ABSTRACT
Labour migrations represent a constant feature in the history of the capitalist system of production: according to the French sociologist and historian Yann Moulier Boutang, the genealogy of Western capitalism is deeply inscribed in the confl ict between workers – struggling for the freedom to move – and the capitalist classes – whose interest has always been to reach a complete control over the mobility of labour.1 This perspective has been very helpful for the emergence of non-orthodox reconstructions of the historical relations between capital and labour, but it shows an even greater utility if it is applied to the current phenomenon of international migrations and their regulation.2 In fact, in the global economy of our times this historical confl ict reappears in what Malcolm Anderson defi nes as the contemporary ‘regime of frontier’ – the body of practices, laws and institutions regulating the political, administrative, economic and social meaning of national and continental borders.3
