ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a critical overview of Marxian scholarship addressing the interrelation between class and migration. In pre-capitalist economies, as well as in the transition to capitalism, migration assumed central importance in articulating social relations and the mode of production. To begin with, transatlantic slavery was thoroughly organized by forced migration, which structured the production of cash crops such as tobacco, cotton and sugar in the Americas. Migrant workers share with all productive workers in capitalist firms a relation to exploitation and the extraction of surplus labor. In the United States, some of the most prominent worker cooperatives are run by immigrant women: WAGES (Women's Action to Gain Economic Security) in San Francisco, UNITY Housecleaners in Long Island, and Si Se Puede in Brooklyn, New York. Worker cooperatives may be one step towards a postcapitalist politics of migration, but only one of many steps required and certainly not without internal contradictions.
