Abstract
An exploration of the link between pacification and global apartheid in the context of the racialized effects of neoliberal labour migration is undertaken. Drawing on the general layout of Canada’s temporary labour migration regime, the legal regulation of migrant labour is taken as a project of pacification that enforces apartheid conditions. Juxtaposed against the construction of migrant labour as menace or threat to ‘host’ communities in Canada, the growing need for “armies of offshore labour” presents an especially acute challenge for capital and national states. Despite certain perceptions that it is freed from national state constraints owing to the hyper-competitiveness of contemporary migration, capital remains deeply beholden to the politico-legal interventions of states, both sending and receiving. Situated within the hierarchical and uneven logic of the nation-state system and global capitalist development, pacification becomes a way in which capital and states attempt to mediate contradictions and govern not “insecurities” surrounding human mobility but rather the need to fabricate productive labour, a need contingent upon the complex transnational legal regulatory dynamic of unfree migrant labour which itself relies upon and perpetuates apartheid.
Highlights
A recent dispute over the relocation of migrant worker housing makes evident the contradictory reasoning of contemporary labour migration
Global apartheid’s instruments of enforcement are, according to Richmond, “interdiction, passports, visas, residence permits, work permits, denial of citizenship rights, including access to education, government-funded health and welfare services” (Richmond 2002). These cover the range of immigration admissions policies but particular consideration has been given to those related to asylum seeking (Richmond 1994), human trafficking and temporary labour migration (Sharma 2005; 2006)
A key contradiction of temporary labour migration stems from the growing need for “armies of offshore labour” within Canada and on a global scale
Summary
A recent dispute over the relocation of migrant worker housing makes evident the contradictory reasoning of contemporary labour migration. The expressed concern, which encapsulates sentiments held more widely, posits at once the necessity of migrant labour in contemporary agricultural production and the threat posed by invading outside forces on pristine and unsuspecting local communities. This offers a necessarily general account of Canada’s migration regime as it relates to pacification and apartheid, instead of opting to focus on narrow and limited conceptions of the legal regulation of labour migration. Engage with how other social processes – most notably, racialization – interact with legal regulatory phenomena to produce and reproduce migrant labour
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