Pakistani workers’ criminalization and racialization emerge from home-country social formations and regional migration

Evidence

Following recent critiques of South Asian migration (Barbora et al. 2008; Shukla 2001), I expand the notions of one-way and bidirectional migration in favor of models of diaspora that emphasize the multiplicity of movement. In particular, I look at how social formations are constructed in diaspora through chain, step, and seasonal migration based on economic, cultural, social, and political factors. Tracing migration to a source country allows the role of internal migration and the placement of migration hubs in the process of sending and receiving migrant workers to be magnified. The politics of regional migration also plays an important role in crafting migrants’ pathways to labor acquisition. In mapping such a labor diaspora, I argue that the social formations produced in home countries and through regional migration are an important aspect of how Pakistani workers are understood through the terms of criminality and deviance that are then racialized in the global War on Terror. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 43

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the reader’s existing material on racialized labor and moral panics; connects to fellow-sounding work on how criminality is racialized through political crisis.
• SEED: Angle: how internal and step migration within a source country feed global narratives of suspect populations, rather than migration being a one-way outsider phenomenon.