The Business of Migration

There is a reason migration is an eternal business model, people want jobs and businesses want cheap hands and it is a perfect marriage of demand and supply. Global labor chains are fragmented based on skill and race (Iskander 2021). There is a migration industry operating in the billions of dollars facilitating this transition between multiple migration corridors. There is an implicit tendency to look at migration through remittances or the security lens, but it is this meta business paradigm which sustains migration through inherent embedded precarity, vulnerability which creates disposability of limbs and life, just look at construction sites in the gulf and southeast Asia which are memorials and graveyards of labor. The remittances sent home bolster the current trade balance of many countries and stabilize the currency. This is soaked in blood, toil, and humiliation of the labor migrant, seen across a phone screen where the call is taken from the back of the bus 67 on a late Sunday evening from Little India to the ulu dorms in Tuas.