The Mobility of Labor and Capital
by Saskia Sassen
Buy on AmazonI’d never heard that before. Immediately it makes me think of linkages between so-called glamour zones and urban slums. You have people who make the glamour zones possible – the people who change the sheets in hotels or serve fancy wine or stock bars – living in the slums. So it seems like you can’t have one without the other. I was talking with a student of mine yesterday about the ways in which low-wage migrant labour has made wealth possible, particularly for middle-class women. I have just had a baby, and it brings home for me the idea that you can’t work and have a family if you’re a woman, in a lot of cases. So having female immigrant workers available to help you raise your kids becomes a really important part of being able to move into the middle classes and upper classes for a lot of urban workers in developed regions. The answer depends on the way that you look at it. You can make the argument – and a lot of people have made the argument – that US immigration policy is not keeping pace, that it has stagnated, that it’s preventing the development of an international labour force to keep pace with the internationalisation of the rest of production. On the other hand, some people argue, that’s not the best way to read it. Actually, US immigration policy, by not doing anything, reproduces this illegal labour force, which has a specific role in capitalist relations. Even Sassen makes this argument later. She says illegal labour is a particular kind of labour. It’s not a coincidence, it’s not an unhappy accident. It performs a certain function in developed nations. Then, by not having an immigration overhaul that has a path to legalisation for undocumented workers, that actually reproduces a labour force, an undocumented labour force.