International Migration and Economic Informalization

This symposium explores the relationship between international migration and economic informalization, with a particular focus on labor–capital power dynamics. In recent years, both political attention and policy actions in the countries of the Global North have increasingly concentrated on the ‘informal economy’ at international and national levels. Despite this heightened attention and intervention, economic informalization continues to expand, alongside the growth of atypical and precarious working conditions in the labor market. Common understandings and discussions of these phenomena often attribute them to fraudulent activities of (primarily self-employed) individuals and organizations, and to international migration. However, the contributions to this symposium challenge such simplistic interpretations by illustrating various ways in which contemporary capitalism is incorporating economic informalization, and how international migration is utilized as a component of this dynamic.

The purpose of this introduction is to present the historical context for the processes and relationships that will be discussed in the contributions to this symposium, as well as the way in which social scientists have historically conceptualized and interpreted the socioeconomic and political phenomena of the informal economy and international migration.

Historical Background

Migration studies as a scientific field have long been, and still are, characterized substantially by methodological nationalism (Anderson, 2019; Dahinden, 2016; Wimmer and Schiller, 2002) as well as a general conceptual simplification of the studied phenomenon (Anderson, 2017; Castles, 2004, 2017). The reason for this lies in the fact that migration studies were initially institutionalized under the strong influence of national migration policies rather than scientific criteria and priorities. This has resulted in migration studies from the outset based on a nation-state- and ethnicity-centered epistemology and methodology (Dahinden, 2016), which has prevented this research field not only from generating scientifically reliable and relevant knowledge about the studied phenomenon but also from creating politically and policy-usable knowledge about migration and migrants. Simplified research has thus led to equally simplified, narrow, and contradictory migration policies (Castles, 2004, 2017). Migration policies have always failed due to the inability, or lack of will, or both, to address the real causes of migration, whether it is the most important historical cause—European colonialism (characterized by domination, reckless exploitation, and pure plunder)—or the contemporary neoliberal economic order, characterized by the plunder of national natural resources, and the generation of hitherto unseen social and economic inequalities, within and between states (Anderson, 2017; Castles, 2017; Anderson et al., 2023; Andersson 2016). The North–South divide generates migration, and once started, migration processes become self-sustained, following their own logic, and creating a sort of structural dependence in the emigration and immigration countries (Castles, 2004: 222). Emigration countries often embrace labor export strategies to manage unemployment and secure an influx of remittances, which stimulate development (Castles, 2004: 222).

Immigration countries also become dependent on immigration over time. This is not only due to the emergence of a whole new industry, the so-called migration industry, which is partly in charge of taking over parts of migration management by the state, and partly to ensure mediation between employers and the needed (immigrant) workforce through the creation of so-called migration logistics (Andersson, 2014, Krifors, 2020). An even more important function that immigrant labor has fulfilled since World War II was the role of the industrial reserve army. According to Castles and Kosack (1972), this industrial reserve army of immigrant workers was the most important stabilizer of the capitalist economy at that time. Their presence prevented wage increases, which provided possibilities for undisturbed capital accumulation and, consequently, growth. At the same time, strong capital accumulation resulted in increased productivity, which, in turn, led to higher wages. These wages made the national income increase more than would have been the case without migration, while at the same time, they remained low relative to profits. In summary, labor immigration during the 1950s and 1960s not only helped prolong the period of the ‘golden years of welfare capitalism’ for at least a decade but also stabilized capitalism as a political and economic system.

Mass migration still seems to be a necessary precondition for capital accumulation (Bauder, 2006; De Genova, 2018a; Hardt and Negri, 2000). As such, mass migrations become the subject of surveillance and control by nation-states and capital, through complex processes that Mezzadra and Neilson (2021) call Geopolitics of labor. It is important to emphasize here that it is not immigration and immigrants as such who contribute to capital accumulation; what contributes to capital accumulation is their deprived position in the labor market. Their exclusion and precarious situation make them attractive to the capitalist economy. By being systematically pushed into the secondary segments of the labor market, migrants help stabilize the labor market for non-migrants (Bauder, 2006; De Genova, 2023). At the same time, and in the long run, they help the neoliberal reconstruction of the labor market as such, which means worsened working conditions and work protection for all (Slavnic, 2010). Increasingly restrictive migration policies push newly arrived refugees and immigrants into the position of living under the permanent threat of being deported, and their deportability exposes them even more to reckless exploitation (De Genova, 2013, 2018b; Sager and Öberg, 2017) and precarious lives (Lewis et al., 2015; Mezzadra, 2022; Öberg, 2015).

These processes are followed by growing political hypocrisy, involving formal democratic social institutions in Western societies as well as democratically elected politicians being involved in the double game of meeting employers’ demands for cheap and exploitable labor on the one hand, and trying not to offend populist media and right-wing groups but also the country’s official labor unions on the other hand (Castles, 2004). Such policy goals cannot be achieved without informal economic and political strategies from above. This brings us to the second research field that is the focus of this symposium, namely the informal economy.

Similar to migration studies, the traditional understanding of the informal economy in Western societies, as a phenomenon related to the survival strategies of marginal social groups, has become increasingly problematic. This conceptual simplification is ostensibly linked to the history of the concept of the informal economy, which has long been associated exclusively with analyses of social processes in so-called Third World countries. During the 1980s, the concept of the informal economy was also brought into play to explain social and economic processes in so-called First World countries. It came to be associated with increased immigration from the Third World rather than with the structural changes taking place within these economies (Sassen, 1998: 194). One assumption that arose within conventional political discourses was that informalization, as a process, could be controlled only if immigration itself could be brought under strict control.

This interpretation has been criticized by a substantial amount of the academic literature (Jones et al., 2006; Kloosterman et al., 1999; Portes et al., 1989; Reynieri, 1998; Sassen, 1997, 1998; Williams and Windebank, 1998; Wilpert, 1998). From differing standpoints, these authors argued that increased informalization in developed countries has little to do with the social and economic impacts of increased immigration per se but is primarily related to the structural properties of developed economies themselves. More concretely, informalization in Western economies can be viewed as a general consequence of the deep economic, political, and social changes that characterize such societies during the so-called post-Fordist transformation (Slavnic, 2010). Informalization is a result of a structural conflict between new neoliberal economic trends and old regulatory frameworks.

In this context, two notions of informalization have been proposed: informalization from above and informalization from below (Slavnic, 2010, 2016). Informalization from above includes corporate strategies, such as downsizing, outsourcing, and subcontracting, as well as the adjustment strategies of the welfare state, both of which increasingly include informalization in economies and labor markets. Informalization from below is constituted by a range of marginalized actors (low-income earners, small-business owners active in work-intensive and highly competitive markets, immigrants, and irregular migrants) who share a lack of legal status and protection, and a dependence on informal engagements as the only available way of coping with their disadvantaged situations.

Today, the informal economy has become one of the central features of capitalism itself. According to Keith Hart (2015), the informal economy seems to have taken over the world while cloaking itself in the rhetoric of free markets. Hart (2015) also pointed out that this phenomenon can no longer be treated as an exclusively economic problem, but is a primarily political failure, both at the national and international levels.

However, despite all this criticism, as well as research findings, the simplified understanding of the informal economy described above is still present not only in political and media circles but also in academic discourses. Furthermore, it is an important part of an ideology that sustains a racialized and gendered global order.

In summary, we can draw the following conclusions. The research fields of the informal economy and migration studies are characterized by similar methodological and conceptual shortcomings. Mainstream migration studies have focused on the role of the nation-state, whose task is to build and defend national sovereignty, a homogeneous national community based on solidarity, and a territorially bounded state (Wimmer and Schiller, 2002). Similarly, mainstream informal economy research normally takes for granted the formal nature of national economies as a whole, as well as the economic activities of the state and big business, while applying an understanding of the informal economy as concerning only marginal social groups and individuals, small businesses, and immigrants’ small businesses in particular.

To step outside national frameworks and categorization, Dahinden (2016) proposes ‘de-migrantizing’ migration research while at the same time ‘migrantizing’ general social scientific research, while Anderson (2019) proposes shifting the focus to methodological de-nationalism. Both attempts suggest embedding migration studies (and in our case, even informal economy studies) within a broader context of structural (geo) political and economic changes at the global level, and from that perspective, to examine not only international migrations and the informal economy but also the roles of nation-states, and other national, supranational, and international political and economic actors in these processes.

This symposium aims to address a gap in the knowledge production on how migration regimes create various forms of exclusion, highlighting that these exclusions are more a precondition for contemporary capitalism than random situations being capitalized upon. Our theoretical contribution is to conceptualize, from a de-nationalized perspective, the dynamics of the informal economy and the spectrum of exploitation faced by international migrants.

The five articles in this issue explore the interaction between informality and formality at the intersection of migration laws, policies, and practices, and the broader context of capital accumulation in the age of neoliberal globalization.

In their contribution to this symposium, Raul Delgado Wise, Francisco Caballero Anguiano, and Selene Gaspar Olvera provide a comprehensive analysis of how migration, informality, and economic and migration policies intersect to shape labor dynamics within the context of Mexico–US asymmetric and subordinated regional integration under neoliberalism. Innovatively, the authors connect the concepts of informality and a reserve army of labor, showing how informalization from above ensures a stable supply of cheap and highly exploitable informal labor for US companies on both sides of the Mexican–US border.

In Mexico, most of the domestic labor force is employed in the labor-intensive enclave economy, regionally known as the Maquila industry. This industry operates under a tax-exempt regime, assembling export products from imported parts. Crucially, the only element remaining in Mexico is the price of labor, which, due to its informality, barely covers the workers’ living costs. At the same time, none of the additional value or profit stays in the country. Two aspects link this process to informalization from above. First, it is formally treated as foreign investment leading to an export-led model of industrialization. In reality, it is a regressive model based exclusively on the direct export of labor, without leaving the country and with minimal contribution to Mexico’s economic development. Second, this economic model is made possible by comprehensively circumventing, avoiding, and ignoring existing regulatory frameworks, often with the support of local and national Mexican authorities.

A reserve army of cheap, disciplined, and flexible labor is also needed in the United States. Delgado Wise and his colleagues show that from 2000 to 2021, 15.5 million new jobs were needed in the United States, with more than 60% (9.4 million jobs) being filled by imported labor. However, during the same period, only about 600,000 temporary and 2.9 million permanent work permits were issued. This means nearly 6 million foreigners worked in the United States without work permits, still performing necessary jobs. This is a typical example of informal strategies from above, where through the process of criminalization and what De Genova (2002, 2018b) calls deportability, the price of labor is reduced, and workers’ willingness to accept any kind of working conditions increases.

The precariousness of Mexican workers in the United States is highlighted by the fact that for every dollar of tax paid, these workers receive only 0.4 dollars in social benefits, compared to domestic workers who receive 1.4 dollars in benefits for every dollar of tax paid. Despite this, they send remittances home to their families, who often work in the Maquila industry and cannot survive without this financial support. As the authors show, remittances, usually considered a North–South subsidy, essentially represent a South–North value transfer, enabling the reproduction of a reserve army of labor that will be ready to migrate in the next generation to survive.

Finally, the authors point to the increased import of highly educated and highly qualified Mexican workers through various talent attraction programs. However, these migrants are paid less in the United States than their native colleagues and are overrepresented in the informal segment of the labor market. For instance, in the automotive industry, the labor-intensive part is located in Mexico, employing domestic informal workers, while the knowledge-intensive part is in the United States, employing mainly Mexican engineers under worse working conditions and lower wages than their native counterparts.

In his contribution, Horonori Onuki presents a similar case of asymmetric economic exchange supported by migration and informality. The article begins with a case of karoshi (death by overwork) involving a Filipino trainee, highlighting excessive overtime and labor rights abuses within the Japanese Technical Intern Training Program (TITP). Established in 1990 to address labor shortages by providing training to foreign nationals, primarily from developing countries in Asia, the TITP initially aimed to transfer Japanese skills and technology to developing countries through on-the-job training. Trainees were intended to return home after acquiring skills. Initially, the training lasted 1 year but was extended to 3 years in 1997 and 5 years in 2017. By 2020, the number of trainees had grown significantly, reaching over 400,000, primarily from Asian countries like Vietnam, China, and the Philippines.

The author shows how the program gradually transformed into an informal strategy to avoid national regulations that prohibited the importation of low-wage labor, meeting the needs of the Japanese economy, especially small and medium-sized companies. At the same time, informal strategies diluted and reduced the program’s obligations toward trainees in terms of admission, training, and working conditions. These informal strategies extend to sending countries, where intermediaries charge exorbitant fees and deposits, exploiting trainees and leading to debt bondage. Many trainees have unmet expectations regarding their potential earnings and the nature of their training in Japan. For instance, promises of high salaries rarely materialize, and some end up in jobs completely unrelated to their fields of expertise, such as radioactive cleanup work. These practices continued even after several karoshi cases were discovered, including one mentioned above, where death was caused by 122.5 hours of overtime per month, far exceeding the 80 hours of overtime that is the official criterion for determining karoshi in Japan.

Xolani Tsabalala, in the third contribution to this symposium, uses the concepts of regional imperialism and bordering to explain the historical and contemporary causes of South Africa’s current migration policy. South Africa’s migrant labor system emerged historically alongside the process of industrialization driven by mining in the late 19th century. The author highlights how colonial and apartheid-era policies institutionalized the recruitment of cheap migrant labor from neighboring countries, primarily to serve the needs of the mining sector. Simultaneously, the state’s authority tried to legally regulate migration. However, these efforts often contradicted the frequent practice of granting special exemptions to certain groups of immigrants, enabling them to circumvent otherwise restrictive immigration regulations.

The author shows how these exceptions to migration regulations played a pivotal role in maintaining South Africa’s industrial core and regional labor periphery, reinforcing patterns of dependency, inequality, and exploitation. After apartheid, priorities shifted to national cohesion, economic development, and integration into the global economy. To achieve these political goals, it was important for the authorities to create a coherent and regulated migration policy. However, after strong resistance from businesses, the authorities continued with the policy of exemptions. The ambivalent and ineffective regulation and exemptions promoted informal cross-border mobility and employment. Estimates suggest millions of undocumented migrants reside and work in South Africa’s formal and informal sectors. In summary, the South African economy’s reliance on migrant labor and its ambivalent migration governance have historically and currently played a critical role in sustaining its competitive edge, with exemptions serving to maintain a veneer of regulatory efficiency while facilitating economic exploitation.

Sam Scott and Johan Fredrik Rye’s contribution explores the concept of ‘mobility–immobility dynamics’ in European horticulture, highlighting how capital uses mobile and immobile forms of labor to control workers. Rooted in labor process theory (LPT), which examines how capital optimizes labor to accumulate surplus value, the study argues that traditional hierarchical management structures have evolved. Today, LPT is applied to a variety of work contexts, including the digital gig economy and the migrant workforce.

The authors argue that understanding the contemporary capitalist labor process requires recognizing employment as multi-scalar. This includes the mobility of the labor force through geographic space and its simultaneous immobility within and outside national borders. Drawing on case studies in Norway and England, the article reveals high levels of transnational mobility among precarious workers, providing an ‘in-situ spatial fix’ to employers who cannot relocate in search of cheaper labor. Employers in developed countries, dependent on low-income labor often supported by the state, rely on migrant workers in labor-intensive sectors such as horticulture. They capitalize on seasonal migration patterns, ensuring a continuous flow of workers while conditioning their return each season on performance. This mobility of labor, or ‘fixed across space’, allows employers to flexibly manage workforce needs in different economic contexts.

At the same time, employers use strategies to fix migrant workers in place, such as on-site housing and limited employment mobility between farms. This immobility, or ‘fix in place’, sometimes imposed by informal agreements or restrictive living conditions, ensures a stable workforce despite temporary work arrangements. Bonded housing not only disciplines work but also integrates workers into a work-oriented routine. This setting limits workers’ social integration and personal mobility, reinforcing their dependence on employer-controlled living arrangements.

The dynamics of mobility and immobility serve as a mechanism for capital to extract surplus value from migrant labor. The authors emphasize how states and employers cooperate in exploiting regulatory gray zones, controlling work without necessarily violating legal boundaries. This dynamic continues in different sectors and global contexts, affecting the rights and working conditions of migrant workers.

In the symposium’s final contribution, Sarah Philipson Isaac employs the concept of ‘temporal dispossession’ to analyze how control over time—both in terms of legal processes and working conditions—shapes the lives of asylum seekers. The study draws on four ethnographic cases detailing the struggles of asylum seekers to survive within Sweden’s labor market and bureaucratic systems. Two of them did not receive temporary work permits while waiting for a decision on their asylum applications because they could not prove their identity. This put them in a hopeless situation, as without work, there is almost no chance of extending the residence permit, and working without a permit is illegal and leads directly to deportation. This hopeless situation means that the time spent waiting for a decision is dispossessed or stolen time. In this context, one participant decided to accept a paid (informal) job to ensure his livelihood, seeing this as a form of resistance or an effort to steal back part of his stolen time. Another participant accepted an unpaid internship instead, viewing it as an investment in his future, hoping it would increase his chances of extending his residence permit.

In the remaining two cases, the asylum seekers had temporary work permits, but the jobs they could get were highly exploitative positions in the gig economy. These jobs, paid per gig, are typically spatially scattered and without a set schedule, so travel and waiting time are not compensated. Thus, the experiences of asylum seekers without work permits and those with temporary permits are not markedly different. Notably, even after obtaining permanent residence and work permits, these individuals often remain in labor-intensive, low-income sectors, frequently running small service enterprises. To sustain their livelihoods, they may resort to informal employment practices, perpetuating the cycle of super-exploitation they once endured.

By employing the framework of temporal dispossession, Philipson Isaac describes how migration policies contribute to informalization in both the formal and informal economies and their connection to racial capitalism. The author highlights the dual nature of informalization, originating both from above and from below, and shows how the state frames and instigates informalization from below. Understanding this state-driven informalization reveals how temporal dispossession and political subjectivation are essential to capital expansion. This interplay doesn’t operate independently of global capitalism’s imperialist structures but highlights the role of the state and border industries in legitimizing racialized legal statuses.

The author concludes by emphasizing the need for further exploration of the state’s role in these processes, beyond just human rights or broader citizenship inclusion. While expanding social citizenship can counter some forms of exploitation, it doesn’t challenge capitalism’s global capital accumulation quest.

Structural Roots of ‘Multiple Disabilities’ and ‘Root Causes’

Now it is time to relate the results of the contributions to this symposium to the earlier discussion in this introduction about the relationship between the informal economy and international migration. We shall do this by first discussing the concept of ‘multiple disabilities’, often linked to economic informalization, and ‘root causes’, which are used to understand and explain the reasons for current waves of migration from the South to the North. Finally, we will conclude with the way in which we tried to overcome methodological nationalism.

Saskia Sassen (1997) noted that economic informalization in the countries of the Global South in the post-colonial period was often explained by the so-called ‘multiple disabilities’ of those countries: the inability to achieve full modernization, to stop migration to cities, to implement universal education, and to create sufficient formal jobs. These disabilities are understood in an essentialist way, as part of the nature and culture of these peoples and their political systems, which have always existed in these societies and are difficult to change.

Similarly, the dominant discourses on the ‘root causes’ of international migration include economic and political instability in sending countries, lack of democracy and democratic institutions, widespread corruption and violence, and a lack of respect for human rights, workers’ rights, and freedom of the press (see, e.g. EU Parliament, 2018; US National Security Council, 2021). Here too, the ‘causes’ are presented as part of the natural order of things in those countries, which are difficult to address.

However, as this symposium has shown, none of that seems to be true. All contributions have shown that informal economic strategies have, during the past three decades, become the main instrument in the neoliberal transformation of welfare societies and the basic organizational principle of neoliberal globalization. It is no longer just an economic phenomenon but increasingly a political one (Breman and van der Linden, 2014; Hart, 2015). We have seen how state institutions and corporate capital cooperate to create informal strategies that ensure stable capital accumulation with desired profit levels. This is achieved through the production and reproduction of a reserve army of (migrant) labor in the Mexican–US regional context, through importing a workforce willing to work to death in Japan’s TITP program, through the reproduction of imperialist relations at the regional level in South Africa, through the provision of a flexible, simultaneously mobile and immobile labor force in the Norwegian and English agricultural industries, and through control, dispossession, and stealing people’s time in the Swedish asylum policy.

The ideology of ‘root causes’ and ‘multiple disabilities’ neither explains nor has anything to do with any of the cases mentioned above. In essence, these ideologies only serve to legitimize the aforementioned informal strategies and shift the blame to the victims of these strategies.

The real structural roots of both South–North migration and the informalization of both the South and the North lie in asymmetric power relations between the North and the South. These relations deepen economic differences between the North and the South and generate South–North migration (Anderson, 2017; Castles, 2017). Despite increasingly restrictive migration policies in the Global North, migration has not decreased, nor has the number of ‘illegal’ migrants being effectively sent back to their countries of origin increased. The reason, according to Haas et al. (2019), is that the single most important factor initiating and directing migration waves from emigration countries is the labor demand in destination countries. This confirms the relevance of Piore’s (1979) theory on the dual labor market. It is not immigrants’ greedy intentions to abuse ‘our’ hospitality and welfare society that motivate their arrival, but the greedy need of ‘our’ capitalists for a cheap and disenfranchised workforce that brings them here.

We also aimed to systematically overcome the shortcomings of methodological nationalism in the contributions to this symposium. However, it became evident that the concept of methodological nationalism, as originally presented by Wimmer and Schiller (2002), which primarily criticizes the methodology that characterizes the social sciences in the West, or as it is known today, the countries of the Global North, is problematic. Their approach defines the problem negatively, indicating what researchers should not do methodologically, instead of suggesting what should be done.

The issue with methodological nationalism is not merely its focus on the nation-state, national sovereignty, and national solidarity. It also involves the Global North’s creation, legitimization, and reproduction of an image of itself and the causes of its economic development, political stability, and citizens’ well-being as being generated internally and endogenously. Simultaneously, methodological nationalism produces and reproduces an image of the Global South, characterized by economic underdevelopment and a lack of democracy resulting in political instability, poverty, and social conflict. This image is also perceived in the Global North as endogenous, stemming from the inherent inability of these countries to modernize their economies, democratize their political systems, and ensure security and welfare for their citizens.

The task of social scientists who want to overcome methodological nationalism is, therefore, to question and criticize these simplistic notions of ‘self’ and ‘others’. In other words, we must actively seek, to paraphrase Comaroff and Comaroff (2012), how much of the South is in the North, how much of the North is in the South, and how much of both will be in the future. The authors of this symposium attempted to contribute in that direction. It is up to the readers to assess how successful we were in that task.