ABSTRACT
This book is an analysis of the contradictory economic and political agendas that create and constrain migration. It shows how global capitalism dominates modes of production and livelihoods in particular moments through an interconnected system of economic dispossession, illegalisation, border control, labour exploitation and processes of underdevelopment, which is summarised as a regime of unfree labour mobility. Labour migration cannot be understood in isolation from the development of markets for migrant labour. The labour market itself cannot be understood separately from the creation of the legal and political status necessary for labour to be cheap and controllable, nor can we make sense of ‘illegal’ migrants in global capitalism without seeing which processes lead people to surrender their citizenship rights. The tensions between international agendas of labour mobility and mechanisms of control produce an arbitrary outcome for migrants, and their trajectories are also shaped by particular coping strategies and local forms of resistance, overdetermined and constrained by the migration regime but not predicted by it.
