Labor migrants must disregard their bodies for life chances without protection

Evidence

The placement of the Pakistani immigrant within the complex political economies of migration to the U.S. has taken on greater complexity in the face of state-endorsed racism since 9/11. In addition to exerting state power through immigration control and legal statutes such as the Patriot Act, the U.S. state plays a central role in this racial configuration of the Muslim as a terrorist in its representations of the multiple Wars on Terror. The necro-politics of migration dictates that certain workers must disregard their bodies in the gamble for greater life chances. Labor migrants represent an extreme of this tenuous existence in the current global economy while they are left unprotected by global capitalism and manipulated by forms of labor migration that attribute such negative moral values to them that their disappearance seems unremarkable. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 871

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘necro-politics of migration,’ the idea that certain workers are expected to disregard their bodies in the gamble for better life chances.
• SHARE: For someone working on migration policy or critical labor studies — the line that migrants’ disappearance ‘seems unremarkable’ due to attributed moral values is a sharp formulation.