ABSTRACT
Migrants today suffer from an imbalance by which their sacrifices, in terms of time, are far greater than those endured by the rest of society, their rewards less. Indeed the diversity in legal status and migratory histories that coexist within the low-paid, manual, low-skilled service sector into which many new Pakistani migrants are absorbed is striking, so too the range in age, educational qualifications and length of time spent in the UK. If restrictions on spatial mobility apply to all labour migrants for lack of time and money, they are especially pertinent in the lives of London's irregular Afro-Eurasian workforce, for whom international travel is inconceivable. The gulf between indigenous members of society and new migrants can be thought of as a sexual-economic structural inequality that operates at multiple levels through the maintenance of various legal. Melancholia tends to be accompanied by a deep and morose self-loathing, self-recrimination and impoverishment of the ego.
