ABSTRACT
Most writings on refugee economy or the immigrant economy take a labour market approach. They refer to changes in the immigrant labour absorption policies of the developed capitalist states. But they leave out the changes in global capitalist economy, and thus the reasons as to why capitalism in late twentieth or early twenty-first century needs the refugee or immigrant labour. The idea we get from these writings is that refugees and forced migrants want to be economically viable, relevant to the host economies, and are economically relevant, but unfortunately, they are discriminated against. The organic link between the immigrant as an economic actor and the global capitalist economy seems to escape the analyses. Moving away from a labour market-centric approach, this chapter discusses the ways in which capital sets in motion movements of labour within a specific field of force that dictates how and why migrant labour is to be harnessed, disciplined, and governed (for instance the dominant presence of immigrant labour in logistics, health care industry, agriculture, etc.), and the links between the “mechanisms” that set the population movements in motion and the “strategies” that control migrants once they are in motion. Fostering mobile footloose labour is functional more than ever to capital’s reproduction – and this “flexibility” is the dialectical other to migrants’ autonomy. The resilient migrant labour is therefore an adaptive agent, and indeed, neo-liberal capitalism in order to continue has to keep on fostering these adaptive subjects.
