ABSTRACT
This chapter draws together the book’s purpose to confront certain obfuscations in the study of migration. First, is a moral question of the global distribution and hierarchy of labour value obfuscated through elaborate global value chains. Migration policies enacted by governments in Australia framed this unwittingly or otherwise as a necessary evil of competition, evidently to access and reinforce a supply of low-value labour. The second obfuscation is how class is positioned as a field of analysis. If all non-humanitarian migration is treated as productive labour, even when migration statistics and policy rubrics suggest otherwise, migration studies is limiting its ability to help provide answers to enduring problems of labour’s exploitation. Finally, Productive Diversity is revealed for its rightful place in Australia policy making: that is, as a key moment in articulating market ideals rather than usual critiques of migrants only as white-collar workers, as ‘ethnic labour’ in new production.
