ABSTRACT
From a political economy perspective, focus of migration and development analysis is on what might be described as labour migration dynamics of capitalist development process, or migration–development nexus. This chapter discusses three principal themes. First, as had been noted by Robin Cohen in his study of The New Helots, many migrant workers today are still locked into forms of labour exploitation that marked birth of global capitalism. Second, emphasized by Cohen, employer demand for cheap and often illegal forms of labour has dogmatic utopian belief in capitalism with unregulated market forces – that under free-market capitalism, economic opportunities for self-advancement are available to everyone. Third, politicians in migrant-importing states have been zealous in trying to police or militarize their frontiers in name of 'national security' as a strategy to prevent economic migrants from flooding the labour market and legal migrants from 'masquerading' as political refugees in order to take advantage of social welfare programmes and free public education.
