Poor and insecure work is a growing problem, even in the rich world. ‘Precarious work’ as it is sometimes called, is often particularly visible in the case of migrant workers. Certain groups of migrants are vulnerable to extreme exploitation and trafficking and can be the focus of considerable concern about ‘modern slavery’ for example. However, emphasising the problems of migrants risks overlooking important connections with the problems of citizens, creating hierarchies of victimhood rather than uncovering shared interest. It also can mean that we fail to consider how precarity and vulnerability are produced, for migrants and citizens alike. In this presentation I will think with and against migration. I will consider how immigration controls function, and how a combination of nationality and skills puts certain kinds of people in certain kinds of jobs and affects access to the welfare state. Immigration controls also give employers important mechanisms of control over migrants once they are in those jobs. In this way I will think WITH migration in relation to precarity. I will then turn to thinking AGAINST migration and argue that nationality and skills are connected to race and class but at the same time are used to separate global populations and workers. Finally, I will briefly touch on time, and how, if we understand immigration enforcement as a form of temporal controls, we can discover connections with citizens’ experiences of precarity, and also expose the importance of time in how we are governed.
