Geopolitics of the diaspora: labor mobility across borders in the current systemic crisis

Abstract

The relationship between the structural crisis of capital and the production of diasporas reveals an intrinsic condition in the current world of work: the mobilization of waves of workers between countries and continents. In this discussion, the dimension of immigration processes, analyzed from the perspective of historical and dialectical materialism, makes it possible to examine the interrelations between labor mobility in a context of chronic unemployment. In this sense, the survey and analysis of databases on immigration flows point to the intensification of mobilizations of workers from the less industrialized periphery towards more industrialized peripheral countries and central countries. Unlike the period of rise of capital, the post-1973 context is characterized by the expansion of insoluble contradictions in the productive system. In the current crisis, the pressures of capital against labor impose a production of space marked by the diaspora of workers subject to imperialism and structural unemployment. In this article, the analysis is based on mobilizations across borders, proposing a theoretical inversion of the concept of immigration crisis, for an examination of immigrations due to/in the crisis, through reality.