Convoluted mobility: on the precarious movements of transnational migrant workers

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the precarity of migrants working in the national labour markets of the Global North is shaped throughout the entire transnational migration process encompassing the planning, the journey as well as the arrival, re-arrival, and engagement across the sending and the receiving societies. Introducing the concept of convoluted mobility, the article analyses how the mediation of transnational labour migration is uneven and filled with frictions of de-tours, stuckness, and obstacles leaving the migrant workers in precarious positions across the sending and receiving societies. Through the empirical examples of Ukrainian migrants working within the agricultural industry in Denmark and brokers in Ukraine, we argue that the precarity of the migrants is established through convoluted mobility characterised by the interlink between the transnational migration infrastructure that moves the migrants and the migrants’ autonomy moving through the migration infrastructure.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarity
• mobility
• labour migration
• transnational migration infrastructure
• temporary work agencies

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful, encouraging and highly constructive comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Approaching the concept of migration, we draw on the strand of transnational migration literature that breaks with the idea of migration as one-way movement informed by push-pull factors that disconnect the sending society from the receiving society (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc 1994; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004). Rather, migration is understood as a transnational social space (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004), sometimes termed circle migration (Baldassar and Merla 2014) often across more destinations than two (Schapendonk et al. 2020).

2 The empirical data and the research project were conducted before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022. However, this invasion has resulted in a change of the Danish asylum law due to the Danish state’s preparation of offering Ukrainian refugees asylum. Thus, Ukrainian migrant workers are now able to apply for asylum for two years that grants them the same rights as EU citizens. In this article, the Ukrainians’ migration and work in Denmark is a paradigmatic example of how the logics and the dynamics are involved when non-EU citizens migrate to Denmark.

3 This understanding of ‘infrastructure’ is very similar to the one put forward by Berlant (2016), which we draw on. As she emphasises: ‘Infrastructure is not identical to system or structure, as we currently see them, because infrastructure is defined by the movement or patterning of social form. It is the living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure’ (Berlant 2016, 393).

4 The length of the interviews varies from one to one and a half hours except one interview. The interviews were recorded and subsequently transcribed. All interviewees, names of the companies, temporary agencies, and brokers are anonymised. The interviewees were informed about the aim and context of the research project, and all the interviewees were recruited by informed consent.

5 The humanitarian dimension (the blue areas) operates according to the logic of human rights encompassing NGOs, but is left out in the Danish case as we observed how they play a very minor role through our analysis of the empirical material.

6 A person overseeing animals at farms. The programme is known as fodermesterordningen.

7 The applicant can be granted a residence and work permit valid for one year at a time during the first two years of the stay. The validity cannot exceed the length of the employment contract. Hereafter, the migrant can apply for a work and residence permit for a maximum of two years. The Danish Immigration Service website: https://www.nyidanmark.dk/en-GB/Applying/Work/Herdsmen%20and%20farm%20managers [March 23, 2022].