Conference Agenda

The increased demand for quality healthcare has led to a heightened migration of nurses, significantly from the Third World countries to the developed countries of the world. In this highly feminised profession, India is one of the major countries providing nurses to countries like the U.K. The southernmost state in India, Kerala, alone had almost 10,000 nurses leave for the U.K. in the year 2022 as per estimates. Though sufficient literature exists on the push, and pull factors and process of recruitment of overseas nurses from Asia, there is a significant gap in the studies on the utilisation of their professional knowledge in the healthcare sector in destination countries. Against this backdrop, the paper attempts to study the specific ways in which ‘deskilling’ takes place among overseas nurses from Kerala in Britain. Deskilling refers to the under-utilisation or obsolescence of the skills of a worker. The paper significantly borrows from the theoretical frameworks of Braverman (1974), Thompson (1983) and others to critically analyse the process of deskilling. The study attempted a qualitative inquiry into the experience of working in Britain among twelve overseas nurses from Kerala who migrated in the last two years. The method of data collection was in-depth interviews. This was followed by an analysis of estimates in terms of the cost of nursing education and skills acquired in India against their pay scale and banding system in Britain. It is observed that overseas nurses from Kerala experience increased levels of deskilling. Unlike earlier studies that focused on deskilling in terms of geriatric care once they were recruited, the respondents of the study had to occupy a lower banding system; until they gained sufficient expertise during the period of their preceptorship. They were not permitted to use their technical skills or even hand out medicine without authorisation. The study, hence, notes nurses' accounts of various levels of their ‘competency’ in the hospital system. It observes that the non-availability of social capital left these overseas nurses in Britain to lose confidence in their expertise in nursing skills.

The study of the “second generation” of migrants in receiving societies is an issue with a long tradition in the social sciences, public discourse and politics in different parts of the world. The predominant theoretical frameworks are those that focus on migration from the global south to the global north. The objective of this paper is to analyze the general patterns of labor incorporation of migrants and children of south-south migrants, Peruvians, Bolivians and Paraguayans, in Argentina. First, we detail the characteristics of the labor incorporation of migrants and their children in comparison with the native population and their children. Second, we analyze the forms of incorporation into the different labor segments of Argentine society. In Argentina, for different reasons, there are no statistics on the so-called “second generation” immigrants. We reconstruct the location of the children of migrants in the occupational structure through the national statistical system, we intend to study comparatively the labor specifications at a household level. We consider the following vectors for comparison with the native population: 1) Generation vector: the occupational incorporation of the adults in the household compared to that of the children living in the household. Specifically, we refer to the intra-household generation, and 2) Gender vector: the occupational distributions of men and women within each generational group. We use census data from the last two censuses in Argentina in order to observe the changes and continuities of these processes. The results obtained suggest an incorporation structured by the vectors of gender and generations. The younger generations within the household (daughters and sons of both native and migrant populations) are incorporated into the most precarious segments and in a complementary way this incorporation interacts with gender. Women who are daughters of migrant households are mostly inserted in the lower segments of the labor structure, while at the other extreme, native men are incorporated in a greater proportion in the higher segments of the labor structure. Although the pattern is general, we find that there is an internal stratification between south-south migrants and their children. Indeed, Peruvians, for historical reasons, are in a better position than other migrant groups.

This paper applies insights from Marxist political economy to explore the seemingly chaotic response to the contemporary migrant and refugee “crisis” in the Americas as an effort to create pools of rapidly mobilizable and deportable migrant labor, while simultaneously warehousing and restricting the mobility of populations deemed surplus. The ongoing crisis of global capitalism has produced unpredictable patterns of migration and injected great uncertainty into the worldwide market for labor. Within this context, how might asylum seekers and presently or potentially unauthorized migrants be transformed into politically disempowered and tightly controlled migrant workers? I call attention to four interrelated phenomena: erosion of the right to claim asylum enshrined in the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees and its 1967 Protocol; distribution of short-term residency and work permits to asylum seekers; expansion and streamlining of so-called guestworker programs; and normalization of digital and biometric surveillance technologies targeting both precarious migrants and the global population, writ large. Taken in conjunction, I argue that these ongoing developments add up to a nascent regime of militarized migration management predicated on a massive increase in state capacity, suggesting that the undocumented migrant is an increasingly anachronistic political subject in our emergent age of global surveillance capitalism. Although largely concerned with actions taken in the United States under the administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, my discussion foregrounds the transnational character of this emergent regulatory project. I present empirical data drawn largely from public and private reports, journalistic accounts, official government statements and statistics, and industry publications. The paper traces the gradual assertion of control over US-bound migration in recent years through a combination of militarized exclusion and differential inclusion under conditions of protracted vulnerability. On the one hand, this involves the use of humanitarian parole and new processing pathways subjecting migrants and asylum seekers to novel forms of digital and biometric surveillance in exchange for short-term work authorization and temporary protection from deportation. On the other hand, US officials and their foreign counterparts have worked closely with industry associations to channel unauthorized flows into expanded guestworker's programs, setting aside visas for nationals of specific countries, streamlining bureaucratic procedures, and constructing extensive, in-country recruitment apparatuses. I conclude with a discussion of the contradictions of militarized migration management and consider whether measures developed in the heat of crisis might congeal into something resembling a coherent regime in the coming years.