Inclusion and Exclusion in Europe: Migration, Work and Employment Perspectives

Recent decades have seen the EU grappling with a major struggle between the securitization of its external borders and demand for exploitable and disposable cheap workforce in various sectors. As a result, the EU has multiplied its borders by pushing them both outwards and inwards, and the distinction between migrants’ status as regular and irregular, legal and illegal, citizen and non-citizen, has been continuously portrayed as black and white. This produces and sustains an analytical, political and practical divide that often obscures commonalities in workers’ dispossession and is an obstacle to unified struggles to secure workers’ rights.

This volume moves beyond a perspective of migrants’ exclusion and inclusion as solely a product of migration processes. It contextualizes migration in the larger transformations of the local, national and transnational labour markets and relations that point to the ongoing precarization of working lives.

These processes of inclusion are methodologically approached through exclusion at macro, micro and meso levels. This positions the ethnographically documented experiences of immigrant labourers in the challenges of contemporary labour and migratory regimes, and traces new forms of collective response and contestation emerging in these reconfiguring contexts.