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?"""
I wasn't suggesting for a moment that people shouldn't be free to move around. What I was problematising was calling an act of necessity a free choice, and something that was the basis of a politics or ethics of emancipation. In many cases immigration is just that, an act of economic need, changing ones own circumstances, skills and location in order to fit in with whatever industries and locations capital finds as most conducive to accumulation.
Though the free-market has this idea of "get on your bike" and find work, we have in the West massive restrictions on migrant labour. Its well to say that people can make there place their place, but it doesn't seem too easy on the ground. Especially when the condition of acceptance is based upon accepting the mores and values of the host country. In Bradford England second/third generation Asians are being criminalised for demanding the right to define their own place.
If capitalism sets the conditions of possibility of the geographical place of work, then its a case of having to move, and not being able to exercise their wish maybe to stay in the same place. H&N I think make virtue out of necessity. Their ontology seems to be founded on the premise that it is the action of the governed that is constituitive, that subjectivity is prior to subjectification. Their argument would be probably something like immigration controls are the jurido-political response and limitation on the adventurous desires of the multitude. But I am having great difficulty in reconciling this with a social ontology where capital is the dominant form of social power. The productive activities of the multitude for sure are like the substance of capital's bloodfest - but isn't Capital also the premise of those productive activities. Positively when it provides work/industry, negatively when it doesn't.
So I suppose what I was asking was do people migrate out of economic need (Yoshie gave some evidence for this), and if so how easy is it to talk about this as free activity based on choice? It might be only good "for us" as it were, fuelling our Western cultural imaginations, and pretty naff allround for the migrants involved, placing them in a position of antagonism with the existing population (I mean its not all integration and hybridisation). Or it just an inevitable result that we should see positively because it represents change and new experience. Or is it too much of a general question to answer in these terms?
cheers
Erik