Logistics of migrant labour: rethinking how workers ‘fit’ transnational economies

Abstract

New approaches to understanding the mediation of migration have emerged from literature on migration industries, migration infrastructures and migration brokerage. These studies point out the importance of economic processes in migration by studying how recruiters and brokers negotiate im/mobilities, within and outside the state. This article argues that there is a need to develop a complementing theorisation of the economies of migration, since the centrality of migrant labour, the role of employers, and the extraction of value from the transnational situation of migrants' lives remain vague. Emerging scholarship around a logistics of migration that accounts for supply chain organisations and the quest for transnational interoperability is suggested for this purpose. The article utilises ethnographic data from Sweden on labour recruiters and employers in two sectors: the wild berry industry and the ICT industry. Logistics, the art and science of coordinating supply chains [Cowen, Deborah. 2014. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. University of Minnesota Press.], produces a commodification of im/mobility in specific contexts of labour and social reproduction. Migration, therefore, represents one, more or less integrated, aspect of extracting value. Critical perspectives on logistics have the potential to link the emerging frameworks on mediation with observations of how globalising markets affect migrant workers and their lives.

Negotiating the Wild West: Variegated neoliberalisation of the Swedish labour migration regime and the wild berry migration industry

“…In line with Menz (2013), the case thus illustrates that the neoliberalisation of the migration regime created a new set of powerful private actors in the migration industry, in this case strongly related to the industry's interest to increase profits (Krifors, 2021). The tax revision critically and contradictory coincided with the neoliberalisation process, and while the neoliberlisation process had the goal to increase labour migration, taxing the industry rather counteracted the import of migrants.…”

“…In response to their common interests to promote migration, state and industry entered into a mutually enforcing process, where they both could gain from restructuring migration. Just like Krifors (2021) puts it, the migration industry has, in this case, been intertwined with the economic activities of the berry industry and the goal to maximise profitability.…”

“…In this phase, the wild berry migration industry developed as an irregular sector consisting of different waves of migrant workers who arrived on tourist visas (Jonsson and Uddstål, 2002). There is a wide understanding among researchers that the Swedish wild berry industry has constructed itself as dependent on migrant workers, integrated in the wider process of economic activities to maximise profits and keep costs down (Eriksson et al, 2019; Krifors, 2021). It has developed against the context of an internationally unique condition, the historical Right of Public Access ( Allemansrätten), which enabled actors of varying nationalities to pick berries for commercial purposes, in private or institutional regimes (Hedberg, 2013; Stens and Sandström, 2013).…”

Beyond blue ocean? The roles of intermediaries in the cross‐border labour market between Japan and Vietnam

“…It is possible to regard activities like these as reactions to the available immigration policies, employment relations and other institutional structures in the migratory process. Krifors (2021) emphasizes that existing research into brokers does not sufficiently cover their market‐making activities. I consider that intermediary actors play a more active role in the making of a cross‐border labour market than has hitherto been realized.…”

Re-visiting the ‘black box’ of migration: state-intermediary co-production of regulatory spaces of labour migration

“…In recent years, there has been growing interest in the actors that enable and give shape to international labour migration, not least in this journal (e.g. Cranston, Schapendonk, and Spaan 2018;Deshingkar 2019;Elrick and Lewandowska 2008;Groutsis, van den Broek, and Harvey 2015;Hernández-León 2021;Krifors 2021;Pijpers 2010;Walton-Roberts 2021). Two special issues, both published in 2018, respectively explore the diversity and complexity of the strategies used by a wide range of migration industry actors to facilitate and commercialise migration (Cranston, Schapendonk, and Spaan 2018) and the complex relationships between migrants and brokers, and between precarity and agency, which characterise migration brokerage in the Global South (Deshingkar 2019).…”