ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ‘failure’ of laws and state controls to regulate labour migration, by focusing on a specific case study: domestic workers in South Africa who are Basotho (i.e. who have migrated from Lesotho). It examines state power and legal instruments as elements within a larger, more complex regulatory apparatus: the border. The chapter applies a novel conception of the border by focusing on the experiences and strategies of migrant workers themselves. This exposes the blurred lines between state and non-state, legal and illegal, in the regulation of migrants’ movements and their employment. Ultimately the ‘failure’ of state measures effectively to control Basotho women’s labour migration is seen to produce a number of specific effects. In particular, the border apparatus, resting on a complex system of documentation and operating through a range of agents, constitutes migrant workers as ‘illegal’. This ‘illegality’ undermines the efficacy of labour protections, distinguishing Basotho women as a supply of exploitable, expendable and invisible labour for South African homes.
The chapter begins by outlining a conceptual framework for the study of labour migration based on a conception of migration control regimes, or ‘borders’, which extends beyond state or legal controls. The perspective of the labour migrant herself is considered particularly crucial in this framework. The remainder of the chapter comprises such an analysis of Basotho domestic workers in South Africa, including: a brief introduction to the case study group; an outline of South African labour migration law and policy (contrasted with the realities of women’s labour migration); migrants’ experiences of ‘illegality’ as produced by the border’s surveillance and disciplining processes; and most crucially, the effects of this ‘illegal’ subjectivity in terms of the domestic service labour market and the concealment of this particular migration flow.
16‘Our problem is that we are not here legally; almost nobody has the right papers.’ – Mosotho migrant domestic worker
