The dialectics of migration: part 2

Pauline Gardiner Barber • Winnie Lem

Published online: 8 February 2014

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

The contributions that follow this introduction form the second part of our project to

explore the dialectics of migration through the conceptual and methodological

apparatus of political economy and Marxism. As we asserted in Part I, this paradigm

is inherently suited to the study of the turbulent mutations of capitalism and its cycle

of crises. Also as migration and capitalism are entwined in a relationship of

reciprocal formation and transformation, analytical interrogations that engage with

the logics of capitalism and its effects on people in various locations throughout the

world are vital to the challenge of capturing this dialectic in the relationship

between the spatial relocations of people and the dominant economic system in the

globe.

The papers in this second part of our collaboration continue to amplify the

entanglement of capitalism and migration. Each author uses distinctive aspects of

political economy and Marxism to illuminate the ways in which the quotidian life of

migrants in different contexts is conditioned by complex processes of accumulation

and value realization within capitalism. A common strand running through the

papers is the intent to reveal the simultaneity of migration and its many links to

processes of capital accumulation on a global scale. The gendered and transnational

complexities of global migration are considered by Eleonore Kofman’s contribution

to this volume, which explores the transnational mobilization of women for the

work of social reproduction. The idea of global chains of care, so Kofman suggests,

has become the favored theoretical lens in much scholarship on women who

perform what has been called intimate labor. The intention of the chain metaphor is

to capture the transfer of physical and emotional labor from less wealthy regions to

P. G. Barber

Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

W. Lem (&)

Trent University, Peterborough, Canada

e-mail: wlem@trentu.ca

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Dialect Anthropol (2014) 38:13–15

DOI 10.1007/s10624-014-9327-4

relatively wealthy regions of the globe. However, Kofman notes there is a limitation

from this lens in as much as it has served to channel research into a narrow set of

sectors, sites, and skills and has served to focus attention on flows between

households. This renders invisible the other sites, external agents, institutions, and

practices of care, including those that are situated particularly within the household.

Such a metaphor then also obscures the diversity of familial arrangements that

prevail within households. Kofman argues that in a context in which paid care has

experienced one of the highest rates of growth in employment, it is necessary to

unpack the dynamics of the household. This is particularly urgent in a period when

inequalities have increased massively and state intervention is reshaping how and

what activities are undertaken in particular sites and institutions. Kofman further

argues that revisiting the concept of social reproduction would enable us to better

appreciate the complexity of the transfer of labor, both in relation to different

institutional arrangements and the spatial extension of social reproduction. Through

a critical re-examination of the applications of the concept of social reproduction,

Kofman’s paper demonstrates its heuristic value in a period when the transregional

and transnational movement of mobile labor is one of the systematic outcomes of

globalization and indeed the turmoil of contemporary capitalism.

The complex manifestations of transregional and transnational movement of

mobile labor and its relationship to the generation of poverty and class are also

addressed by Ubaldo Martinez Viega. His intervention considers migrants and their

residential conditions in an urban setting in Spain. Echoing debates emanating from

the Chicago school of urban studies, Martinez Viega critiques the myth of

‘‘concentrated poverty’’ that blames urban ills on spatial morphology and represents

the city as a reified entity. Concentrating on the evolution of a ghetto in the Spanish

Mediterranean coast, he argues that the fetishization of space in much urban work

neglects to consider the political economies that create poverty and inequality.

Through a focus on three different contingents of residents—Spaniards, gypsies, and

Moroccans—the article analyzes their mutual relationships and their dealings with

local and regional governments that are implicated in the production of the

neighborhood as a wasteland. Although there is a high degree of social separation

between these groups, which are ethnically marked, what they have in common is

that they inhabit a space that carries a stigma that that sets them apart socially from

the larger society. Although stigmatized and socially distanced from the larger

society, these groups are nonetheless embedded in the economic structures that

constitute local and regional formations of capitalism. Having addressed spatial

segregation, social isolation, and territorial stigmatization of the urban poor in this

settlement, Martinez Viega then suggests that to reify is to fetishize, and therefore

obscure the roots of the production of poverty and social inequality.

The issue of contentious relations among and between mobile ethnically marked

populations is also taken up by Kyeyoung Park. Park offers an analysis of the

complex and contradictory experiences of Korean immigrants as they pursue their

livelihoods in South America. Focusing on immigrants from South Korea in Buenos

Aires and Sao Paulo, her paper critically analyzes the political economy of

development and neoliberalism in Korea, Brazil, and Argentina, as well as the

Korean immigrants’ structural location in the apparel industries in South America.

14 P. G. Barber, W. Lem

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Park observes that it has been argued that Korean immigrants are comparable to

Jewish immigrants because both groups pursue similar strategies of socioeconomic

mobility in terms of their concentration in certain economic niches, such as the

apparel industry. Park also discusses the tensions that have emerged between these

groups as a result of such concentration. Her article next maps out some similarities

and differences between the Korean and Jewish groups’ responses to their economic

and social displacement as well as their political circumstances. She then discusses

the implications of these responses for their future relationships. In presenting a

comparative analysis that focuses on the structure of domination facing immi-

grants—the prevailing forms of prejudice and discrimination—as well as the

strategies for socioeconomic mobility, Park attends to the global forces and

neoliberal practices of states that are implicated in dividing populations into

competing groups and exacerbating tensions between them. She argues that it is

critical that we assess the role of state, national identity, class dynamics, and the

political economy of neoliberalism in our debates on migration, anti-immigrant

sentiment, and ethnic tension.

Reflecting thematic strands in the previous contributions, Natasha Hanson also

explores how global shifts in capital, production, and labor markets with their

segmentation, relate to mobility strategies and community ties in a specific local

context. She observes that mobility strategies, or indeed the refusal to be mobile are,

at times, deployed by workers in order to maintain households in communities that

have seen the labor market constrict. Hanson argues that decisions about mobility

are not purely about economic rationality. Rather, her research suggests a critical

line of enquiry against a purely economistic view of labor mobility. In the mobility

strategies employed by former pulp and paper workers from Miramichi, New

Brunswick, Canada, so Hanson notes, resistance to mobility is due to community

loyalties and familial ties to place. Such local commitments may take precedence

over, but are clearly implicated in and by, the ever-shifting tides of global capital.

These articles continue to emphasize that as capitalism continues to prevail as the

dominant system which organizes our world, it also conditions the livelihood and

social circumstances of mobile people. In their efforts to embed the analyses of

migration in an examination of the processes of differentiation, accumulation,

dispossession, and exploitation and to link such processes to the formation and

transformation of capitalism across space and time, these authors collectively

demonstrate the expansive theoretical and analytical reach of a political economy of

migration. Our common approach is to position our research within the dialectics of

capitalism and migration, and this in turn enables a truly critical engagement with

the conditions of human mobility in changing formations of capitalism.

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