Citizenship as Capital: The Distinction of Migrant Labor

Abstract

As subordinate workers, migrants and foreigners are an essential labor force for industrialized economies. The author extends Pierre Bourdieu's ideas of capital to suggest that citizenship constitutes a key mechanism of distinction between migrant and nonmigrant workers. From this perspective, citizenship is a strategically produced form of capital, which manifests itself in formal (legal and institutional) as well as informal (practiced and cultural) aspects. Both aspects of citizenship can render migrant labor more vulnerable than nonmigrant labor and often channel migrants into the secondary labor market or the informal economy. The author presents examples from Germany and Canada to illustrate how legal and cultural processes associated with citizenship facilitate economic subordination and exploitation of migrant labor. The value of conceptualizing citizenship as a form of capital lies in integrating processes of inclusion and exclusion into a framework of distinction and in locating the strategic nature of citizenship with the motivation of reproduction. Based on the situation of migrants in the labor market, the author proposes that the logic of distinction and reproduction is an important underlying force in the construction and transformation of the concept of citizenship.