Neoliberalism shifts jobs toward labor, not labor toward jobs

Evidence

Neoliberal emphasis is less to get rid of the state – what, in any case, exactly would that mean? – than radically to shift its priorities, to redirect it to represent different interests, to do different work. While committing to the flows of commodifiable entities, contemporary modes of control have been decidedly circumspect about freedom of movement for multitudes of people. If developing economies have traditionally seen the dramatic movement of people from rural to urban locations in search of work, neoliberal movements have been threefold. First, they have been largely of jobs to sources of cheap labor, reversing the usual direction. The legal movement of people to highly capitalized societies has been increasingly curtailed. As a result, second, large-scale movements to highly capitalized societies have been prompted by economic and social dislocations in less capitalized regions. And third, movements to less from more capitalized countries tend increasingly to be tourist prompted and so temporary, fleeting, mostly uncommitted. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1746

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the decolonizing/economics discourse in Miami Weiss’ material and to Milgrom’s law-merchant analysis of trade movement.
• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘globalization’ rhetoric actually reverses the direction of human migration and reclassifies people as either investors or tourists, never as residents.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1746