The “integration business”: A radical critique on migration, development and reception services (webinar recording)

In recent years there has been significant discussion of the “migration infrastructure”, notably the networks, institutions and organizations that mediate migration trajectories. There has also been critical analysis of the economies of migration control that have emerged around borders, both territorial and digital ones, and the private interests behind them. Less attention has been paid though to the sector that has emerged around migrant reception.

This April 2024 CERC in Migration and Immigration workshop takes a radical critical approach on to examining these concerns, looking at how provision of local migrant services, whether in border areas, or locations of settlement, give rise to a migrant “integration business”. This business becomes part of local economies, while resting on structures of inequality, displacement, dispossession and unequal capital accumulation, and deepening these processes.

The workshop is organized into two panels.

The first focuses on the local aspects of this migration industry in both border areas and settlement locations, critically analyzing the ways locals, settled migrants and recently arrived asylum seekers, refugees or migrants become entangled in forms of service provision that extract capital and constitute multi-scalar processes of governance.

Part 1 - The Migrant Integration Business

Chair: Usha George, Toronto Metropolitan University
Co-chair: Omar Lujan,Toronto Metropolitan University

Presenters (with links to research abstracts):

• The four logics of capital extraction of the “Integration Business” | Nina Glick Schiller, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
• Migration service as a re-integration business | Ninna Nyberg Sørensen, Danish Institute for International Studies
• Political economy of containment industries: Confinement and (im)mobilized labour in the making of Linz  | Ayse Çaglar, University of Vienna
• Philippine migration and the political economy of “hope” | Pauline Gardiner Barber, Dalhousie University
• Migration industry and city making | Henrik Lebuhn, Humboldt Universität Berlin and Nir Cohen, Bar Ilan University

The second panel expands this critical perspective by engaging with the broader policy and political discourses on migration and development. Contributors to both panels seek to unmask the processes of capital accumulation that underlie the regulation of mobility, territory, social life and political subjectivities.

Part 2 - Unmasking Migration and Development

Chair: Chris Gore, Toronto Metropolitan University
Co-chair: Shiva S. Mohan, Toronto Metropolitan University

Presenters (with links to research abstracts):

• Global inequalities and migration critique | Manuela Boatcă, Freiburg University
• Towards a counter-hegemonic agenda on migration and development | Raul Delgado Wise, Universidad Autonoma de Zacatecas, Mexico
• Labour migration as extractivist capitalism and imperialism | Henry Veltmeyer, Universidad Autonoma de Zacatecas, Critical Development Studies (CDS) network
• Rethinking the migration–development nexus in Africa | Faisal Garba, University of Cape Town