves on these borders and boundaries, and made migration a critical bio-political aspect of our age. The emergence of some of the different forms of labour subjectivities marking our world today can be traced back to that time.
