Guerrilla History - Migration as Economic Imperialism w/ Immanuel Ness

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

In this fascinating episode of Guerrilla History, we are joined by fan-favorite Manny Ness to discuss one of his new books, Migration as Economic Imperialism: How International Labour Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries.  This work directly takes on and dismantles the notion that labor migration is beneficial for the countries of the Global South who send their workers abroad.  This is a common refrain in mainstream, neoliberal developmentalist discourse, and this book and the conversation we are having around it are a vital corrective.  We are sure you are going to get a lot out of this one! Immanuel Ness  is  Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York and Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg.  He is the author or editor of numerous works including Organizing Insurgency: Workers' Movements in the Global South, Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class, and The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism.  You can follow Manny on twitter @ImmanuelNess. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory

You remember Dinn-Vin-Bin-Bin-Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history, that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons

of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckinackie, unfortunately only joined by one of my usual co-hosts. We are joined by Brett O'Shea, who is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing today? Doing very good. It's actually been quite a while since we've been able to do an episode over the holiday break, so I'm happy to be back and there's nobody better than Manny Ness to come back too. Yeah, that's right. And I know the listeners will have had a constant stream of episodes coming out, but Brett just let it slip that those were all recorded before our little holiday break. But, you know, we are back and recording again. But as I said, listeners, you haven't had any

interruption. We're unfortunately not joined by our other usual co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, as he had some international paperwork that he had to do, because these are the sorts of things that Adnan has to deal with, which fortunately, I don't have to, and I don't think Brett does either. Before I get into the topic at hand in our excellent returning guests, which Brett also alluded to, I would just want to remind the listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by contributing as little as $3 a month, I think, is our minimum tier at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, with guerrilla being spelled,

G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow us on Twitter to keep up with everything that the show is putting out and each of the hosts are putting out individually at Gorilla underscore Pod. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Score pod. But we are joined by a returning guest and a fan favorite in many ways. We are joined by Professor Emanuel Ness, Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the University of Johannesburg. Hello, Manny.

It's a long time that we've not been able to talk to you, but it's really great to have you back on the show. Well, it's a pleasure to be on your show, as usual, Henry, Brett. So we have a terrific book, one of your new books that has recently come out. It's titled Migration as Economic Imperialism, how international labor mobility undermines economic development in poor countries. And it was an absolutely terrific read. I really enjoyed it.

I ripped through it. It's not a super long book, but it's very useful. And it's one of those books that I know I've mentioned it in some of our previous conversations that I particularly appreciate because they directly attack sort of narratives that are in widespread mainstream society. So I know that in one of the episodes that I brought this sort of thing up was our socialist states and the environment episode where there's this narrative in mainstream society that social estates are inherently bad for the environment.

and socialism is inherently bad for the environment. And the entire purpose of that book was to attack that narrative head on and show that it was absolutely false. Your book, which we're going to be talking about today, Manny, does something in a very similar vein, which is that when many people are talking about migration and labor migration, particularly labor mobility, they think of it as a net positive for both countries, both descending, and receiving countries in many cases in terms of the receiving country receives skilled workers who can participate within the economic system within that country, and the sending country benefits via things like remittances, as well as other things that you point out

in the book, these ideas of good governance and, you know, cultural exchange and things like this. That's kind of the narrative that many in mainstream society have. But as I said, you attack this narrative head on and in a multitude of ways throughout this book. So I'm just going to open this opening question to you in order to explain how you came to this project. Why did you decide to take on this kind of narrative of migration, labor mobility as a net positive? And that this is something that benefits countries around the world. So how did you come to this project and why did you decide to attack it in the way that you did? Well, really, when one examines labor and trade unions and so forth and so on, we're really referring to migrant labor

in most instances. I mean, for the first one, workers have to travel to a specific location. And historically, throughout history, we can go back to the beginnings of capitalism. workers moved from one location to another. So, for instance, the Irish move to Britain as a consequence of the colonization of Ireland by Britain as well as the impoverishment of the Irish people. Today, we find the same kinds of dynamics taking place, and they are very, very serious in terms of the way

migrants are treated. So what made me take this on is that, first of all, migration is labor. One can look at just China today, and it's incredible advancement that has taken place. Much of the development has taken place through migration. We have a trade union movement that is the largest in the world combined, that does have democracy of this. say that. And most of them are migrants, migrant workers from rural areas. So, you know, you have internal migration and you also have international migration. This book focuses primarily on international, but also on internal migration, and I think that's as well very important. So I've focused on migration primarily because of this issue that you cannot discuss or examine the trade union

movement without migration. People get fired and they have to move to another location. And if people are hired, you know, somewhere else for survival, they may move or by demands that are made by other, you know, corporations and so forth. Yeah, there's a lot to go into and we'll get into that. That's a good overview of the project. I guess the good place to start is with the sort of overarching object of critique, which is this, you know, sort of Henry was alluding to this mainstream view of migration as beneficial for all parties involved. You talk about it in terms of the neoliberal era starting roughly in the 90s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the sort of, you know, full steam ahead, neoliberal globalization approach to everything. So how has migrant

labor been seen? What's the mainstream view through the neoliberal lens for the past 30 or 40 years? And fundamentally, and we can get into the details later, but fundamentally, how is this perspective ultimately incorrect? Thanks, Brett. Well, neoliberalism has that a stream influence on migration over the last 30 years, as you pointed out, 30, 40 years. In fact, it's a fundamental aspect of migration, neoliberalism, because it involves the movement of populations from one location to another, in order to survive, or in order to serve people who are far richer and far more prosperous than others. So the other point at the center of the argument that you're making, and I make in the book, is that if we think about the idea of neoliberalism, we're really thinking about

individual responsibility and the withdrawal of all kinds of state. development. Now, I don't favor social democracy in any way, but, you know, if you have a socialist state, people don't have to move. People argued, well, you know, in the Soviet Union and China, people didn't move. Well, they didn't need to move because they lived in that community. So under neoliberalism, it speeds up the way in which people move, especially internationally, because people are forced to relocate to other areas of the world. So I'll give you one example with respect to Mexican workers, for instance, right after NAFTA was passed in the early 1990s,

the North American Free Trade Agreement, you had, I would say something like several million to eight million Mexicans coming to the United States. And they came to the United States primarily because they could no longer survive in Mexico because U.S. corporations primarily agricultural, agribusiness and so forth, took over the entire marketing of food. So they sold very cheap crops and regions where you had peasant workers who were basically surviving on the

sale of their goods. That no longer took place. So you had millions of Mexican migrants coming to the New York, United States, New York City, elsewhere, who were forced to by the demands of the market. So they were forced to take care of themselves. Capital had no concern, finance capital had no concern with the human dimension of migration. They just cared about profitability. So if they could sell products in Mexico at a fairly high wage and displaced Mexican farmers, well, that was good for them, but they did not care about the consequences of that migration. Now, of course, I believe that all Mexicans have a right and should live in the United States. Migrants undocumented as well as others, and they make a major contribution to the U.S. economy

and advance the U.S. economy and contribute to surplus value on a tremendous level and so forth because they work at extremely low wages. So that's another factor with respect to neoliberalism. And at its core, around the 1990s, we started hearing from a number of organizations around the United States especially that people should take care of themselves,

that we're living in the society in which we are only responsible for ourselves, not even our families to some degree. So this was, you know, a lot of libertarians believe that as well. So this contributed to migration. It is, in fact, the highest level of, capitalism that one could actually find. So, you know, referring back to Lenin, if you have absolutely no restraints whatsoever on capital and workers are mobile, then they can be exploited at the highest rate possible. And so this book is actually in keeping with a Leninist argument. And

of course, I pay tribute to imperialism the highest stage of capital. capitalism, because, in fact, we are still in that highest stage of capitalism, and migration is a central feature of it. So I think that this is part of the project of neoliberalism, that is a Western project, one that comes out of Western Europe, the Five Eyes, United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, and so forth and so on, in which they enrich themselves as a consequence of migration. And many of the migrants are very poor, and most of them by far. And the consumers of those migrants are actually well-to-do, and some of them are actually middle-class workers, I hate to say. Yeah, one of the things that I really – there's a lot of things that I like about this book, but one of the things that's really interesting is that there's such a

a focus on underdevelopment and the role of so-called underdevelopment into the structure of labor mobility and this economic imperialism and how these things are related. So what I mean by this is that in the discussion that you provide in this book, what you show is that the narrative of underdevelopment and in many cases actual underdevelopment of these countries is a justification for allowing this migration to take place. Oh, look, if we have workers from these underdeveloped countries come to more high wage countries, they're going to be able to send remittances back to their home countries, which are going to aid in development.

This is one of the narratives that's out there and one of the ones that you really look at pretty in depth in this book. But on the flip side of things, and in many ways, you also show that the impetus for maintaining underdevelopment of the countries is certainly there on the part of the high wage countries to maintain the underdevelopment of the countries, the sending countries. And also, in addition to this, you also see that the mere fact of the labor mobility and the export of many of these workers, many of whom are high skilled, I know the example that you use in many parts of the book is of nurses from the Philippines coming to the United States to be nurses, it contributes to

essentially a brain drain that then perpetuates this ongoing underdevelopment of various countries that you look at throughout the book. So this underdevelopment in both rhetoric and in actuality not only is used as a way for justifying the sorts of labor flows that we're seeing, but also provide cover for the ongoing suppression of, you know, keeping down of this country to maintain the underdevelopment and then perpetuate this, these labor flows that contribute to, as you said, exploitation of surplus value from the workers that are then being sent over to the high wage country. So if you can talk a little bit about this, the role of underdevelopment within this work that you look at as well as within the narratives of

the necessity for labor migration for individuals from these low-wage countries. Yes, absolutely, Henry. And that point was very well taken. The center of this book is that migration is important because it is the main source of revenue for countries that are poor. And those countries comprise most of the world, about 80%. center of the world. And that as a consequence of this, those countries through remittances will benefit by having migrants who are working overseas, low-wage migrants, I might add, work in

very poor conditions, face extreme forms of violence, perhaps death, undernourishment, lack of housing and so forth and so on, and are subject to what I always call, arrest, detention, and deportation, including migrants who are under contract with bilateral state agreements. So with respect to under development, you know, I'm just reminded of all the countries. For instance, Nepal would be one of the cases of the book. In Nepal, you have the majority of the workers. the vast majority of the workers going to work in low-wage jobs overseas. That's also true for places like Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, etc.

So, for instance, in the case of Indonesia, you might find a lot of Indonesians in the Gulf states of the Arab Gulf working and also being subjected to very harsh conditions. But those same Indonesians will also go to other locations such as Malaysia and so forth and so on. And I want to make the central point that Malaysia is in the global south, yet it also is a bit better off than its neighbors in the global south. And so as a consequence, they are able to establish a recruitment base, what is referred to as a migration infrastructure, that necessitates migration. So just to give you an example of this, you have the country of Malaysia, because many people say,

well, is in migration also south-south? It's not just north-the-south-north. And so I can say two parts of that. First of all, the north-south part of it is that one of extreme exploitation. And the south-south part of it is equally such, maybe a little bit less. But in the context of Malaysia, the country I just mentioned,

it is essentially formed out of neoliberal capitalism to get to Brett's point. It is a country in which most of the manufacturing workers are foreigners who are under contract to work for three years and must return home after those three years. And in order to receive that contract, they are forced to engage in brokerage agreements on both sides, both in their own country. Let's say it's Indonesia, Nepal, any place, Burma, whatever. And they are also forced to pay people in their destination states. They have to pay their way to the country. They have to pay for every aspect of their living, including high.

housing. And so as a consequence of this, they have very little left over, speaking under development, to actually send home. And if the major international agencies and the United States, as well as its partners in the West, think that this is the new form of economic development, a project that they believed they were the leaders of since the end of the Second World War, and have been abject failures at economic development, and we can just see the conditions in the global South, Africa, South Asia, Latin America, et cetera, that this being the latest iteration of foreign aid, a foreign direct investment, and so forth and so on, that is the exact opposite. So in the case of Malaysia, you have workers that are forced to go into these countries,

They're recruited by these countries. They're forced by economic reasons. And they're recruited by these countries primarily to serve the West. And just very briefly and very simply state how that takes place. And I think we all know about it. That, you know, one will say, South-South migration is something that benefits both countries. Well, in fact, those corporations that invest in Malaysia happen to be Western corporations. They happen to be, you know, American companies, they happen to be European companies that are investing in the country, whether they're directly investing or they're investing through finance capital indirectly.

They are the recipients of the wealth that is accrued in Malaysia. And there is extreme forms of exploitation of those workers, which I will not get into at this point. But so I'd like to say that the underdevelopment is reproduced. As Andre Gendroffant said, we have the underdevelopment of development. So in this context, it's absolutely true. And so if you are living in Indonesia, the fourth largest country in the world with respect to population, it is a very poor country. The average income is 2,000 to 2,500.

per year in U.S. dollars. Of course, that is highly inequitably distributed between people who are more wealthy and people who are poor. So many people are living in poverty. Many are living in abject poverty. And so you have a whole range of workers from five different fields. Those fields start with agriculture. They go on to construction, then manufacturing, home care, and now the platform

big economy. So they're working in all those sectors in countries such as Malaysia as well as, you know, the West as well. So I can go through each of them if you wish. But now with respect to North and North migration, you know, people, this is the migration industry, the migration research industry, which is a cottage industry that is growing rapidly. they like to say that, in fact, migration is a net positive, as was pointed out by both of you, but in fact, migration is a form of development. This book is really about development, and capitalist-led development and a critique of it, that migration is an abject failure.

And going to the North-North question, so they point to the fact that, you know, countries are increasing trade through migration, it contributes to networking, social interchange and so forth. But most of the migration is between rich countries, not between, in terms of value, not in terms of people. So you have 169, maybe 200 million people who are migrants, you know, maybe one-tenth of them are highly skilled, migrants from global north countries, going to other global north countries, or, I might add, highly skilled workers in the south who are going to global north countries. So they are considered to be the bulwark of the development that takes place. But in fact, as I demonstrate in the book,

workers who come from the global south, like India, which has a high level of IT workers, as well as financial services workers and so forth and so on that are working in the West as well as parts of East Asia, they actually establish networks, create corporations and so forth, but they actually engage in a form of extreme parasitic exploitation of workers back home. On their return to India or whichever country,

they set up businesses that exploit workers in which those workers are forced off their land, first of all, through development of specific complexes. And many of them based on caste and other factors, don't get any work at all. And the work they get is very limited. You know, for instance, in India, you're, you know, a upper caste person cannot engage in any interchange with a lower caste person. So it's a very extreme form of exploitation that takes place. Of course, India is a country that's very poor, and so we should be very concerned with its development, or I would say it should become a socialist country. It would be much more prosperous if they were and would eliminate poverty to a great degree.

But so it does not contribute to development whatsoever, and it undermines development in many different ways, which this book discusses if you want, I don't want to take up too much time in the answer, so I'll give you more time. Well, I mean, I'm happy that you were able to add so much and be so articulate on those points, because I realized after I asked the question that I didn't really articulate the question particularly well, but you answered it almost exactly the way that I was hoping that you would. So credit to you. But to add kind of one wrinkle into that question that I had asked previously, you know, the question is, are remittances actually contributing to development?

This is a question that is asked quite frequently within, again, more mainstream circles. And people that are asking this question might look to actually a graph like the one that you included in the introduction of the book, which shows the top 10 remittance receiving countries as a percentage of GDP. And just to run through a few of these for the listeners who haven't yet read your book, you show that Tonga received a full 39% of their GDP from remittances, Kyrgyzstan, 37%, Lazotho, 25, Somalia, 25, El Salvador, 24, Nepal, 24, Honduras, 24, Bernuda 23, the Gambia, 22%.

I mean, that's a huge share of their GDP and people that are in favor of upholding the neoliberal world system and maintaining these sorts of labor flows and, you know, labor mobility between countries, particularly from the south to the north, which, you know, many politicians like to rail against, but really they benefit from. They would point to a graph like this and say, look, how would these countries even go about developing if it wasn't for this big influx of cash that's coming in in the form of remittances? I mean, you show in the book that these remittances actually aren't going into developing the countries. But I'm wondering if you can kind of talk about that because the question would arise within these sorts of debates

that are coming up around whether or not this is a valid system, are remittances actually contributing to development or not? Thanks again for that question. I want to answer this question. First of all, put the rest of the question of remittances. In no case, absolutely do remittances could contribute to the development of countries that are poor, which make up most of the world. The only way that these countries could advance is through socialism. I want to make that point very clear and provide examples of it. The most remittances can do, absolutely, is to provide some money for families that are back home. And the longer you're away, the less that money trickles in. But it also

distorts economies in ways that are outrageous. For instance, the case of El Salvador, Honduras, and what are called the triangle in Central America, Guatemala, you have many remittances that are set back

and they only go to specific families, right? And those families may have enough money to build a new wing on their shack or send their kid to school. or kids to school or pay for surgery for their father or grandfather or mother. And so that's the kind of stuff at most that they do in terms of, I don't consider that

development whatsoever, but it also has another pernicious side to it, which I point out, and that is that it contributes to social upheaval at home. It's the exact opposite of the migration cottage industry. who paid me for this book. I've already received that. And that is that it contributes to the development of an expansion of the petty bourgeois and the bourgeois coprador classes in these countries. So they say, okay, we'll take this money.

We'll establish education, you know, private education schools. We'll develop, oh, yeah, they buy food. We'll have our own food products developed here in these countries and so forth. And so they engage in non-tradable forms of economic services. And they don't develop whatsoever. So this is what really these migrant and development specialists are really referring to when they're saying development. They're really referring to the capitalists in these countries engaging in essentially parasitic exploitation of not just the migrants and their families back home in this case,

but also of those people who do not go. So in countries like El Salvador, you have a very large proportion of the population that is even understated in these tables that I provide, you know, something like 30% of the population is living abroad. In a country like Moldova, 50% of the population is living abroad. It's barely a state that's operating is controlled by the CIA, as far as I'm concerned, and the country does not have any kind of economic development whatsoever.

Any enterprise that was initiated has failed miserably. What it does is that contributes to the breakup of families or communities and so forth. It contributes to a tremendous amount of poverty as a consequence of the fact that people cannot support their families and a lot of indigence and so forth. And so there is no evidence except for maybe one or two or three examples of a factory being built with money that is subsidized by perhaps the World Bank in some way. but that's really not a form of economic development that is a consequence of migration whatsoever. And the other point I would make is that in most of the countries you mentioned, that's in one of the graphs, there are many,

that they're all really small countries, right? And so in this context, you can see how limited that development actually and that migration as it's used is really affecting these countries. So a country like Tonga, a small island state, has a large proportion of its GDP being migrant labor and supposedly that money will be spent on development, which it is not. But in reality, we take a look at larger countries

like Nepal, which makes the list. It's about 40 million people. The triangle in the Central American region, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, etc. These are fairly large regions of migration, Indonesia, and so forth and so on. You have a lot of migrants going and they're not really developing countries. So I'll give you another wrinkle to this, which is very disturbing. And that is, so let's go sick with Indonesia. When we look at one of the major forms of migration, it is care work that is performed by women. And so there's an equal amount of women, globally speaking, that migrate as there are men, just about equal, 50%, 50, 50, or 48, 52. And so you'll have many migrant women in, you know, the part of their life that they should be enjoying themselves or going to school and so forth between 18 and 25 who are working as caregivers in major global cities like Singapore, like Tokyo, like London, etc., and many other very rich Dubai, very rich.

cities. And so they, so what happens? They're making more money than skilled professional, managerial, administrative workers back home, maybe five times as much. So it's a distortion. So what do they do with their money? It becomes somewhat of a dowry when they come home. They could maybe have a marriage and so forth. It may pay for their marriage. It may sustain people for a period of time, but it does not at all contribute to development. So I think the mainstream argument and even the left argument amongst migration scholars is completely wrong. And the new and expanded version of it through development studies is also completely false. In fact, a growing number of people are agreeing with this point of view, including Hector Delgado-Bece and Mexico

and other good scholars. Yeah, so what I want to do is kind of, you know, bring this high-level global analysis that you're advancing and let it, you know, sort of touch the rubber meeting the road of American political discourse at the moment. One of the things that what we see here, we've already talked about, is this neoliberal idea and of migration, remittances, this entire model. And of course, there's this sense that in political discourse more broadly, there's this contradiction between, you know, recognizing the total humanity of migrants and also understanding that the neoliberal or just the capitalist class in the global north in particular benefits from militarized borders, from cheap pools of labor to exploit, etc. And I was listening to an interview the other day, and I'd love to get your views on this and explain why your view is fundamentally done.

differing. One of your things that you say in the intro is that you're coming from the perspective of migrants and origin countries, right? You're not coming from this American worker sort of centric perspective. So I was listening to Tucker Carlson interview RFK Jr., a presidential candidate, talking precisely about RFK Jr. going down to the border, right? And the argument advanced by both of them is, you know, we're not racist. We recognize the humanity of migrants, But what happens is that migrants come and they drive down wages for American workers, right? And there's this whole idea that, you know, their position is more pro-worker because it's not a racist rejection of migrants, but it's saying that by letting them in, it serves the, you know, and so many words, sort of, it serves the neoliberal capitalist class and hurts the American worker. Can you talk about what you think of that entire line of argumentation and sort of how your perspective is fundamentally

different, not just from the neoliberal perspective, which some on the broadly conceived left sort of, you know, naively support without recognizing its deficiencies, as well as the more conservative pro-worker, ostensibly pro-worker, a position of people like Tucker Carlson and RFK Jr.? Yes. So the neoliberal position that addresses the question of humanity, I don't think they actually treat workers in a humane way. But I would make this case, and I think we all should embrace it, that migrant workers should be treated with absolute respect, they should have decent work, they should have decent facilities to live in, they should have the option to live where they want to, and so forth and so on. And that's a very important part of this book. So when we think about the total number of international migrants, there may be 200 million, but it's a very important part of this book.

If you multiply that times four or five, if you think about families, we're thinking about 200 million to 1 billion people, right? So about 1 billion people are affected. And so, yes, I point out the exploitation that takes place. And one of the key and fundamental arguments of this book is that this is completely going to contradict what Tucker Carlson. RFK Jr. said, is that while these workers who are migrants are essential to the U.S. economy, essential workers, they are despised and they are considered to be basically shot and lost, as you would say, in German.

They don't have a state and they should go back to wherever. yet at the same time, the United States economy, especially during the COVID-19 period, would not be able to really survive without these migrant workers. Who was delivering the goods to those migrant workers at their homes? I mean, to those middle class workers and certainly upper class, and working class, what people were delivering packages for Amazon, what people were delivering Uber Eats or Brabhub, whatever the company is, these were all migrant workers, absolutely migrant workers.

They also are involved in working for, for instance, checking to see whether from a scientific perspective, Maybe Henry knows more about this, you know, the degree to which contamination takes place. So they would be out there measuring the level of COVID in the sewers and so forth. These are essential workers. These are workers who drive ambulances to hospitals and so forth. So it's a complete abomination to actually call these workers, take a – as unworthy to live in this country or to work in this country.

In fact, they're not taking away jobs. They're actually improving the economy of the United States, which I don't think is necessarily a good thing because they're improving it in a bad way through more pollution, climate change, and so forth. Because they are subjected. Many of the migrants are climate migrants because they can't grow food and so forth.

that Tucker Carlson and RFK Jr., arguing that they drive down wages, I think they do the exact opposite. They make consumer goods far cheaper. They contribute to lower wages for themselves in the sense because they are serving a workforce in the United States that is largely affluent. I know that is controversial, maybe even on this show. I do believe in the aristocracy of labor to a great extent. And workers who are making $100,000 a year who call themselves working class, you know, it's kind of ridiculous as far I'm concerned. You know, I mean, I support them when they go on strike and so forth and so on.

They have every right to do whatever they want or $200,000 a year workers, professional workers, or $400,000 or $400,000 a year workers at the ports. I'm sorry, that's not the working class of this country. Just not. And so in that case, there is a Libre aristocracy. They're not driving down those workers' wages. They're improving their lifestyles by allowing them to have. maids at home or caregivers at home, getting delivery, getting car service, ride hailing and so forth

for low wages, for low prices and so forth. So, you know, this is really outrageous that Tiger Carlson and RFK Jr., I wouldn't just limit it to them. I would say it's the Democrats large, Biden and so forth and so on. He hasn't changed the policies of Trump, except with perspective to allowing people to stay in the country during the period of time that they are being investigated by the U.S. forward to control, CIS, citizenship and immigration service. So Biden hasn't changed a thing, and most Democrats agree with the Republicans on this same issue. But the capitalist class in this country wants to see more migration in this country because it's certainly not going to drive down wages. I mean, there's a logic to this.

The United States is the largest consumer economy in the world. So that being said, you want to ensure, this goes back to Lenin again, you want to ensure that those people in the country are going to be able to buy products. So, you know, one of the questions that many people say, Marxists argue, is that there's a crisis of capitalism that's around the corner. The crisis of capitalism for them, and many of them, a certain group of them, is the overproduction that takes place. Well, in this context, you basically have a economy in which workers are actually having wages go up. Take a look at the last six or seven years, five years since COVID, I think it is, for four years, four years. And wages have gone up appreciably.

You know, of course, inflation has gone up too, and that's not a good thing. But the idea that they drive down wages, the inflation would be far higher if these workers were not there driving trucks, driving bicycles, engaging in manufacturing, and so forth and so on. Of course, it's the corporate leaders that make the money, the managers, and so forth, but it also benefits a large segment of the working class of this country. And by that, I'm referring to a working class that is somewhat parasitic too. So I hope that answers a question. I'd like to actually explore it further, but I think it's,

just bizarre, and why I would like to explore it further is that the reason why a person like RFK Jr. goes down to the border, and you'll find every single candidate probably will end up on the border, maybe not with Tiger Carlson, but with another act from MSNBC or CNN or wherever, they'll go down to the border and say, well, this is a problem, and they refer to it as a crisis, the crisis of migration. Well, let's turn that on its head. It's not a crisis of migration for Americans or Europeans and other rich countries. It's a crisis of the migrants themselves who are forced to leave their countries because they cannot survive because of the pernicious nature of imperialist capital in these countries and divides families and so forth.

the crisis is within the migrant communities themselves, not at all, writ large, with respect to the American worker. And I'll say one thing, and I'll close it here, right now there is a wave of migrants that are entering the United States, many working class people, general public, liberals, and so forth, they're saying, oh, there's a crisis. Politicians in the media take advantage of that. You just gave an example, Tucker Carlson and RFK Jr. And so where are the migrants coming from? The majority of the migrants now are coming from Venezuela. Well, okay, Venezuela. They tend to be poor workers who are coming from Venezuela because they can't afford to live there.

Why can't they afford to live there? Because the United States has engaged in extreme forms of sanctions against Venezuela, so much so that the country is really doing quite poorly as a consequence of that, and is completely isolated from the rest of the world. And the United States also engages in secondary boycott so that even countries that want to trade with Venezuela are not allowed to, just like Cuba. And so, of course, there is a privileged few that are allowed into the country, including this cohort of working class and peasant rural workers from Venezuela, the crisis is theirs. They're the ones that are taking the risks, forced to taking the risk of crossing rivers

where their boats may capsize or something like that. And so I would just place the blame at the U.S. at the door of the U.S. government for actually engaging in a foreign policy of sanctions, what I refer to as the sanctions regime, which forces migration and contributes to the development of the United States by getting in low-wage workers. So if you take a look at most of the workers, even restaurant workers, you go to Italian restaurant, forgive me, most Italian restaurants, they are workers from Latin America. I think that's universal of the United States. Yeah, I find that very interesting. I totally agree with your point about the aristocracy of labor, absolutely. Well, you know, the system as it's currently constructed seems to serve the elite quite well on several levels. You just mentioned Venezuela, for example.

So there's this imperialist, obviously, incentive to destroy that country to upend it. It challenges U.S. imperialism. You know, it claims that it's interested in socialism, et cetera. And, you know, it stands up to the U.S. So, of course, you want to destroy that country as much as you can. So will you do that? And then you have a bunch of migrants that flee that country that you've helped destroy and underdevelop or ravage, whatever.

They come to the border. They're easily exploitable by the ruling class as far as low wages, you know, shitty living conditions. And as you're even mentioning, they even serve. not to steal our jobs or drive down wages but actually serve a certain huge portion of the American working classes like this under this underclass, this servant class. But then it also allows for reactionaries, you know, in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in the capitalist class more broadly to then use them as the perfect scapegoat for broader economic problems to keep the eyes off of the actual people with power and money in this country. So from destabilizing countries that you don't like to exploiting the migrant, desperate. labor for your own profit to then using them as scapegoats. You know, the Democratic Republican parties and their donor bases in the capitalist class seem to benefit at every level, which I think

is very interesting. But that does kind of give an interesting contradiction within the Republican party's base of workers who have been sort of trained to despise these people, to scapegoat them, to fear them. So it's like, you know, but the elite establishment within that party, benefits from their from their labor and in some ways even the constituency of benefits from them so it's kind of interesting to see where they want to push it it kind of feels like elements of the right wing in this country want to end migration and instead of relying on migrant labor to to ruthlessly exploit it sort of maybe even want to create an impoverished lower class of citizens here to play the role of sort of migrant labor and that contradiction is not fully worked out but it's something that's

in development it has been for quite some time so not no real question there but anybody has thoughts on that. Yeah, but I engage in a Freudian slip before. I'll be honest with you. The new working class of the United States are these migrant workers, and their wages are cut. So initially, I kind of thought to myself, I have to correct myself, but you are absolutely correct, Brett. This is the working class of the United States. It has always been my position that wherever you work, you're a worker in that country. So the working class of this. this country are migrant workers who are highly exploited for the most part, unless you're working in IT or biotechnology, et cetera, and so forth, chemistry, or the STEM sectors.

Well, I'll just add in something quick on what Brett said before I add my question, which is semi-related. So, as Brett mentioned in terms of looking inside the Republican Party, and it's also true to a large extent in the Democratic Party, although with a slight nicer face, slightly more geriatric face at the head of it right now, but a nicer face nonetheless. But in any case, when Brett was talking about how the constituency, the broad constituency of the Republican Party has been trained to be very anti-immigrant, but yet the decision makers within the Republican Party are massively benefiting from migration into the country, but one only needs to look at Trump, you know, it came out that much, much of the labor that was

taking place within Trump enterprises was illegal immigrant labor. And I'm using illegal with quotations here as a result of, of course, no human is actually illegal, but that is the term that is used within the context of the United States political system. So, you know, much of the value is actually being, you know, reaped as a result of exploiting the labor of those, again, quote unquote, illegal, you know, migrants that were working within Trump industries. And Trump was willing to point this out. He said, yes, you have shown that I am exploiting this system, but it was not I who put the system in place. And all of us on this stage have been exploiting the system. I'm just the one who is willing to say, hey, you're right. I have been

exploiting it. You know, so that's an interesting point. And then just as another little flippant side comment this is you know probably we we tend to be very academic on the show so i'm going to break from that for a second my wife likes to watch the office it's her favorite show and there's one scene i'm not i don't really watch tv but i watch with her uh when she's here but there's one scene in particular that really stood out to me when it happened and it kind of relates to this exploiting uh the labor of these people and then kind of kicking them to the curb as soon as they try to do anything about it in one of the scenes one of the employees of the office and for those of you who have seen the show it's dwight he's going to where there's a

bunch of undocumented laborers on the side of the road looking for day labor and he pulls up and he asks are there any good workers here and all of the people are backing away from him you're not wanting to talk to me you're like huh what's going on here cuts to the side and they have this little brief side interview with them. For those of you who are familiar with the show, you'll know what I'm talking about. And he says, yes, I always employ day labor on my farm. I bring in these workers. I work them for a day.

And then just before they're about to check out, I bring in an ice agent, who is not actually an ice agent, it's his cousin dressed up as an ice agent, puts them in the back of a truck, drives them off, drops them off somewhere else, and doesn't pay them. Now, to many viewers of the show, they may think that this is, you know, something that's played for a laugh on the show. And of course, it is played for a laugh on the show. But we actually have numerous stories in the United States that have been reported on for years of where essentially this happens, particularly in the agricultural sector of the Southwest. These migrant laborers come in and work in the agricultural sector. they're paid in absolute pittance, you know, a dollar an hour or less in many cases,

because as undocumented laborers, they're not able to bring these sorts of grievances up. And in instances, and listeners, I don't have any citations of names of articles right now, but if you just Google these sorts of things, you will find them. There's many of them. I've read many of them. If you just look, you will see that when there are instances of undocumented labors who essentially have tried to, you know, have some sort of collective action or, you know, kind of informally unionized just for a easy term for people to kind of understand what was going on,

kind of have this collective struggle against the conditions that they were working under and the exploitation that they were facing. The people who own the farms would then call on them anytime that they would try to get some sort of recompense for what they were being put through. And so while that scene on the television show was obviously played as a humorous kind of thing, like, you know, look at this guy completely shamelessly trying to rip off the labor of these people because he knows that he could. We have numerous examples of that happening in the United States every year. So, Mani, I don't know if you have anything to say on that. Otherwise, I will throw in my next question, which is tangentially related to something that

you previously said. But I'll let you say anything if you want to here. I definitely agree. I don't watch TV either, but that's a very good anecdote that you put forward. It's done on an international level in every country. The goal of the employer is to make the worker undocumented so they could be arrested, detained, and deported. And in this case, very briefly, those new undocumented workers, were coming from South America now, are undermining. those workers who are migrants who are here legally under the H-2B visa who are highly exploited themselves so that it's even lowering the wages further. That's all I wanted to say. No, absolutely.

So the question that I was going to bring up then is related to something that you said previously about how migrant laborers often face the most sort of dangerous and, well, just, let's say, unsafe work conditions. And we can talk about agricultural sector workers who often are putting up with conditions that are definitely not OSHA compliant, to just put it mildly. But one of the other very interesting things that you brought up, I believe it was in chapter one and chapter three of the book. I could be misremembering, but I believe it was in those two chapters.

You bring up the anecdote or the example of the nurses that come from the Philippines in Ghana. And this book has mentions of the COVID pandemic all through the book, which is, you know, it's great that we can have some contemporary analysis of how labor migration has been impacted and how, you know, the structures have been impacted as a result of the pandemic that we're just, you know, still in the fallout of as we record. But when we're talking about the pandemic, particularly in those early days, the people who were at the absolute highest risk were health care.

workers and other quote unquote essential workers, which often were very lowly paid workers and in many cases were labor migrants. And this is something that you touch on throughout the book in a couple places. Like I said, I believe it was in chapter one and chapter three. So if you can talk a little bit about the risk that these labor migrants have to put up with, particularly when we have South, North labor migration, because they are taking up a specific role within that economic structure in many cases. And even in the cases of where we have, you know, comparatively well trained migrants coming to a global North country like nurses who have been trained in Ghana and the Philippines to a fairly high standard, they are still the ones

who face disproportionate amount of risk at their workplace compared to, you know, let's say native born workers within that global North country. So here, very, very, very, very, good point. And I could address it. What I would say is that, for instance, in a country like Ghana, Patrick Coburn, who was a reporter for the independent, a really good reporter, even though I don't, you know, he's, I don't agree necessarily with everything he says, especially on foreign policy. But he's usually good on a lot of issues. He has a disability. and he was raised by, I mean, he was, as a child, he was helped by Irish migrant workers who were in Britain at the time when he was living there.

And so he used it as the anecdote of Ghana, and I investigated it, and can you imagine a country like Ghana, a very poor country, maybe more wealthy than other countries, countries in Africa, but a very poor country that really needs nurses. It costs the Ghanaian state something like $65,000 to $80,000 to train them. And the state pays for them. They don't pay their own way. And so they go to Britain and who are the net beneficiaries of it? It's like, it is almost like importing stuff. I don't like to use the term importing when I refer to migrants. but essentially it's a form of, again, parasitism in which these workers from Ghana are trained by the government, paid for, and so forth. Then in the case of the Philippines, which, you know, one has always, if you go there, you have to be careful because you may not get out.

And I say that because, especially if you're a leftist, they investigate you, why aren't you going to the beaches? of the Philippines. That's happened to me a number of times. So, and I didn't go to the beaches. I went to investigate workers, in this case, nurses. I was taken by a comrade of mine, Sarah Redwood. And we witnessed the major industry of the Philippines, which is the export of health care workers. and you've had many thousands, what I witnessed in Manila, hundreds of thousands of young women or girls, in some cases, going to school to be trained for export. And Robin Rodriguez wrote a very good book on that subject, which you referred to in chapter one. that's called Migrants for Export or a country of export, which is the Philippines. And so the Philippines, in effect, isn't a migrant export country.

They make a tremendous amount of their foreign income on migrant labor. But on the other hand, that migrant labor is not enough. enough for to develop it by any means. The Philippines is one, again, a very poor country that the United States is the colonial ruler of or was, and so remains the economic colonial ruler as far as I'm concerned. It's a sub-colonity. And so you have, again, a distorted form of development. It's not development for the people of the Philippines who make up 110 million, which is fairly large, its development for Canada, the United States,

you name it, countries outside of the Philippines where they can go to and gain tremendous amounts of skilled labor, in this case, nurses and medical technicians and so forth and so on. So if you go to hospitals, you may be treated or you'll probably be treated in this country by a migrant worker. It's here legally. Yeah, this kind of leads into this next question. It's related for sure. We were talking earlier about how I was mentioning, you know, we use the Venezuela example.

This system on every level seems to serve the elite in the global north quite well. But of course, there's this liberal veneer that is sort of, you know, put over this entire system of exploitation and domination and unequal development, etc. that tries to argue, as we've made clear many times in this conversation already, that there's mutual benefit here. And one of these, one of these arguments is that the remittance model is positive in all these ways, helps develop, but you've already torn down that argument and shown how it's false. But there's also this interesting element you discuss of social imperialism, this other element that says, you know, that there's this social benefit to this whole migrant model of exploitation that results in, you know,

bringing liberal ideals back to their origin countries, et cetera, another way to sort of make humanitarian liberal excuses for the system. Can you talk about the remittances model and the liberal idea of it helping and then how social imperialism is actually being advanced in this configuration? Well, I'd like to answer that question initially with kind of a paradox or a joke. So there is a industry of academics or hacademics, as I'd like to call them, who are arguing that political development occurs, and in addition to the development of the countries.

I mean, this is actually a social imperialist and politically imperialist argument, that what migrants do is they bring back democracy, so you can overthrow your government that is an autocracy of one form or another. But, okay, so what if you, many of the migrants come from work in Saudi Arabia? Do you think they're going to bring home democracy? I think not.

With all due respect to Saudi Arabians, the people there. So in many of the cases, people go to countries that are not democratic at all. And that's the vast majority. So you're putting forward to the argument that this is actually published work in major university presses, that workers bring home democracy. They go there and they learn how people are engaged in democracy. But they can't vote in the countries where they go to.

They can't engage in politics in any way whatsoever. And then the very idea that they're going back to a country that lacks democracy, well, I think we really have to make a distinction between Western democracy and other forms of democracy. I'm sorry, I consider China to be very democratic on a local level, far more democratic than any country I've seen, except for maybe Cuba, and in many other countries that are like Venezuela. it's very democratic at a local level. People make decisions on their own within groups, within their villages and communities and cooperatives. So I wanted to say that because I think it's an imperialist argument because it says, well, it's a Western form of imperialism.

So you vote between two hacks in a local election or between Biden and Trump in a national election, as far as I'm concerned, okay, I'll tell your listeners, I don't vote. I just don't vote. I don't think there's any need to for me. And I think that's a very good way to protest against the lack of democracy in this country. Because any candidate in this country, as well as any other country in Western Europe, is going to be, you know, basically a hack, getting their money from political action committees,

which are really the entities that make political leaders. You can't be elected without money. In fact, corporations are considered people in this country, as we all know. So if you're going to bring that back to your home country, woe is that whole country because even on the formal levels of democracy, they don't have the level of money and economic power and wealth that is needed to be elected. So there's no way that candidates can be elected in this country. as I pointed out earlier, I don't want to repeat myself without that.

And I really despise that argument because they go after countries that are not only socialist, and yes, there are socialist countries in the world, or six of them, five or six of that, but also former socialist countries that are seeking to try to find a way back. I won't mention the name, just because I don't want to reveal to the CIA. But in any case, they argue that these former communist countries where, in fact, there's a high level of nostalgia for the old country under communism or socialism, which I would call it, and they want to go back to it because their lives are much more simple, they had all the necessities that they needed, and so forth and so on. So for some reason, you know, this goes, it's not just politics. Labor, for instance, the working class, the trade unions are less democratic in these former socialist countries because of that history of socialism. Well, I completely reject that argument, and I can give evidence on another show if you want.

But it's another example of social imperialism where U.S. trade unions and the Solidarity Center for Christ's sake. is actually engaged in educating workers about democracy? I mean, basically, it's a front for the CIA. Case closed. You know, they tried to make the argument in the mid-90s that they weren't. Now, under the current AFL-CIA regime, they are absolutely a front for the stake department in the CIA. They work together with organizations throughout the world that seek to undermine socialist unions and socialist movements.

No question about it. In fact, I'm working with some of them. But I will give you an example of one country. I was stuck at Heathrow Airport last fall for a day, and so I was stuck at Costa coffee. and so I got to meet a lot of people going to the airport and so forth I was on my way to South Africa at the time so one guy from

and it's an anecdotal but I've spoken to other people from this country Albania he said things were far better under Angra Oja I'm not necessarily a Hojaist but it was a socialist country and he said you know one of the great

things about Albania was that the president or the leader, the leader of the party, which is general secretary, was making the same amount of money as any other worker. So the airplane pilot or whomever you name is making basically the same amount of money. There's no division In the United States, the typical CEO makes 500 times or more than the typical worker. And can you imagine how many more times it is in the global south that they make a U.S. CIA executive officer? So, yeah, so, and then with respect to Albania, another thing is how people used to ridicule the country because they had, you know, these boulders to protect it from other countries. And, you know, when you talk to some of these Albanians, they said that that was a very good thing.

It was because we didn't need the influence of capitalism in our country. And so I'm making that point. And, you know, many of these people are migrants who have left the country. They left the country after socialism ended. And let's just leave it at that. And then I would add, you know, the social imperialism, cultural. imperialism, that for some reason Western culture is better than any other kind of culture, that, for instance, if one is wearing the latest clothing, fashion, and so forth,

that you bring it back home, that that's a form of economic development. It's completely ridiculous. But it also undermines the importance of those countries who have, their own culture that is being eroded gradually. So you'll find a country, again, like Dominican Republic, El Salvador, et cetera, that becomes less consolidated as a people and more divided by the, I would say, the consumerist nature of the export of culture. You know, just something that came to mind.

This is kind of an aside when you mentioned that, and when I say you, I mean both of you, Brett asked it in the question and Mani, you brought it up in the answer, that these workers going abroad would get these ideas of Western liberalism and democratic society and then go back and topple their repressive governments. It also just reminds me of how the United States in particular, has this notion that they can basically create governments in waiting or puppets in waiting by educating various people in the United States and then keeping them waiting in the wings for when they are later able to topple government.

So, you know, we have many examples like Singman Re of South Korea or Vicente Fox of Mexico or Francois Duvalier, Alberto Fujimori, Netanyahu, Shinzo Abe, Sayyne Wen, Ahmed Chalabi, these people were all educated in the United States and when the United States either intervened in the country in the cases of South Korea or, you know, Peru or Iraq or in other cases where the United States kind of had its thumb on the scale in some ways or, you know, was kind of promising nice relations with the country if a certain person got into power, you know, like Shenzhou Abe or Saian Wen. And that's something that we have seen examples of, but we've also seen the United States

actually create some of their biggest thorns in their side, like Kwame and Krumah, for example, was educated in the United States. Hafizullah Amin, the head of socialist Afghanistan, was educated in the United States. Rafael Karea has a degree from the United States. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan. Like some of these people that ended up being pretty big thorns in the side of the United States in terms of challenging the neoliberal world order, or at least the dominance of the United States in this order, were also educated in the United States.

And in this way, it kind of reminds me of what you were talking about in terms of the idea that you would have this kind of one-to-one relationship in terms of bringing these migrants to these liberal democratic, so-called the democratic countries and then being able to instill these values and that inherently is going to mean that once they go back, they're going to create some sort of movement. I mean, you are probably going to kind of indoctrinate some of the workers with these false ideals of democracy that the United States and other similar imperialist countries like to portray themselves as. But on the other hand, it's not like a one-to-one relationship. Just like, you know, studying in the United States doesn't mean that you're going to be a U.S.

puppet as I just labeled with some of these other characters. I guess that's kind of an aside and not really relevant to the question, but it did come to mind as we were talking about it. I want to turn us back to Chapter 3 for a second, though. One of the things that you do in Chapter 3 is you look at case studies of origin states, which is really fascinating and something that I actually really appreciate with your work more generally, Mani. I've read many of your books, and I really love that you have so many and so many useful case studies.

So, of course, the listeners will be familiar with all of the case studies and the Sanctions this war book, as we've had many episodes. on the show that have focused on those case studies. But in Southern insurgency, organizing insurgency, choke points, all of these various books that you've had a large role in or outright written yourself, they have fascinating case studies. And this book is no different. So in chapter three, the four origin states that you have case studies of are Nepal, Vietnam, El

Salvador, and Moldova. I'm wondering if you can take us through why you selected these four case studies for inclusion within this book and what these four case studies demonstrate in terms of how this structure of labor mobility and economic imperialism actually shows about the system through these four case studies. Certainly. I would like to add, I also do Malawi to some degree, but not in the same way. So I wanted to get a very good spread of countries throughout the world in the global south or poor countries. And so I selected countries where the standard of living was particularly low, a country like Nepal, which is very low. What I'm referring to

is the GDP per capita and so forth. Vietnam is also low. El Salvador is also low. Moldova is amongst the poorest countries in Europe after, I think it's Ukraine now, right? So I selected these countries and I also selected countries that had a range of levels of migration with the exception I mean, they all had very high levels of migration

with the exception of Vietnam. So I was very much interested in Vietnam because it claimed to be a socialist country, and it has many of the attributes of socialism, and yet the IMF and the World Bank forces them into neoliberalism through, you know, basically intimidation and so forth. So I selected each of these countries because they essentially had large numbers of people, absolute numbers of people who migrated to different regions. So there are three major corridors of migration in the world. One is the North American corridor or the American

corridor in which you have migrants from the Americas going to the USA. The second is within Europe. It's actually the Schengen zone. But in that context, you also have migrants who come from other countries in the Middle East and North Africa over southwest Asia and North Africa, as well as Africa south of the Sahara, who are, you know, are almost on a monthly basis in the news on the front page of the Western press, where either a boat has capsized and killed hundreds of people, if not thousands, or in other contexts, the countries of destination are not allowing them into the country. So this is a consistent theme that takes place.

So that's the second corridor, and there is a smaller proportion of the migrants in that region. That's why I chose Moldova, because they are not in the Schengen zone, but by virtue of being linked to Romania, because many Moldovans are Romanians, that was a very good example because They had so many migrants that were leaving the country, and many of the migrants there left permanently. They just left. There was nothing that they brought home, and when you leave, you don't bring anything back necessarily.

I mean, there's always exceptions to the rule. You don't even support your families back home. You may have a second family and so forth. And then El Salvador, because it's particularly a very good example of migration. The third corridor is Southeast Asia to the rest of Asia. I'm sorry, I digress with respect to El Salvador. So those three are the major regions of migration, and each of them are highly exploitative, with the exception of the Schengen zone to some degree where if you are a Polish citizen,

you can live in Britain or, no longer Britain. I'm sorry, forgive me. Paris or Madrid, Barcelona, and any Western European city, and vice versa. So you could move. But yet on the other hand, they despise people who are, especially Eastern European and Central European countries, people who are from the global south and do not allow them into the country. Yet there are millions, maybe 5 million people who are migrants from parts elsewhere of

Europe. So that's, those are some of the reasons why I chose those countries. Nepal is a very important country of migration export. At one point, it was the leading country of migration export. And, you know, when you think about Nepal, nobody thinks of migrants, right? You think about the Hamalayas, and you think of Mount Everest and so forth and so on as a tourist destination. And, well, I'd say every one of these countries I visited, by the way, and I got to meet with labor leaders and, you know, CSOs, et cetera, as well as workers themselves. And, you know, if you go to Kathmandu, its major industry is migration. And I found that to be really interesting that it is a country for exporting migrants to the rest of the world who are not a, allowed to stay in the destination country, and they have to come back.

Many of the migrants around the world, especially during the COVID period, come back without pay because we know the concept of wage theft in the United States. Well, wage theft has taken place through migration for many, many years, but particularly during the COVID era. So many people who even left came back with less money and huge amounts of debt. That's also true with respect to Vietnam, by the way. Unfortunately, those people in the rural areas of Vietnam are encouraged to go to countries like Malaysia, etc., Thailand, And they come back, impoverished, and their families are completely broken up and so forth.

So the reasons why I chose each of these countries is because they are unique in many ways of migration. They're not the same necessarily. I didn't want to pick one same type of country. And they represent each of the corridors. So you have Vietnam and one. corridor as well as Nepal to some degree you have El Salvador

in the U.S. corridor and you have Moldova in the European corridor so that's the reason why I chose them. Yeah, as a quick aside since you mentioned Nepal I actually on the recommendation

of Brian from Twitter, many of you will know him but he recommended a movie called, it's a documentary called Sherpa, which is about the, you know, Sherpa guides up in the Hamalayas and how they, in 2014, like, essentially tried to unionize and single-handedly canceled the Everest season because of unsafe, exploitative conditions. And the documentary

was very interesting. It wasn't nearly sharp enough on the, you know, that kind of analysis for my liking but it was interesting nonetheless but what you mentioned is that when people think of Nepal they tend to think of the Hamales without thinking of labor within the rest of the country and I know and I'm just going to throw this statistic out there for people that have this similar mentality that you know the Hamalayas are like a major uh you know the major area of Nepal and that the Sherpas are kind of the main group of Nepal let me dispel that notion I know many people when they think of Nepal, they immediately think of the Sherpas. The Sherpas make up 0.4 to 0.5% of the total population of the country. The vast majority of people in Nepal,

as Mani pointed out, are poor laborers in more urban areas like Kathmandu, which if you look at the infrastructure of Kathmandu and Mani, you might be able to speak to this as somebody who's been there, but I've looked into it just on the side over the last couple of years. There is essentially no development of the infrastructure that I can see. You know, the roads are absolutely for being a capital of a country, despicable. The ability to travel within and outside of the city are appalling the accommodations in the city. Again, I haven't been there. I've just been looking at it for the past few years. So feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. But, you know, that's in the capital of the country. That's much less the other areas outside of where people

you know, rich Westerners are going to be flying in to travel over to the Himalayas to go up and say, hey, I climbed the world's tallest mountain on the backs of these Sherpas that are being underpaid. You know, they fly into Kathmandu, and even there, the infrastructure is completely dilapidated to say the least. So, Mani, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on any of that. No, no, you're not wrong at all. I can even add to it.

There's just one street light that I found. I like to walk when it goes to places. I don't think you see anything through driving around. You might see something. I like to walk, and I don't like to go to necessarily tourist places, touristic places. But, you know, Kathmandu is a very poor city where most of the housing for the indigenous people of Nepal in Kathmandu is ramshackle, you know, basically corrugate.

steel or aluminum, corrugated aluminum buildings. And they serve the tourists who are there ready to go to the Himalayas for their trek and so forth. And

it's then you go to the other, the eastern side of the city. There is a huge amount of migration export agencies who

ostensibly train workers for industry, but basically they just say don't buck up on the job, make sure you don't leave the first employer. You've got to pay us a thousand bucks, $2,000 in order to get this job,

we'll lend you the money and so forth and so on. And so, you know, and so you see these companies that are Western companies that I use contractors there in one part. And it's actually one of the more, you know, more developed parts of the city. But, you know, I mean, I think one street light in the city is kind of strange. There may be more, but that's all I saw.

One other really brief aside before Brett, you hopped in. It's also related to this documentary, and it's kind of not related to the conversation at hand, but something that came up in it and absolutely blew me away when it happened. So for listeners who haven't seen the documentary, and I'm assuming most of you haven't. As I said, it's not like a radical documentary or anything like that, but if you look at it through a critical lens, you can actually glean some interesting things from it. So the essentially strike of the Sherpas happened because these Sherp and guides were carrying all of the bags and equipment up the mountain for the...

the Westerners so that they could, you know, just march up the up the mountain, plant their flag and then walk on down. And load after load after load is being carried up by the Sherpas to make it possible for them to do this. And 14 or 16, I don't remember exactly, 14 or 16 of them died in a ice fall in 2014 as a result of having to go up and down and up and down the most dangerous part of the mountain carrying the gear for the Westerners. And they banded together and said, okay well we're not going to go up the mountain this year because our demands for fair compensation for the victims for safety measures for us who are doing this are not being met so we're just not going to go up we're essentially going on a wildcat strike

they turn the camera to one of the rich white american tourists who is going up the mountain and he says this and i quote it might not be a direct quote but it's pretty darn close to this I feel like we're being held hostage by terrorists, a group of people that are not allowing us to do what we wanted to do and are essentially using the threat of violence to prevent people from doing what they want. We Americans know what this is. It's called 9-11. Absolutely blew me away when I heard that,

but that was the response to people essentially saying, we're going to walk off the job because we just had a mass count. casualty event, you know, two days before, and none of our demands for safety or compensation are being met. He immediately equates it to 9-11. I feel like that's a very typical rich, white American mindset towards things like these sort of labor issues. Brett, feel free to go in. I'm sorry, I keep going off with these tangents that are not directly related to the book, but, you know, when I talk to Manny, this happens. That's an important part of this show and stuff to be able to take those detours.

I also wanted to mention, of course, a few years ago, we did that interview with Hesiliami called Women in Nepal Civil War. So if you want to learn more about the People's War in Nepal, she served as a three-time minister of Nepal, fascinating deep dive into the sort of internal class struggles of Nepal for those interested in that and the history, of course. I wanted to move forward a little bit. In the book, Manny, you say, quote, since the end of the Second World War, foreign aid. has been directed at infrastructural projects that would supposedly contribute to economic growth and development, but has made a negligible contribution to development, as foreign aid has been tied to credit from Western banks. Southern countries have been trapped by extensive foreign debt, which has often led the IMF to four structural readjustment programs, severely eroding basic

survival needs, health, education, other social services. In another part of the book, you say, quote, migration is not the driver for advancing social and economic development, but a result of the extraction of natural resources and labor in poor countries. So kind of bringing these together, if we look at the current, you know, sort of migration system that we've been talking about and critiquing, you know, market solutions, the social imperialism we've discussed, investment via the World Bank IMF, the whole remittance model, et cetera. That's the system as it currently stands. And of course, we want to see the end of that system and much more. What is the alternative? What are the socialist options, right, if we can even put it that way, to this form of the migration system globally?

You know, you mentioned nationalization of natural resources. Of course, you get punished severely for trying to do that by the United States and its lackeys. But I'm wondering what a sort of socialist vision for the world could look like and how it would address some of these issues. Big question. I'm sorry. No, it's a great question, Brett, and I thank you very much for it. because it's at the heart of the book. This book is about the wretched of the earth in some respects, the poorest people on the planet,

which is what I am concerned with, and I think all of us should be concerned with, and they make up the largest majority of the population on the planet. So a socialist option is a very important one, and let's start with a point I also made It echoes the work of Jason Hickle, the British political economist. You know, that in 1947, Harry Truman, the warmonger, gave a speech because it was going to be the basis for the redevelopment of the entire world.

it became very popular. It was a very popular thing. Many Americans saw, wow, this is great. We're going to develop the rest of the world. Well, that never came to fruition, as you pointed out. Brett, there was a series of ways in which the West, Western Banks, as well as the IMF and World Bank, under the tutelage of the United States, France, etc., Britain, that put these countries into huge amounts of debt, including, I'll say, socialist countries in Eastern Europe. You know, Holland, for instance, was under huge amount of debt when they had opposition to the government and so forth. So this is a very serious issue. I think it's a real false model to think that you're going to develop through foreign aid. I will say, however, that the Chinese model foreign investment, and this will contradict everybody else, is far more, I think, far more recognizes the degree to which each country is different and tries to follow what every country wants to do.

So they don't impose their vision necessarily. Of course, they would prefer to work with communist parties around the world, but they work with governments in different ways. forgiven so much debt in the poorest countries of the world. So what is a vision of empowering in terms of economically the world? You asked a big question, so I make it a big answer. Well, there's a growing movement amongst Marxists of a certain kind, that the only way that you could change the world is through politics.

that capital and imperialism is a reflection of the imperialist states. Capital doesn't flow from nowhere. It comes from some place. It comes from states enacting policies of imperialisms, for instance, and so forth, or enacting policies of neoliberalism or being subjected to those policies. And so I think it's crucial to answer that question through examining the state. We take a look at Africa. It's carved up into over 50 states, I think 51, and counting.

And the United States loves that. It's the Yugoslav model where you carve up a country into eight countries or seven countries, if you exclude Kosovo, and make each of them weaker so that you could exploit them more. So I think there is a movement for regional power blocks where, in fact, you would have a power block, let's say, in Africa, which would include everything from the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo to South Africa, because that would give them a lot more power. It would allow them to pick and select the choice that they want to develop because they would have the capacities. You know, in some countries, there's just nothing really to, certainly you could form a socialist state, but there's really very limited levels of economic development, few natural resources,

and they're based just on agriculture, which is a good thing and so forth, to some degree, if you could survive that way. but a country like Malawi, which is firmly part of the Southern African region, should be integrated into a Southern Africa. So I see South Africa as a Southern Africa, and we refer to this as polypolarity. So we don't need one central power, which is domiciled in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv, if I may, But you might want to have a southern African region which decides to become socialist because that's in their interests. Or in South America, the same thing can be said. Of course, you have Brazil, which is a very large country. And the same thing can be said for other parts of Southeast Asia and so forth and so on.

You know, China certainly has chosen its path and is doing very well by it. And I think no country will advance its people without having the resources. You know, there's this old question about having the right politics, right? Not the right politics or the left politics, but what I mean is having a good politics and an important analysis. But if you don't have the capacity to implement it, you're nowhere. And that is really the problem of the world because these countries, are being strangleholds by the West. And that is the way they're able to control the world,

the United States especially. And so I think that one model that is actually feasible, I am not a utopian socialist by any means. I think Engels' work is important, contra-Western Marxists, that socialism has to be grounded and it has to be scientific. And it is a science, dialectical materialism, and we should have debates about it.

In this context, I think that it's crucial to understand that socialism has to be built, and it is not something that is going to be created just because people want it. You have to have capacities, And you have to have the economic power to actually advance it and to be able to restrain foreign countries, imperialist powers, from interfering with your project. Now, I don't think the bricks are necessarily that because they've expanded so much. But, you know, a Brazil would be a block in itself.

India, certainly, and the subcontinent of, I shouldn't say the subcontinent, because that's politically incorrect. The Indian region, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, is another place that could be a power block in some respects. And definitely move towards socialism. I know many people who are organizing and have very large socialist parties in India and so forth. And it's a main ideology, especially Marxism and Latinism. And, you know, one can say that can happen also in other parts of the world. You know, I mentioned earlier that many people, including from Ukraine, are nostalgic for the era of the Soviet Union and would like to see that come back. It's only the West that has

utilized its ideology imposed his ideology of neoliberal capitalism and extreme forms of nationalism to divide the country and turn it into a boiling pot and a region of

contention that they created this political and military conflict. So in any case, you would be far better off as part of a Soviet Union, I would say, and they were better off under the Soviet Union. And many of the narratives that you hear about the Soviet Union, as Henry knows very well, from his great book, the edited book on Lasserto, translated

and edited that Lassardo wrote it, wrote on Stalin, you know, gives a sense of what really happened and what didn't happen and so forth in a very honest way. So in any case, I think that's an answer. I have no, you know, I don't really want to comment on the rest of the world. And, you know, the United States really needs to get its act in order. And I think it needs to be defeated in order to have that happen. I know that's, you know, hard pill to swallow. But it needs to be reduced a number of notches and become one of many nations, not just the dominant. an imperialist country of the world. One of the things that I always like in your analysis is that you focus not only on having

the right ideas, but also being able to enact these ideas. One of the things that you talk about, it's in chapter five immediately before the conclusion of the book. So towards the end of it, you bring up something that many people think is a potential way of building power, which is trade unions. And you have a section, a subsection, I should say, right at the end. before the conclusion chapter, the limitations of trade union support for migrant workers, where you particularly look at two major trade union federations, the ITUC, the international

trade union confederation, and the WFTU, the World Federation of Trade Unions. Can you talk a little bit about these two trade union federations, the differences of them, and then a little bit of your analysis within this subsection of the limitations of trade union support, for migrant workers and what would you tell to people who think that pushing for trade unions as a primary method for achieving some sort of political power? What would you say to them using your analysis that you put together in this section? Well, I think it's a very important question. I think I also mentioned a union called the All China Federation of Trade Unions, AC up to you.

I took, or ITUC, is the former International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, which was the union dominated by the CIA that tried to impose its vision on all countries throughout the world, you know, as well as MI6, et cetera. I'm just saying it's facetiously, but that's essentially what it was. And essentially what they tried to do was undermine any form of they'll attend to working class organizing. Today, they continue to do much of that, although they don't have control. This is a very interesting point.

They don't have real influence because workers in many, workers are not interested in the ITUC. They're interested in their own struggles. I recently wrote an article about this, that workers are interested in struggling. if they can get support from ITUC, fine. If they can get support from the World Federation Trade Unions, that's great. But the difference between the ITUC and the World Federation Trade Unions is that the World Federation Trade Unions formed in 1948, I think as part of the Soviet Union, was the center of it,

it's now domiciled in Greece. It represents socialist states. And again, you know, it has its limitations because of money, but it also has a vision that many countries around the world and working class peoples around the world actually have held up as their vision of the future, of the present and future. So I've been doing work with a comrade on Niger, which just had a what I would call a revolution. coup d'etat, and the countries of the Sahel region, one of the poorest parts of the world in Africa. And what I noticed is that, you know, they're holding up the vision of the World Federation of Trade Unions as theirs and that one that they want to build. So it's the other way around in the sense that they want to be in charge of it. They want to be a part of it, whereas the ITUC, it's an imperialist trade union, so they are going to impose their doctrine of neoliberal capitalism on the rest of the world with some restraints.

Now, I'd like to say just a brief thing about the ACFTAU, which is going to be very controversial, but I think the evidence is absolute. The ACFTU is the most democratic trade union in the world. The ACFTU is the Chinese trade union. There is only one Chinese trade union as the ACFTU, but they have hundreds of micro unions that are throughout the country, grassroots unions that are developing in the state-owned enterprises, and the Chinese state actually encourages organizing in their, you know, state-owned enterprises

because that contributes to advancing Chinese socialism, well, sorry, socialism with Chinese characteristics. And I think it's a form of democracy that no country has reached. This completely counters everyone, I think, a lot of bashers of China. It's, again, another industry in the academic world, huge industry where they say, okay, there's only one union and so forth and so on.

But in fact, okay, so what? You have one union in a country of 1.4 billion people, and you say to yourself, well, that's pretty large. It's something like the ITUC and the WFTU, but only is far more democratic. and has a direct, you know, synthetic relationship with its constituent unions on a local basis. So those unions can actually organize on a local basis. Now, that doesn't mean that there are not workers exploited in China. Workers, every worker in China has a right to be in a union or is in a union, and they can do what they made with that union. We need to, yeah, I mean, they need to organize to build more power, and that's very hard to do in the private sector, which under the current administration is trying to minimize as much as possible.

So I would say that the ACF2U, by the way, is organizing migrant workers, 300 million migrant workers who represent industrial workers in the state-owned sector. of the economy. So I think that it is a beacon that many countries should emulate. Again, democracy is not a contestation between two parties that have the same basic ideology or no ideology whatsoever. So, Manny, you've been incredibly generous with your time, but I do want to close with one question because a big part of the book is something that we actually haven't had enough focus on in this conversation. And so I want to close us out with it, which is the woman question. As you point out throughout the book, there's a big, there needs to be a big focus on women when talking about migration. And you even have a nice summary of this

component in the conclusion, women in migration, social reproduction, exploitation, and isolation. So in closing, and feel free to include other thoughts that you may have as you wrap us up with this final answer. But I would like to focus a little bit on women specifically, because this is a really important topic, and we would be remiss to not mention it as we close out this conversation. Absolutely. Women are very important to recognize. They represent 50% half of all migrants in the world, migrant workers in the world. And this is a new phenomenon because if you go back to the 20th century, women tended not to migrate. in the 19th century, absolutely not.

The migrants were men. And yet today, they are hugely exploited workers who work in the gamuts. So many people say they only work in care work. No, they work in every sector of the economy. As I said before, agriculture, not so much construction, but a lot of construction, manufacturing, as well as care work and gig work. So I think it's a huge misnomer to think that women and pigeonhole women into one sector of the economy.

They work in many sectors of the economy. I'd like to say further very briefly, if I can, that women of the Global South, which makes up 85% of the world, go to the Global North to take care of other women's children or family members who are in need of care, and those people, and maybe Western scholars would argue, well, this is a form of empowerment. These are migrant scholars. We're empowering these Western women to go work for Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. Isn't that a wonderful thing?

Well, I think women should be empowered even in the West. I will say, however, that I think there's a large literature on this, that the women who work every day in care work and make almost no money and are really subjected to isolation in a tremendous way if you go to places like Singapore, as I noted earlier, Kuala Lumpur, even Hong Kong, a city like Hong Kong, which I think they should,

well I will say I won't say anything a city like Hong Kong I think one eighth of all people the city maybe over a million

by 800,000 workers are caregivers out of a population of 7 million so 1 out of 12 workers are migrant workers so then you figure out the math typical family

4 people and so it's something like one out of every five or four or five families has a guest worker caregiver in their households. I think that's outrageous in the sense that these workers are living

in the prime of their lives and they're sending money home to support their families and I think that's really a noble gesture. But some of the some of the real issues with respect to women is the trafficking of women by criminal enterprises throughout the world.

It's not just Jeffrey Epstein that's responsible for this, but many others throughout the world. The fact that women can be exploited on the job and in their workplaces and in their homes, on the job is the workplace, So in their, and, you know, within their communities, if they're working in other sectors of the economy, as cleaners, et cetera, or manufacturing workers, you know, the issues of sexual abuse is prevalent, highly prevalent, and many women come home. This is actually, I'll just give you a little short story, but I'll try to limit it as much as possible, so I won't give you, it's done. it's in the book. You know, women are sometimes asked to go because they can become caregivers for rich people. So they go for 10, 20 years in some cases. In some cases, they come home, they're considered to be outcasts. They are completely ignored by their home communities. So they have no home. And that's also true for people who go for three years.

You know, families are disrupted and so forth. People's lives are disrupted. I say this all the time that the prime of one's life is between 18 and 30. I'd be honest with you. You know, the time of your life where, you know, you could enjoy yourself and have fun, and people should do that. Their lives are completely ruined because in the prime of life, of their lives are taking care of other people's children and family members in different ways and are isolated and in some cases they have their passports confiscated under the

kafala system and the Gulf Cooperation Council states and Eylee exploit it. So I think that a special attention must be placed on the plight of women who are also amongst the most militant workers. I think people just think it's men, but actually women, migrant workers, are frequently involved in the major portion of the struggles, as I've seen here in New York City and other places around the world.

I've been involved in some of the women workers primarily, as well as some men, but women became the leaders in many instances. So I would like to say that, yes, women play a crucial role in the global economy as migrant workers. They're highly exploited, exploitable. They are treated far worse than male workers, typically, and they're pigeonholed, again, into specific kinds of jobs in which they could be subjected to sexual abuse and discrimination.

nation. So I think we need to really focus on empowering women. And you had a question earlier, and this dovetails with it about, hey, what is the solution? You know, really the solution to the migration question is for all countries to abide by specific principles of decent work. I mean, this is kind of a left argument. And I agree with it, to tell you the truth, I'll be honest with you, but that's never going to happen. That's never going to happen. There was a global compact on migration that was passed in 2019. It's not in place. Every agreement is between countries or not at all. You're either undocumented or you're a temporary worker, and every temporary worker can be cut from undocumented. Well, on that depressing note. I don't want to be depressing,

so that's okay i mean we just are realistic you know i'm being a little bit flippant here but you know that is the case that we have i just want to flag up one previous episode that we've done for listeners when you bring up the idea of or the reality of migrant laborers of migrant women laborers coming in to be caregivers in houses and then not being upheld as by many western feminists is allowing western women particularly white western women to be able to achieve things that they otherwise wouldn't be able to do. And therefore, it's a victory for feminism. This is very much in line with the conversation. And, you know, hint-hand listeners, you can go back and find this probably about two years ago at this point. But we had a crossover where Allison

from Red Menace and I, and so it was released on both feeds, interviewed Francoise Verges, about her terrific book, a decolonial feminism. And this is a really major thread throughout that book. So if you want to hear more from Francois's perspective as, you know, an anti-colonial decolonial feminist talking about these sorts of issues, go back and find that episode on a decolonial feminism. In fact, with it being about two years out, we should probably remastered that episode sometime, I think, Brett. So, you know, or look out for a remastered edition soon. But again, listeners, our guest was a manual mess. Our friend, Manny, and the book is the terrific, which everybody, I highly recommend you pick it up.

Migration is economic imperialism, how international labor mobility undermines economic development in poor countries, which was published by Pauity Press. Mani, thank you very much for coming back on the show. Can you let the listeners know how they can find more of your work and anything else that you want to direct the listeners to? Sure. I guess the best way is just to email me at Manny. Ness at gmail.com, if you want to directly correspond with me or on Twitter, hashtag Emanuel

Ness, I-M-M-A-N-U-E-L-N-E-S-S. And, yeah, I'd be happy to speak with anyone, and I return emails as well as texts within very short time. Yeah, absolutely. I will not give your phone number out to the raving hordes that we have listening to this show because you'd never get any sleep, but we all know that, man, he doesn't sleep anyway. Brett, how can the listeners find you in your other excellent podcasts? Yeah, first of all, thank you again, Emmanuel, for coming on the show, sharing your knowledge

with us, really, really appreciate it, a fan favor, and for good reason. As for me, you can find everything I do at Revolutionary Left Radio.com. Absolutely. Listeners should also check out our co-host, who is not able to make it today, Adnan Hussein. You can find him on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-I-R-S-A-I. I and check out his other podcasts, the Mudgellis. They just put out an episode on the history of the Ood, a beautiful and wonderful instrument. I listened to that episode and it was terrific.

So if you are looking for, as I said recently somewhere on one of our episodes, if you're looking for beauty, you listen to the Mudgellis, if you're looking for the Beast, you listen to Gorilla History. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-1-995. stay tuned, more updates about the upcoming book that Salvatore Engel de Morrow and I are translating and editing now. We'll be out through Iskra books relatively soon. And I guess we should also mention Brett that you, Adnan, and I wrote a forward for a forthcoming

collection of historical documents from the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the resistance movement that will also be coming out from Iskra books imminently. So stay tuned for that. You can keep up with all of those. releases by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. And again,

you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this and doing things like writing the forward for that forthcoming collection of historical documents by supporting us at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, with again, gorilla being spelled G-U-E-R-I-L-A

history. And on that note, listeners, and until next time, solidarity. You know,