Financialisation and/of Migrant Labour

This chapter focuses on financialization and migrant labor highlighting that migrants are pivotal in financialized economies as both low and highly skilled workers. If low paid migrant workers are one side of the financialization–migrant labor story, their highly skilled counterparts are the other. Their significance as key architects of financialization, illustrate that finance has not disempowered all workers equally and that class is an enduring labor market differentiator. The chapter proposes that scholars critically interrogate the co-constitution of financialization and migrant labor. Structural shifts in the global political economy brought on by neoliberal reform and the increased prominence of finance over the last 40 years have intensified historic processes of the subordination of migrant labor. The return migration of heavily indebted migrants to countries which historically dealt with structural labor market problems through labor export strategies has had devastating consequences on households and local economies.