ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that there is something more to the ecological marginality of select population groups than the appearance of ecological happenings as cataclysmic events. Ecological marginality produces migrant labour now made available from out of natural calamities, developmental disasters, infrastructural madness, and economic collapses. While “disasters” remain in memory, the immigrant labour produced out of the disasters belongs to “normal” phenomenon of society. We have thus two categories: refugees and migrants. Refugees are visible. They belong to the visible sphere of politics, civil society, rights, and humanitarian protection. Migrants, particularly in the form of immigrant labour, are invisible. Their presence is spectral. They belong to economics, market, wages, and governmental welfare. The migrant remains the other of the refugee, and the humanitarian expressions about protection of the refugees have their counterpart in the stately silence about migrant labour. Yet, this chapter argues, the task is not to delink the two as is conventionally done, or state merely that the two are interlinked, but to investigate the nature of the migrant’s invisibility. The logistical expansion of economies and their extractive turn increase the demand for the migrant – but remember, only as labour, and not as a political subject. This chapter explores the conditions of invisibility – the invisibility of the migrant in the process of accumulation.
