Border control on labor movement is the constitutive logic of contemporary globalization

Evidence

That is what I call the multicultural question of modern times. And this globalization from below is occurring in the context of the globalization from above, which is of course the movement of every single thing apart from people. The movement of capital, of technologies, the “flow” of messages and images, the “flow” of investment, the movement of entrepreneurs, of the executive corporate global class. Everybody is “on the move” according to the logic of globalization, except the poor. Labor—ordinary folks—is the only factor which is not supposed to move. Why? Because how can you take competitive advantage of the translocation of production and consumption if the one-dollar-a-day laborer in Latin America is going to be “free” to move to the West Coast and claim advanced salaries? The function of the dispersal of capital around the globe of the decentralization of capital in the modern global system depends on the capacity to exploit labor, cheap labor, where it is! So the control on the movement of how many people are allowed to cross borders is absolutely central to the new, constituent logic of contemporary globalization. The movement of peoples for economic purposes—escaping poverty, escaping ill health, escaping ecological devastation, escaping civil war, escaping ethnic cleansing, escaping rural depopulation, escaping overurbanization, escaping a thousand and one problems—has become illegal. This is the underbelly of the contemporary globalization system. Therefore, our new diasporas are simply one part of this huge new historic movement, of a huge new geopolitical formation, which is creating the mixtures of cultures and peoples and histories and backgrounds and religions, which is the contemporary problem of the modern world. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1206

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ and sacrifice articles as a theory of how labor immobility and border policing structure exploitation; also frames diaspora as the underside of this.
• XREF: Connects to Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s work on state power and to the reader’s biopolitics/necropolitics strand: border control as who gets to be legible and movable. — connects to: Neoliberal governance seeks managed borders, not borderless openness — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 864
• DEFINE: Defines ‘globalization from above’ vs ‘globalization from below’ and positions border control within the logic of capital.
• SEED: Angle: the ‘one-dollar-a-day laborer in Latin America’ as the unspoken premise on which free-trade rhetoric rests - an essay on how capital mobility and labor immobility are one system.