Race, Labor Migration, and the Law

This new book series creates a space to examine the increasingly exploitative labor practices that temporary migrant workers around the world are subject to due to their dependence on employment contracts and labor conditions that give employers extraordinary bargaining power. The orientation of the series underscores that understanding migrants’ work experiences around the world tells us something about the permeability, mutability, and durability of racial capitalism, and that an interdisciplinary, practice-oriented lens can reveal its dynamics.

In particular, the series will develop works that foreground race in discussions about the development of labor arrangements, and the ways in which employers continue to rationalize treatment of foreign workers through processes of dehumanization that depend on logics of white supremacy, anti-blackness, and other forms of racialized difference production. By explicitly engaging with theories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, series volumes will help readers make sense of contemporary global migratory processes and migrants’ experiences of unfreedom on the job and in the countries where they are employed. Importantly, the series will explore the ways the law—at the local, national and transnational levels—shapes these conditions of unfreedom given the ways that the law in deeply implicated in structures of global capitalism.

Interdisciplinary in scope and sweep, this series promises to be a destination for timely, cross-cutting scholarship that connects race, labor migration, and the law.