Migrant Labor (was Re: lbo-talk-digest V1 #4685)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Erik Empson wrote:
>
>>I might be missing the point here, but I've just been reading in Empire
>>where Hardt and Negri talk about nomadism and miscegenation. They see
>>migration as a positive form and the kind of multiplicity that results as
>>the first basis of anti-empirial ethics. The destruction of the third world
>>state, ostensibly creates conditions for "subjective circulation";
>>
>>"the mutlitude's resistance to bondage - the struggle against the slavery of
>>belonging to a nation, an identity, and a people, and thus the desertion
>>from sovereignty and the limits it places on subjectivity - is entirely
>>positive." (Empire 361)
>>
>>This "nomadic singularity is the most creative force and the omnilateral
>>movement of its desire is itself the coming liberation" (363)
>>
>>"the concrete universal is what allows the mutlitude to pass from place to
>>place and make its place its own" (362)
>>
>>Is there something positive about the movement of labour
>
>I think so, and so do H&N, though Art McGee might dissent. Why 
>shouldn't workers be free to move where they want? Why shouldn't 
>people as people (and not as workers specifically) be free to move 
>where they want?
>
>Doug

There shouldn't be anti-immigrant repression, but H&N are saying more 
than that, judging migrant labor -- legal or illegal, well paid or 
poorly paid -- to be on the whole a promising phenomenon.  It seems 
to me, though, that migrant labor would decrease if currently poor 
nations got to develop economically.  Japanese workers used to be 
compelled by necessity to emigrate to the USA & elsewhere, working on 
plantations, cleaning the houses of the rich, etc., but now that 
Japan's rich, they don't have to scramble for miserable low-wage jobs 
abroad, even in the midst of a long-standing deflation.  When the 
Japanese go abroad today, they generally go as investors, managers, 
professionals, students, or tourists.  That's a world of difference.

Yoshie