Migration and Social Reproduction: Critical Junctions between Labour, Border and Reproductive Struggles

This timely book examines the unique relationship between migration, labour, and social reproduction in light of current global crises. Leading experts outline how border processes, precarious welfare states, labour markets and gendered and racialised conventions influence the labour and social reproduction of migrant workers. Contributing authors present empirical findings from research conducted in a variety of contexts, exploring the struggles and opportunities of different groups of migrant workers: from female nurses in India to workers impacted by the dormitory regimes and remote platform work in Eastern and Southern Europe. They advocate for a more inclusive definition of reproductive labour, highlighting how states and employers manage mobility at work while foregrounding migrants’ everyday strategies - both collective and individual - of survival, resistance, and care. Concluding with a postface written by eminent luminaries of the field, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, this book demonstrates that social reproduction is critical to a transnational future of emancipation, liberation and social justice. Migration and Social Reproduction is a valuable resource for scholars and students in the field of social science, namely sociology, social policy, politics, migration studies, and race studies. The empirical research presented in this book will also be of great benefit to policy researchers and practitioners.

Table of Contents:
Contents 1 Introduction to Migration and Social Reproduction 1 Gabriella Alberti, Lisa Riedner and Gwyneth Lonergan PART I SPACES OF WORK AND RE/PRODUCTION 2 Digital labour mobility and the crisis of social reproduction: home-based platform workers in Eastern Europe 30 Mira Wallis 3 Home as a service: social reproduction, reindustrialization, and the return of worker dormitories in Hungary 54 Olena Fedyuk and Tibor T. Meszmann 4 Living-at-work regimes: task indeterminacy, compression and detachment of social reproduction for female migrant workers 76 Valeria Piro and Francesca Alice Vianello PART II CONTESTED POLICIES OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION 5 Unreliable infrastructures of transnational social reproduction for precarious young EU migrants under neoliberal regimes of mobility, work, and welfare 99 Anna Simola 6 (In-)dependent work and affected subjectivities: an analysis of migrant self-employment in post-Fordist northern Italy 120 Marika Pierdicca PART III MIGRANT EXPERIENCES OF CARE WORK 7 Reproducing women workers: migrant nurses in India 145 Mithun Som and Rani Rohini Raman 8 Border regimes shaping social reproduction: the childcare practices of migrant working mothers 172 Anne-Iris Romens Postface 191 Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson

About the Author :
Edited by Gabriella Alberti, Professor of International Labour Migration, University of Leeds, UK, Lisa Riedner, Junior Research Group Leader, Institute for European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany and Gwyneth Lonergan, Assistant Professor in Criminology and Sociology, Northumbria University, UK

Review :
‘This powerful book offers a compelling exploration of the intersections between labour migration, border regimes, and social reproduction. Bringing together a rich array of critical literatures, it provides a nuanced dissection of the concept of “crisis” – or more aptly, “polycrisis” – through multiple analytical lenses. One of its most noteworthy contributions lies in unpacking the pivotal role of migrant labour in the contemporary crisis of social reproduction. The book incisively reveals how states and employers actively shape and regulate migrant mobility, extending their influence across every facet of migrant workers' socio-economic lives. A key read for scholars and students of migration studies, this book powerfully demonstrates how today’s border regimes are, at their core, reproductive regimes—restructuring life and labour for millions of migrant workers across the globe.’ ‘This book “offers a prismatic vision of how, in the most recent phases of uneven capitalist development, social reproduction has come to depend even more on migration and migration has posed new challenges for the reproduction not only of labor but also of the whole fabric of relations that make up society. As such, the book makes a vital intervention into the increasingly prominent field of social reproduction theory.”’