Conference Agenda

This paper proposes an analysis of the present conjuncture of migration flows and enforcement in the United States that engages critical Latin American conceptual frameworks rooted in Marxist Dependency Theory. Situating mass migration from Latin America within a totality of asymmetrical social relations that structure the uneven movement of labor and capital across borders in the region, I highlight the relationship between international patterns of accumulation and migration in history. I contend that the crisis of neoliberal capitalist accumulation unfolding since the 2008 financial crisis and aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic provoked a corresponding crisis in the prevailing migration pattern. Drawing on critical Mexican migration scholarship from researchers, I argue that this mass migration was not just a product of neoliberal restructuring, but indeed constitutive of that process on both sides of the border. The neoliberal migration pattern was a central mechanism for the reproduction of restructured dependency relations between the U.S. and its Southern neighbors, understood in the formulation of the Brazilian revolutionary thinker Ruy Mauro Marini as a social relation that reproduces Latin America's disadvantaged insertion in the international division of labor through structural mechanisms of value appropriation and transfer from the periphery to the core of the capitalist world system. My research points to qualitative and quantitative changes in both migrant populations and tactics as well as U.S.-led enforcement strategies in the last fifteen years. Rather, they are increasingly comprised of asylum-seeking women, children, and families from Central and South America and beyond. At the same time, increasingly punitive and externalized U.S. migration controls indicate a shift from an enforcement regime that fostered what Nicolas De Genova theorized as deportability to one of mass expulsion and exclusion. This paper makes the case that these transformations are evidence of the exhaustion of the neoliberal political economy on both sides of the border.

This paper analyses how the platform economy is shaping migration globally, and how this industry is being (re)shaped by this particular composition of its workforce. While research now indicates that migration plays an important role in platform work, especially in the Global North (Dunn, 2020; van Doorn; Ferrari; Graham, 2020; Woodcock, 2021), little is known about the ways in which this occurs in practice.Francis Collins's (2020) concept of 'platform migration', along with the Marxist theory of class composition, provided the analytical route to understanding how both ‘platforms’ (of delivery and of migration) are integrated. This framework enables a broader lens than the usual labor process analyses on platform studies. While platforms have benefited from these dynamics, mainly by providing access to a larger pool of potential workers with little or no social protection, this dynamic has also produced the conditions for workers to respond and react. The migrant condition creates common ground cutting across all aspects of this industry, from the labor process and life experiences to collective forms of resistance and organization. It is no accident that most organic strikes in these countries have been led by migrant workers (Cant, 2017). This double movement, I argue, is at the core of the political economy of the platform industry. This study was based on a comparative ethnography where I worked as a union organizer for a migrant worker’s trade union in the UK for two years, and another year as a volunteer among delivery workers organizations in Brazil. Currently, I am working with migrant delivery workers in New York City and Washington. Some conclusions were also strengthened by careful analysis of second-hand data and case studies from South East Asia, Central Europe and other Latin countries.

Under conditions encouraged by COVID-19, access to digital remote work has allowed increasing numbers of individuals to work outside the traditional workspace and be increasingly mobile across national borders. In response, scholars have begun investigating the phenomenon of “digital nomads,” which are largely agreed to be: 1. Location-independent workers (i.e. able to work from anywhere), 2. Engaged in long-term travel while working, and 3. Invested in a leisure-based lifestyle. Scholarship has investigated why individuals become digital nomads and the consequences upon the individual from the lifestyle, however, how digital nomads and their relocation impact the countries they access is nearly nonexistent. The countries they inhabit are simple backgrounds, and the agency of local populations in aiding, interacting with, and challenging digital nomads and their migration is unaccounted for.

Utilizing ethnographic research in Guatemala, which has been described as “an up-and-coming digital nomad hub” (Explorers Away 2023), I examine the impact and consequences of digital nomad migration. Centering on how Guatemalans make meaning of, negotiate, and contest the mobilities of privileged migrants in Guatemala, I propose digital nomads are not simply explorers taking advantage of remote work to travel, they are privileged migrants participating in dynamics fundamentally based on capitalist and colonial world structuring. I show digital nomads are: 1. Deeply embedded within global capitalism and are able to access nearly unrestricted mobility through their digital labor and “strong” passports, 2. Remaking boundaries of transnational labor mobilities through a privileged class, and 3. Participating in displacement of local communities.

Understanding these migration patterns is especially critical, for this privileged migration (and consequent gentrification) is happening concurrently with the erasure of Guatemalan indigenous land rights. As largely Maya communities are criminalized and displaced, I highlight the violently contested claim to land and the consequences of change in the region. This adds an important dimension to immigration scholarship, for too often, narratives of migration only center on migrants from the Global South migrating to the Global North. While this scholarship is highly important, we must not forget that migration is likewise occurring in the opposite direction, and often, with very different outcomes.