Migration Management?

This book takes the reader into the lives of migrant workers who perform low-status occupations in Ragusa, Sicily. By drawing parallels between the experiences of live-in care and farm migrant workers, the author reveals remarkable similarities in how they relate to the labour market, to the state, and to the employers, building bridges between two sectors of the economy often studied separately. Through extensive fieldwork and interviews with workers and employers, the author explores how structural processes affect, and at the same time enable these actors to act upon them. First, she situates the mobility of low-status workers within larger economic, social and political processes that have reconfigured local areas assimilating them into the global economy and into specific migration systems. She offers insights into the discourse and practices of migrant workers and employers, revealing the importance of the human dimension of migration, an aspect often neglected in the market-based ‘migration management’ discourse. The author reveals how this human dimension touches upon every aspect of the migration experience from recruitment, to policy implementation, to the mutual construction of the identities of employers and workers, which are inevitably negotiated in the intimacy of the home-workplace.