Upstream - Migration as Economic Imperialism w/ Immanuel Ness

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey everyone, just a quick but important announcement before we get started on today's episode. So if you are a recurring donor through FlipCaus, so not Patreon, but through FlipCaus, please check your spam folder for an email from upstreampodcast.org because we've sent out some important emails regarding your donation and the FlipCaus platform. So look for the subject line, action required, your upstream donation. And we sent an original batch of emails out on September 2nd, and then we've begun sending out a second batch of reminder emails just recently. So you may or may not have two emails from us, but you will definitely have at least one. So thank you for doing that. And just a quick reminder

Starting point is 00:00:46 again that this is only for Flip Cause donors, not Patreon subscribers. If you're a Patreon subscriber, please completely disregard this announcement. All right. Thank you. There is a There is a general notion of a so-called migration crisis, when in fact, migrants themselves contribute to the U.S. economy. to a great extent, and to the detriment of their own economies, because you have the most able coming to the United States and other Western or Northern countries, and they do all, if not most of the labor that we need, that allows the economy to prosper.

Starting point is 00:01:49 Migrant workers are the exploited workers. They're despised by Westerners, and yet at the same time, they are essential workers. These are workers who are essential to Western economies. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. There's an idea out there that global migration is a net positive for global South development. that by migrating to wealthy countries, workers are able to not only improve their own lives, but that through remittances and the development of skills,

Starting point is 00:02:35 that migrant workers will actually improve the conditions of their origin countries as well. It sounds nice on the surface, but this idea couldn't be further from reality. The truth is that the systems of migration currently in place are actually legacies of hundreds of years of imperialism, and that far from improving conditions, migration under global capitalism contributes to underdevelopment, uneven and unequal exchange, and dependency of global South countries. Not to mention the toll it takes on migrant workers themselves, who are often trapped in precarious work in racist, xenophobic societies that despise them. Today we'll be joined by Emmanuel Ness to discuss all of this and more.

Starting point is 00:03:25 Emmanuel Ness is professor of political science at the City University of New York, Brooklyn, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and author of, Migration as Economic Imperialism, how international labor mobility undermines economic development in poor countries. And before we get started, Upstream is entirely listener-funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable, you'll be part of a growing movement,

Starting point is 00:04:17 and you'll be helping keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, So thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's Robert in conversation with Emmanuel Ness. All right, Emmanuel, it's great to have you on the show. Well, thank you, Robbie, for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be on. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Starting point is 00:04:48 And we always like to start with having our guests just introduce themselves in their own words. So, yeah, maybe we could just start with an introduction and tell us a little bit about the work that you do and how you came to be doing it. Thank you, Robbie. Once again, I'm very happy to be on upstream podcasts and its pleasure. I am a politically economist by training, and I continue to do that work. I have focused on the Global South, or what is called the periphery of the world economy, which actually is the majority of humanity. and I write about trade unions, workers, and labor, and migration, as well as several other themes like socialism, actually existing socialism. I do primarily studies and so forth of various

Starting point is 00:05:39 places, most recently China, where I'm completing a book on the Chinese labor rule, which will be very controversial, but I think it's important to get it right. And so those are some of the attributes. I'm the editor of the Journal of Labor and Society, which is a Marxist journal for labor. And I study the concept of unequal exchange most recently. And I should also say that I'm a professor at City University of New York and a visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. Thank you for sharing about all the cool stuff you're doing. And I'm actually really, really excited to hear that you're working on a book on the labor movement in China. We have a series on China that we're doing, so I'd love to invite you back for that whenever

Starting point is 00:06:30 that's ready and if you'd be interested in that. I'm in my final edits, and it's going to be highly controversial, but I think it will be correct. I'm confident. I've conducted significant research in China, both interviews, archival work, et cetera. And it sort of reflects the reality of the situation in China that is rooted actually in a socialist model, Lenin and so forth. And Mao had the same position on labor. And I would argue that the All-China Federation of Trade Union's practices that to the greatest degree possible, especially under General Secretary Xi Jinping. Awesome, awesome. Yeah, thank you so much for all of that. And today we are unfortunately not going to be talking about China, but fortunately we'll be talking about something that is on everybody's mind right now because the contradictions have been heightening to a degree where immigration, migration, and imperialism are really something that has been dominating our world in a way that is at least getting more attention than it was perhaps prior to October.

Starting point is 00:07:43 7th and prior to the Trump administration, although it's not like any of these issues are new. So we're talking about a book that you wrote on migration and imperialism. And it's an excellent book. I highly recommend it. A past guest of ours actually recommended it to me. So I'm really excited to be sharing it with our listeners. Migration as economic imperialism is the name of the book. how international labor mobility undermines economic development in poor countries. So that's the text we'll be talking about today. And I thought just to start, if you could just briefly lay out sort of your main argument for the book and give us a sense of why you chose to tackle this topic, and then we'll

Starting point is 00:08:29 get into more detail. Migration as economic imperialism is the name of the book. And the reason why I wrote the book is because there's a conundrum that many people people have about migration. One principal issue is that migrants in the United States are despised both by the right center and parts of the left as well. There is a general notion of a so-called migration crisis when, in fact, migrants themselves contribute to the U.S. economy to a great extent and to the detriment of their own economies, because you have the best, the brightest, the youngest, and the most able coming to the United States and other Western or

Starting point is 00:09:15 northern countries. And they do all, if not most of the labor that we need, that allows the economy to prosper. And I can give you many different areas in which that takes place. So the book really deals with that question. I look at countries of origin, which would be the places where people come from. I conducted research in each of these countries, as well as many others in Southeast Asia, in South America and Central America, as well as in Europe and Africa. So I understand the primary dynamics in each region, both from the perspective of the people leaving and the people who arrive. And so I put forward an argument that is based on the research I've done that shows and demonstrates, I believe,

Starting point is 00:10:06 correctly that migrant workers are the exploited workers. They're despised by Westerners. And I can expand on that if you would like. And yet at the same time, they are essential workers. These are workers who are essential to Western economies. In addition to that, I point out that migrant workers who leave their countries do not benefit their countries that they come from. And I'm not really talking about a brain drain. I'm just talking about the erosion of a society. And so places like Malawi, El Salvador, well, Vietnam would be one place, but also Nepal and other locations. I look at primary regions that these populations go to, as well as the conditions in which they leave behind and may come back to. Another significant factor is that those people left behind,

Starting point is 00:11:05 are often ignored in terms of books on migration. There is some research on the topic, but very little. And so what I'm very much interested in is kind of talking to people who have been left behind and also conducting research in places like Kathmandu, which is a very poor city where they just had an uprising. And this situation is quite economically, I'm going to say, underdeveloped. And for that reason, these countries are not benefiting by any means as a consequence of remittances. This argument generally challenges the dominant liberal and world organizations that try to advance development in most of the world by arguing that remittances that are sent back home do not, in fact, contribute to the betterment of.

Starting point is 00:12:05 society, but in fact may contribute to harming the society to some degree because it contributes to a certain form of dependency that occurs, but no development whatsoever. There is no example of industrial or technological advance as a consequence of migration of any great degree whatsoever. So in a nutshell, that's the book, but I use a particular mechanism for understanding this, and that is the concept of unequal exchange, which was and is, I think, a very important concept that is alluded to greatly by Marx and Angles, as well as by Lenin himself, amongst others, that there is something called a labor aristocracy that exists in countries that are very, very rich. And this is a hard pill to swallow for people in the West,

Starting point is 00:13:02 but in some respects, social democracy in the West contributes to the betterment of workers and so forth, but also society as a whole. And we all support it, yet at the same time, countries that can afford it do so at the cost of hurting the countries in the origin places. So most of the world, that is. So imperialism is a very important factor in understanding migration, because, There's a form of extraction, if we look at migration, a surplus value extraction, both in the center and on the periphery, in this context, both amongst migrant workers themselves, as well as the peripheral countries, where there is an unequal exchange of trade.

Starting point is 00:13:51 So if we take a look at purchasing power parity, comparisons of wages and so forth, the wages that workers make in the global south are a pay. Hittance, you know, maybe in most places of Africa, I would say, I did a study of the Sahel recently, which is a region that is going through change today. It is maybe for every one dollar that a worker makes in a country like Mali or Burkina Faso, a worker in the United States would get $100. It's very same work. So I guess I could stop there. I mean, this work is based on the theoretical perspective of Argyri Emanuel, a Greek philosopher and a political economist whose work has become very, very popular amongst people who study imperialism especially, but also politically economy, particularly amongst people who study labor exchange, as well as ecological exchange. And in some respects, that's what I'm doing this book in the context of migration. One can certainly a study crowdsourcing as one example of unequal exchange in which workers in the global south are maybe performing services for people in the North, the United States and so forth, but they do so at a huge discount and a high degree to which a high percentage of the money in which they make is taken from them by these intermediary companies like.

Starting point is 00:15:27 upward. And as a consequence of that, there is a form of expropriation. But even worse still is that these are the highest paid and most well-educated workers in their countries of origin, and they do nothing for their own people. So I'm actually studying that right now, and I think it's very important. And yeah, that further keeps those states underdeveloped to a certain sense. And so you touched on so many things that we will dive deeper into. I really appreciate the introduction there and pretty much every point that you touched on. I have a question to dive deeper on. So I'm looking forward to that.

Starting point is 00:16:06 And then you also mentioned the Sahel States, which is interesting here. I'm glad to hear that you're currently doing some research on those states. We have a series. It's a Patreon series on the Sahel States. I think we're at four parts now. Wow. So again, so many overlaps here. so I'm really looking forward to potentially having you back on again for multiple episodes.

Starting point is 00:16:28 It sounds like we have a lot of alignment in our areas of interest. Before we get into more of the details on how migration under global capitalism leads to unequal exchange, to underdevelopment, to global inequality, all of which you touched upon, I would love to start the conversation around the causes of low-wage migration because, you know, there's a deeper, perhaps more systemic analysis that has to do with the way the global economy was restructured as you write in the introduction of your book, like with the fall of the Soviet Union and the shifting needs of capital. What you could think of as sort of like a more structured or like intentional even. actually I'll quote you here from the book Strategies established by multinational corporations seeking to expand their economic profitability

Starting point is 00:17:29 as you write And then there are the causes that are sort of more of the symptoms of the contradictions of global capitalism Like you know broadly more understood like wars sanctions that kind of thing So maybe let's start with the more systemic analysis Like if you could maybe just give us a history an explanation of that.

Starting point is 00:17:51 And then also if you want to just maybe touch on some of the more well-known causes, like things like sanctions or wars. Well, generally speaking, there is this perspective that most people have. It's from academics to ordinary people like myself or anyone. That perspective is that

Starting point is 00:18:09 migrants come to the United States because they will earn higher wages and because their situation is one that is very poor, and as a consequence of that, they will send back remittances and develop the countries back home. Along with that, first of all, that is incorrect that migrants, in fact, are in many instances forced from their communities as a consequence of the commodification of agriculture. Most workers who come to the United States and other rich countries are, in fact, people who are very

Starting point is 00:18:46 poor and have very few skills in some instances, but we also have many that have skills, and I can talk about that as well, for instance, in Silicon Valley. But in this context, you have, for instance, a country like India, which sends migrants across the world, especially to the Gulf states and the Southeast Asia, where in many instances, the migrants were forced off the land, or a migrant worker will, in some respect, as a consequence of unequal exchange, earn higher wages in the place of a destination and be able to support family members back home, which does happen at times, but not all the time. For instance, Gandhi was, in fact, one of the first to do that with respect to India. He became a lawyer in Britain, and then he went on to

Starting point is 00:19:39 South Africa, where he engaged in other kinds of law that I would argue is unethical. If you want me to get into that, I can, but I don't think for this point. But, you know, many well-known people are migrants or children of migrants and so forth. But in many instances, there is this notion that there is a desire to leave. And I argue that most people would rather stay home and develop their own society. I mean, why would anyone want to be away from their family unless they're being abused? for a very long period of time. So that's one point that is necessary.

Starting point is 00:20:14 If you go back to Mark's Capital Volume 3, you will find that, for instance, migrants might come back home with a lot of money and displace local villagers by buying all the land up and turning the workers, the agricultural workers, into workers for the migrant who returns home. So there is a vicious cycle in this whole process. But some of the other reasons that are given for migration, as you pointed out, would be ecological disaster that takes place frequently. So, for instance, to use India once again, in Kerala, about five years ago, there was a major monsoon that was caused by global warming.

Starting point is 00:21:02 Kerala is a state, the southern state of India. and many people were displaced. Maybe over 100,000 were displaced from their tea plantations and so forth. And many became migrant workers in various countries around the world. And as a consequence of that, people said they benefited in some respect, but they essentially lost their capacity to develop the land and to continue to become tea workers. So this was a form of displacement that was significant.

Starting point is 00:21:32 And I'll stick with India once more in pointing out that, obviously, one of the most important incidents that took place over the last decade is COVID-19. And in India, there was a significant problem with respect to COVID-19. All the urban residents in India, who were migrants, were forced back to their rural locations. And it created a tremendous amount of dislocation, including death, amongst many of the migrants and uprisings that took place throughout the country. But this also comes at a global level, for instance. So migrants from South America and Central America are often fleeing from the destruction of their environments by unequal exchange of pollution in the sense that we live in a world

Starting point is 00:22:22 where there is a commodification of the air and the ecology of the world. and as a consequence, much of the industry and polluting products are produced in places like Mexico, Central America, and beyond. So, for instance, we don't have any smoke cities, that's a term I think they use, or smoke towns, a term they used in Britain to describe former cities that were once extremely polluted. So if we go to a place like New York or most former industrial cities around the United States, including Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one will find that the air is very clean. At one time, that air was very polluted. And my point is that these migrants are essentially mostly agricultural workers who had migrated to the United States or Canada and other locations as a consequence of the incapacity to grow their crops.

Starting point is 00:23:21 at the same rate as they could in the past and be able to make a living. I mean, it can give, you know, obviously sanctions. You brought up that very important point, which I am very interested in, and that, you know, I think it does cause migration in many places. For instance, in the case of the Middle East or West Asia, as we would prefer to call it, migrants from Syria in 2014, there was a major wave of migration to Europe from North Africa and West Asia. And many of them came from countries that the United States had essentially destroyed militarily by proxy war or directly through NATO. So I'm referring to countries like

Starting point is 00:24:04 Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and so forth and so on. And these are the migrants that had eventually come to Europe in this context. And many of these countries were under sanctioned by Europe as well. And so sanctions are the prohibition of trade with countries like Syria, let's say. And as a consequence, people really have no way to survive because that trade is essential. And countries of the global south, core countries or semi-peritual countries, require technology in order to develop. It's the most important thing. in fact, and don't have it and therefore don't have the means to live and therefore migrate and take their families with them and so forth and so on. But the sanctions on Syria were

Starting point is 00:24:54 highly punishing and essentially destroyed the fabric of the country. I would say that sanctions on countries like North Korea may not work, notwithstanding what people say and the popular media media says about North Korea, North Korea is doing fairly well in terms of the basic necessities of life. And it is a socialist country, one of five that are left in the world and hopefully growing, maybe more. And they, in fact, were able to advance new forms of production as a consequence of being autarkic producing from within. So in that context, migration did not take place from Korea. Certainly you have poor people in every country, but anyone in Korea could survive for the most part.

Starting point is 00:25:45 There's a passage in the text where you talk about sort of the causes of migration more structurally and sort of as they exploded more in the 90s after the Soviet Union fell and the United States deindustrialized. and multinational corporations realized it was much cheaper that they could go abroad and pay less for workers abroad. And that sort of reshaped the global economy in a sense and caused migration to increase. Do I have that right? Yes, absolutely. The main argument is that in 1990s, or what is referred to as a unipolar moment where the United

Starting point is 00:26:30 States was the unquestionable hegemon of the world. I still think they are, but that's another question we can discuss. At that point, the United States was able to advance whatever kind of policy it wished on the entire world. And any country that sought to opt out of neoliberal policies, the removal of any kind of welfare state benefits, especially in the global south, places like Brazil, South Africa, amongst other countries, where they do have some modicum of social welfare. I mean, there was an effort in 1990 to remove all forms of social welfare to engage in neoliberal policies, which is the removal of the state, generally speaking, from social life. So with respect to the former Soviet Union, in fact, one of the countries

Starting point is 00:27:19 that I examined in this book is Moldova. You found an extensive migration. In fact, most of its population lives abroad. And it's a population of about five million. Half of them live abroad overseas, and usually southern Europe for the most part. And so that's just one example of that. And, you know, United States imposition of these policies forced people from their locations and their homes and so forth and makes it almost a requirement for people to leave because there's no way to survive at home. So, for instance, with respect to the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union in this context, I would argue that the Soviet Union, and I think most of your listeners would agree, was pillaged during the 1990s when it became

Starting point is 00:28:07 a independent state of Russia, Russian Federation. And it was a very, very difficult time where many people died of diseases that could have been prevented. People were in a state of despair as a general rule. The population declined dramatically. People would not have families or children and so forth. These were some of the consequences of the development of oligarchs who were essentially appointed in many instances by Westerners. So I think it's very important to recognize that neoliberalism is a project that was initiated by the United States and imposed on parts of the world that did not wish to actually have those programs but really had no way to resist, like China actually could and did resist neoliberalism.

Starting point is 00:28:59 It's a very good book on that subject. So, you know, in fact, there is a oligarch by the name of Bill Browder Jr., you may have heard of the name before, but he was involved in the expropriation of significant amounts of natural resources from the Russian Federation, you know, at bottom dollar, you know, so he owned and controlled many natural resources. He actually is an American who went to Britain because the tax rate was lower and he became a British citizen. I won't get into his specific life, but I suggest people reexamine the whole question of Magnitsky. There's a very good film on that called The Magnitsky Act Behind the Scenes. It's available for free, I think, on YouTube.

Starting point is 00:29:41 I highly recommend it. It's a documentary that seems like a drama and very, very interesting in terms of what Bill Browder was up to, an oligarch. But that's just one example of the displacement of population. So in this context, the Russian Federation population had to move to urban areas in order to survive, which also contributed to the decline of peripheral areas. This includes actually not just Russia, but the entire Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, places like Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and so forth and so on, just as examples of regions of the Soviet Union where you had high levels of migration to urban areas like Moscow

Starting point is 00:30:27 and what is now called St. Petersburg. So before we get a little bit more into some of the questions, that I have around the way that underdevelopment and unequal exchange manifest through migration. I'm wondering if we can do a little bit more table setting. So you focus a lot on remittances in the book. And I'd love it if you could maybe just explain. I'm sure most people know remittances are,

Starting point is 00:30:57 but maybe just give us a sense of the quantity and how remittances work. And also maybe just give us a bit of a sense of the scale of migration in the world. Like, you know, how many people are migrants, how many people are impacted in terms of, like, you lay out in the book, like connections and family members of migrants, like the impact of migration and just kind of the scale of it. And then, yeah, again, maybe if you could just give us a sense in the same way of like remittances and the scale of those two. Okay, certainly, Robbie, let's start with remittances. Well, many of us,

Starting point is 00:31:36 actually give remittances to people around the world. Typically, it's done by poor people through Western Union or various different types of services that wire money to individuals at the location of a poor country. So one can go to a pharmacy or drugstore or someplace like that and find a Western Union or it's equivalent. And so poor people generally go to those places to send money back home.

Starting point is 00:32:05 and they take a huge amount of, a huge cut of the money. I would say something like 6% of the money is remittances. The remittances are based on the money that migrants make that are sent home, and that Caposync are a form of development for poor countries which have not come to fruition. So in terms of the absolute amount of money, it's enormous, actually. it's close to 800 billion. And that just goes to show you the degree to which this scheme is widespread and yet not helping people whatsoever.

Starting point is 00:32:44 I mean, $800 billion sounds like a lot of money and is a lot of money. But when we refer to the number of migrants that are workers, we're looking at around 200 million workers. So actually, there isn't, you know, if you do the math, there really isn't much remittances going back home. It's only people who are able to send them back home, and they're frequently irregular. So it isn't as a panacea, as some people see it, in which those people who are living back home are becoming millionaires or becoming wealthy or even able to move out of their own homes. But essentially, I mean, at best, it would probably provide somebody's education because in many parts of the world, primary education you have to pay for.

Starting point is 00:33:30 it may pay for somebody's heart surgery because it costs a lot of money wherever you go. And so we're looking at about $800 billion today. I'm just trying to update the book a little bit. And about 200 million workers. So if you think about 200 million workers who leave their countries of origin to work in places like the United States, well, just think about their families. And if we were to average a family, in this case a nuclear family and say, well, the average nuclear family, five, which is probably much more than that in the global south, well, then we're looking

Starting point is 00:34:06 at a billion workers or a billion people that are affected, which is one out of every eight people on the planet. And that's why migration is such a huge and significant issue, because it disrupts the entire family life, it disrupts the economies, it disrupts the culture and so forth that is prevailing in the origin countries. And so, yeah, in many instances, it works directly through the sending of remittances from the employer, it depends on what region of the world, from the employer to the country of the origin, the family members, but to do so, a huge amount of cost is taken off. So if we take a look at, let's say, $800 billion, just to make the math easy, let's say a

Starting point is 00:34:54 percent of $800 billion is taken away for transfer costs and so forth. That's a significant amount of money and represents something like $80 billion. So it shows you that not only are the workers exploited as migrants in the West or other parts of the world is not just the West, but the money they make they can't keep when they send them home because of the charges of remittances. So remittances represents the money workers, in this case migrant workers make, and send to another country. Those are remittances. Yeah, so you mentioned the World Bank. I'm curious if you can tell us a little bit about this like prevailing economic belief.

Starting point is 00:35:40 You've touched on it already under neoliberalism and what I'd say is probably a pretty commonly held belief generally that migration is actually a net benefit for the countries that migrants come from, then in fact, it's a primary means of economic development for poor countries. So maybe just lay out that economic model, the model of what you've called in the book, remittances as development, which is advanced by development agencies and finance capitalists and Western governments. So tell us the myth, and then I want to ask you to dispel the myth, sort of point by point, and talk about why these arguments are actually not true.

Starting point is 00:36:23 Yeah, they are advanced by the World Bank and the IMF and various other agencies that operate. So the notion of remittances as development has, I would say, for the last 25 years, become increasingly important, maybe even 30 years. And it became termed as the remittances nexus in which this would be the way in which poor countries would develop. Now, once again, think of poor countries as the majority of the world. So if we take a look at the world, we would say, let's say, seven-eighths of the world or something like that, or let's say 75% of the world live on the periphery, not generally at the same wage scales and so forth, but live in poor countries compared to, let's say, the United States.

Starting point is 00:37:10 And so the idea is through sending remittances, these workers sending remittances back home, that countries of origin would be able to develop. When they say develop, they're referring to technological development, they're referring to infrastructural development, development of health care, education, housing, transportation, and you name it, that these countries would transform themselves into advanced countries in which people would live very well and prosperously. So that is not, in fact, the case.

Starting point is 00:37:43 I mean, I can go on. I mean, that's essentially the point is this is the remittances, a nexus. And it's not just the World Bank and IMF that advances. It's also most migration scholars are people who study migration who will say, oh, yeah, migration is a great thing. Well, I also think migration is a great thing, but I don't think people should be forced into migration because of absolute need. So I'm not saying anything against migrants. I think migrants are very important to society, creates a higher level of diversity. I can add a caveat to that in the sense of

Starting point is 00:38:17 there is a cultural imperialist dimension to that from the north. But the point would be is that these countries of the South would develop. You know, when you have a country like Moldova, I'll just go back to that, or El Salvador, where both parents are away for most of the year, or for years at a time, and never come back,

Starting point is 00:38:38 what happens to the children and so forth, or what happens to the extended family members, grandparents, and so forth, grandchildren, et cetera, and who may actually have needs and so forth. There's a great literature on the absence of people from the communities themselves. So that's actually something that is a form of, I would say, extraction, extracting the best and brightest. By that, I mean those people who are the most educated, most wealthy, migrate to foreign countries, people who are the youngest and most able to work

Starting point is 00:39:12 and have skills that are needed in the West, but also workers who are farm workers who are willing to take extreme risks in their lives, such as doing community services to prevent the transmission of COVID-19, and a whole other discussion there. but if we take a look at most of those people who are engaged in providing those services, most, I'm saying, not just some, they were migrant workers. So in a place like New York City where I live, so who does the deliveries? They're migrant workers. That goes for food, that goes for products and so forth.

Starting point is 00:39:54 Who's in those ambulances that are taking people to hospitals? The point would be is that they were doing all this very important work at a time when they were exposed to COVID and, you know, many of them died. So why did they die? Because they didn't have access to some of the vaccines. Those workers were put under physical risk as a consequence. And they are the real heroes. They're not Americans that are the heroes.

Starting point is 00:40:24 Of course, there may be some, but I would argue that they are the migrant workers who have done the vast majority of the work. so they may measure or take samples out of the water and the sewers and so forth for health care agencies or public service agencies and so forth. These were the essential skills. And so the World Bank and the IMF are advancing this argument about how great it is, and they don't really talk about the contributions of migrant workers to their societies, the Western societies this would be, as well as wealthy societies.

Starting point is 00:41:02 Yeah, no, yeah, the focus from this sort of model of remittances is development, as you're saying it like overlooks a lot of the harms that are brought upon migrants in the countries that they arrive at. And it also, it's also incorrect in that development doesn't actually occur in the origin countries for a variety of reasons, one of which you underscored is that a lot of the people who have certain designations. skills or who are most able to work, are unable then to help develop the countries of origin because they are, for one reason or another, compelled to go to countries like the United States. And then there's this sort of double, there's the exploitation that comes with being a low-wage worker, but then there's this double sort of arrow of oppression and disdain and hatred that they're experience in the countries that they come to, which I want to ask you about more as well in a little bit. But I want to stick to the economic imperialism side of it and ask you to maybe unpack a little bit more some of the ways that immigration acts as economic imperialism. And you actually

Starting point is 00:42:20 argue that this model, in fact, continues five centuries of the West's legacy of extraction of resources from the global south countries and that it's simply an extension of economic imperialism that is migration. So maybe if you could unpack that statement for us from the book and then in doing so, I mean, there's capital flight and underdevelopment, there's uneven development, there's dependence, all of these issues that are a result of migration as economic imperialism. So maybe if you could talk about that a little bit more. Yeah, sure, I'd be pleased to. In fact, that's a central argument in the book. First of all, we have to take as the premise that underdeveloped countries are living, they have populations who are living under deplorable conditions, and those conditions

Starting point is 00:43:14 are related to the lower wage costs, far lower wage costs that exist in underdeveloped countries compared to imperialist countries, which is what I'll call them. And so those factors are, you know, anywhere from one to ten, or even one to five, one to ten, or one to a hundred in cases like Africa, if you have Africans migrating to Western Europe or North America. And so this is what I referred to as unequal exchange as being a primary driver of migration, because in some respects, the solution to inequality on a global scale is to have all the populations of the global south move to the global north, in which they would be able to benefit from the higher wages that are able to be accrued as a consequence of that.

Starting point is 00:44:07 In fact, even migrant workers admittedly do get higher wages than anything you can expect at a origin country like El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and so forth and so on. So, you know, I refer to this whole process as unequal exchange, echoing the great Argyri Emmanuel's work, unequal exchange, where, you know, you have trade and so forth, and products and so forth that are worth far lower amounts of money in the global south than they are here in the north or in the core countries of the world. And, you know, and you raised the point of capital flight a moment ago, and I think that's extremely important as well, because if people are going to invest money, if you're in the global south, and let's say you're living in Nepal, you're not going to invest your money in Nepalese banks.

Starting point is 00:44:58 It's more likely that you'll put that money if you're going to invest it, if you call it investment, but they'll be safer in American banks or Western banks in some ways or another. And so in this context, there's no way that money is going to even reach those populations because they will stay at the country of origin. We see the depreciation of value of currencies in places like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, all throughout Africa, including some of the countries that the West likes to applaud as being great developers such as Ghana and Kenya, which had had to be put under structural adjustment policies as a consequence of their inability to pay back loans that were charged by Western banks at usury rates. that are not charged by China and so forth. You know, so when we examine this whole question of development, capital flight, unequal development, as well as uneven development, and dependence, we can see that there is a structural issue with respect to value. And I think that's the most important point, that what the wealthy countries of the world, that I would argue that wealthy populations or the capitalist classes of the

Starting point is 00:46:19 world want is they want to ensure the maintenance of a system of unequal exchange and dependence in which it is viewed by the population that, well, my dream is to make it to the United States and they're all going to make a lot of money and be able to advance myself, when in fact, that, first of all, usually does not come to fruition, and even if it does, it's highly unlikely that those populations will be able to, and those workers will be able to send money back home because survival in the United States, if you live in any major city like New York or L.A. or San Francisco, et cetera, Chicago, one will have to pay a lot of money to even live. Housing costs are extremely expensive and virtually everything. So people have a very difficult time even providing for

Starting point is 00:47:11 themselves. So we also need to differentiate in terms of dependence. that the process of migration contributes to dependence because in most instances, those people who are high-wage workers and high-skilled workers who migrate to places like Silicon Valley are making a fraction of what actually high-wage workers would make in the United States, but I'm not arguing that at this point, but they make more money than almost anyone, and they're able to develop a economy of sorts through going back and forth from their countries of origin and become very wealthy.

Starting point is 00:47:51 So there is a stratum of upper-class people, populations, highly skilled workers who are in the IT industry and so forth, medical doctors and beyond scientists, who are able to do well, but they represent a small fraction. And if you go back to the places where they come from, cities like Hyderabad or Bangalore, Mumbai, etc., Delhi, as well as other locations, but most of these populations are from India, they're in Silicon Valley. Those cities have become dependent on the relationship between the West, that would be, let's say, Silicon Valley, and those locations. So they may call themselves high-tech capitals of the Global South or of India, but if the United States were to go away, or if U.S. IT companies were to go away, well, those companies would also fail to advance themselves because of the nature of that economy there.

Starting point is 00:48:51 So one of the key point is to ensure that there is a historical, as you pointed out, a 500-year effort initiative to ensure immobility for most of the population. so that workers in the north will do far better than anywhere else of the world, workers of the world, and that developed countries have always ensured that there will be significant wage differentials between their countries and the periphery. And so I would argue that this is the major feature that is embedded in the international political economy and has been around for under capitalism, let's say, at least 250 years. years, and it maintains that power. So when we read the works of Marx and Engels, the introduction to the English working class forward to the 1883 edition, its original edition was

Starting point is 00:49:47 1844, Angles points out, and Marx does too, I might have the citation here, that, in fact, the biggest problem is the inequality between countries. In the case of Marx and Engels, It might have been Ireland and Irish workers at the time, but they were also cognizant that there was a far larger population beyond that were doing very poorly and so forth. And even Marx admonished the trade unions of Britain for being very greedy and so forth. This is also echoed in the work of Lenin and his important research on but also analysis of the level of formation of a specific strata of workers that are in the global north and they actually make up the majority of those workers who are beneficiaries of low-wage jobs.

Starting point is 00:50:43 In fact, the entire premise of low-wage jobs for immigrant workers and also low-wage jobs back at home is the premise of imperialism, the latest stage of capitalism or the highest stage of capitalism. The real word is the latest. That's what he intended. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Emmanuel Ness. We'll be right back. understand why I play

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Starting point is 00:53:09 Try to mend What I've done I can stand notes on my throne under my bed, I'll be unfair that I need to hate the things that remind me of you. So if I'm around If I run around Like a snake

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Starting point is 00:54:24 Unfair that I mean to hate the things that remind me alone with you that was unfair by bliss now back to our conversation with emmanuel ness so we've spent a lot of time in the last couple years on this show focusing on underdevelopment and we've done this sort of looking both historically through like outright colonialism but very much also through like neocolonialism economic imperialism and this is you know the way that western multinational corporations extract resources and you know they keep the industries and the workers in the global south countries they operate in as just sort of a resource they can extract from right like keeping them from learning the skills making sure that they operate in these states in a way that doesn't actually build up the sovereignty of these states but keeps them dependent on the west and so we've

Starting point is 00:55:44 talked about this for example with AES countries with Burkina Faso Niger and Mali and how they're fighting against this. We've talked about how China worked around this in a sense. But what I love about your book is like we haven't actually looked at this other aspect of underdevelopment, which is like how the West actually underdevelops the global South, like through migration, right? Like if we see workers as resources, then these workers are being extracted in a sense. So I do really appreciate you talking about that in detail. But of course, it's not just that there's a second form of, you could call it theft here, right? Where like there's a whole industry designed to siphon off remittances and it leads to like further deepening inequalities around

Starting point is 00:56:33 the world as well. And I think you refer to this in the book as like a reverse global value chain. And I love it if maybe you could like expand on that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. So the technical term is the migration infrastructure. And, you know, remittances are part of that whole process. So there are what we refer to as middlemen or companies who operate as third party providers. So they, in fact, treat migrants. Obviously, they are agents in the production process. We have to think of migrant workers as producers. But in many instances, they're viewed as commodities that can be traded and traded from poor countries to wealthy countries so that that migration and infrastructure, in my opinion, which is somewhat different from the perspectives that have been advanced by mainstream migration theorists, which in itself is an infrastructure. And that is that migrant workers are treated as commodities to be traded from one place to the other. And yet there's some incredible examples that I found of actual people

Starting point is 00:57:46 who I spoke with and discussed, who came back to their origin countries poorer than they were and when they went out because you have to pay a fee to a third-party contractor who will say, well, what I'm going to do is find you a place to work in, let's say, Malaysia. Let's stick with the case in Nepal. And so as a consequence of that, the Nepali who is working in Malaysia, And I can explain Malaysia, which is a very interesting country in itself, ends up having to pay for the contractor to provide the contact with the final destination employer.

Starting point is 00:58:31 Now, not everything in this process works smoothly for the migrant worker, especially for the migrant worker, because there is also a mechanism within this whole process. Obviously, people have to buy plane tickets. people have to ensure that they're paying for their rent and paying for their food, et cetera, all the things and essentials that we need to live. That is not something that's provided for poor and working class people in the Global South who migrate to fairly wealthy countries or even wealthy countries. And so in many instances, people actually don't get the proper nutrition and so forth at the destination locations, especially in parts of the Global South.

Starting point is 00:59:11 But one mechanism, as we've seen in the United States more recently, is this whole notion of enforcing migration laws or immigration laws in this context. And so, for instance, in the corridor of East Asia or Asia as a whole, Southeast East Asia and notwithstanding China, there are laws that every country has in terms of the admittance of guest workers, or in this case we're referring to migrant workers. I refer them to, as well as guest workers, because it's a traditional term that's been used. And so, you know, just like you have to get a visa to work in this country, you have to get a visa to work in every country of the world if you want to work. So those visas have stipulations that actually, that are encoded with a means to get them kicked out of those countries, deported. So when I went to Malaysia, which is a fairly wealthy country in Southeast Asia, I say wealthy because there's a very wealthy class of people there who dominate the country. I'm not saying that most Malayans are wealthy because actually the Malayans are in some respects

Starting point is 01:00:21 not even allowed to work in society. They're not trained or educated to work. And there's a lot of statements by the population that controls the country that are derogatory toward the majority of the population. So in this context, so let's say you're a Nepali worker employed for a construction company and that the project comes to a lull or to a finish. And so the Nepali worker has a, let's say, nine-month contract, which is usually the case, no longer than nine months. And do you imagine being able to even collect any money that would be significant to develop the country back home of Nepal? Well,

Starting point is 01:01:03 it doesn't take place, but they have a means to deport these workers, and that is the employer, and this I actually saw, the employer of one firm says, well, you know, we don't want to keep this worker idle and keep paying him or her. So what we'll do is we'll send that person to another company. Well, embedded within the migration legislation of Malaysia as well as many other countries is that if you work for two employers, this is the United States too, the second employer, you are undocumented. So you become undocumented as a consequence of that. And you become deportable. So I actually did go to Malaysia during the height of the COVID pandemic. And what I saw was just abominable with respect to a kind of infrastructure in itself of deportation. So that once

Starting point is 01:01:54 somebody becomes working for a secondary employer, and let's say they're not even, you know, really sort of redundant in a certain way. They're not really being able to be used full-time. The employer has a means to have that person deported. So in Malaysia, if you go to the sites where migrants work, as well as airport, you'll find these security trucks that are basically jails with bars, iron bars and so forth. They're buses, actually. They just think of a bus with iron bars on them. And they're being deported at the airport and other places. and with no money whatsoever. And so, you know, I did speak to a number of people in Nepal who were deported and were very,

Starting point is 01:02:37 very upset about their experience. This is also true for other countries as well. Now, I'm not just picking on Malaysia. There are many other countries where this happens. Of course, we're all familiar with the infrastructure that exists in West Asia, in this case, the Gulf countries, the Gulf Cooperation Council. And this is by that I'm referring to United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Arabia, et cetera, Kuwait, where they have extremely severe migration laws where, yet at the same time,

Starting point is 01:03:06 the majority of the populations in these countries are migrant workers. So one may ask, well, what's the population of the United Arab Emirates? And so somebody may say, well, they're a country of 13 million people. Well, that would be correct, because 10 million of that population are actually migrant workers or they're on contracts for a temporary period of time. And so you have 10 million people serving three million of that population. Now, of course, we shouldn't allow the Israeli entity or Zionist entity. I'm going to be very worth right to get away with this either because they treat their migrant workers extremely poorly, certainly Palestinians, but some of your listeners may recall amongst those people who were captured were migrant workers, captured after the events of October 7. and these people were amongst the poorest and most vulnerable of all the populations,

Starting point is 01:04:03 and really the Israelis didn't care about them whatsoever. Obviously, they treat Palestinians as if they are foreigners, which is also even worse. I'm hearing here, too, what's really interesting, of course, is that, like, it's not just, as somebody say, like, I'm living in California, right? So we have a lot of immigrants coming from Mexico, from Central and South America, and that's like, you know, a very classic case of, you know, the United States as the sort of global hegemon. And then you have these states that are in its, you know, quote unquote backyard, which have been ravaged by all of the United States's adventures abroad. and it's, you know, just everything that comes with imperialism. And they're forced for many reasons, some more structural, some more symptomatic, to

Starting point is 01:04:59 migrate to the United States to seek what they hope. And generally are, unfortunately, those hopes are dashed will be a better life for them and their families back home. But then you also have, like, migration that's happening between what would be commonly thought of as global South countries. And then you start, and I think you brought this into the. the conversation pretty early. It's like you have these ruling classes in these global South countries who are exploiting migration and migrant workers. And there's a whole different dynamic there,

Starting point is 01:05:34 it seems like, that's like very unique to say specific relationships that these countries form with each other, right? Like you have Nepal and Malaysia. You have, you know, back in the day or I'm not sure if this is still the case, but through reading Walter Rodney, you have a lot of, like, Indian migrants to Guyana, right? And then so there's like all of these different dynamics of play. So it's very fascinating. And I don't know if there's really a question in there, but I'm just sort of like reflecting on, yeah, on that sort of dynamic as well. Yeah, but I also add to that a very good point that you're making. And that is that the real beneficiaries are the multinational corporations. who own and control the global supply chains, or control them, and global production chains, where, for instance, a country like Malaysia produces chips, electronic or computer chips and so forth, where they sell those products to the United States at extremely low prices,

Starting point is 01:06:35 as complete products. It may be computers or various other kinds of devices and so forth that are very valuable. They're produced at a very low cost. And so we're not only referring to just low-wage workers who are in construction sites, which I consider construction to be a very dangerous and, in many ways, skill job, depending on what you're doing, but in the context of the production of semiconductors of various types, you know, Malaysia is not at the very top, but they produce for the United States and for Western economies at a very, very low price so that the majority of the Malaysian working class itself is highly exploited.

Starting point is 01:07:15 as you were pointing out before just now. And so I think that as you're also referring to these global production chains and the backward and forward processes that exist with respect to migration and other aspects, what's so interesting about Malaysia is that there's sort of like an island that produces for the West. And yet at the same time, it's a place that a very large proportion of the population is poor. and the only way that they can actually produce semiconductors or computer chips and so forth is through securing migrant workers from overseas at very low wages.

Starting point is 01:07:56 And so they may be coming from India and so forth. But these people are actually manufacturing these products. So it's a lose-lose situation to migrant workers as well as their countries of origin. Yeah, the migrant worker may be able to pay for this. through that, a new extension on their house, TV set, etc. But that's not development as far as I'm concerned. Right, right, yeah. All roads lead to Rome or the United States. So I just have a couple more questions for you. This next one might be a little bit of a big one, though, and I think you've addressed certain parts of it, but as you know, all of us, our listeners and ourselves are well aware

Starting point is 01:08:41 that immigration has really become a primary issue for the fascist Trump regime. And I'd like to take some time talking about the treatment and conditions of migrant workers and destination regions, which you've touched upon a little bit. But maybe if we could focus a little bit on the United States here, a cheap and precarious workforce is one that has always been needed in capitalism, right? Like you mentioned the Irish being exploited and repressed in England, just off the top my head here in California, Chinese laborers who built the railroads. It's just, it's an endless list, right? And it's a feature of capitalism. And you write in the book that migrant laborers

Starting point is 01:09:22 are in fact integral to destination countries. And it's also like a glaring contradiction within this system that these workers are simultaneously needed and despised. And I think you used that word, and I've also used that word independently. I think it's a really apt word to capture the feelings that are, like, broadly associated towards migrants in the United States. They're often mistreated. They're used as scapegoats, you know, like we're seeing with the Trump administration. They're also criminalized and disproportionately policed, and we explored this in our episode with Julian Goh on the Imperial Boomerang. But maybe if you could talk a little bit more about this contradiction, like how global capitalism relies on this underclass of precarious,

Starting point is 01:10:13 replaceable workers to begin with. And then, you know, what are the systemic challenges that these workers face in destination countries? And I'm particularly thinking here about the United States. Yes. Very good points that you made. Let me see if I can try to respond. I certainly agree with the points you make, it's certainly true, you know, in some respects that this country was built by migrant workers. In many instances, those migrant workers were forced to leave. So in this context, you mentioned the Chinese workers in California. Well, they built the intercontinental railway and they built many other things in the United States that this country benefited from, and yet those workers were all forced to leave by 1883. And some went back to China,

Starting point is 01:11:01 others went to Latin America, et cetera. And so what happened in the 1850s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and so forth, or at least after the Civil War, we see a repetition of it today with respect to migrant workers, including Chinese workers, I would say. And that is one of those big contradictions, which obviously the world is based on contradictions of various forms through the dialectics that go on between workers and employers

Starting point is 01:11:29 and struggles that take place. But how are these migrant workers treated? Well, first of all, I would start with a premise that in the United States, we all frequently talk about the fact that the United States does not have an immigration policy or a migration policy. And then many of the big capitalists that are out there, multinational corporations who are working for AI or IT giants of this world or of the United States, they dominate in this country, that these workers are always criminalized by the very, and I'm not going to say always, there's a very small proportion of workers in this country, United States, that actually enter the country with a papers. The vast majority of migrant workers enter this country without those papers. And my argument is that is the American policy. They actually have a regime of migrants, and it's called undocumented migration. Quote, unquote, illegal migration is what Trump called. So that is the system that we have. So when people say, or capitalists say, well, we need a system of migration, I would say, well, you're ready to have one.

Starting point is 01:12:43 And that one is based on depending on exploitable workers who could be arrested, detained, and deported. And in many cases, deported to jail of various parts of the world, in this case, El Salvador. So I would make a very strong case that the United States has a migration regime, even though many people say we don't have an immigration policy. But on top of that, the way it's being enforced today is highly rapacious if we take a look at the the levels of fear and also the actuality of deportations that are taking place in the United States, even in what are referred to as sanctuary cities or a state like California, which is far better than most on the question of migration. And that, you know, so for instance, our current mayor in New York City, Eric Adams, had a deal with Trump to escape prosecution for some form

Starting point is 01:13:39 of, I guess he was engaged in some kind of fraud with the Turkish embassy, but there are some other instances where they were taking money for campaign purposes under the table. I don't know the specifics of it, but we all know here in New York City and maybe throughout the country that Eric Adams was facing federal prosecution for those policies. And Trump pardoned him in advance for all those potential crimes. And in exchange, and this is well known, Adam said he was going to ensure that New York City is not a sanctuary city and that he was going to enforce all migration laws. Now, Eric Adams used to be a cop and I think that's something to do with it. Most of the, I'm going to be very clear, the African-American

Starting point is 01:14:27 and black population in New York City detest him because of the fact that he hasn't really cared at all about improving the conditions of those populations, but he's serving Wall Street and he's serving those people in power. So, you know, we have a lot of corruption within the country that is related to migration in the sense that the real violators of migration laws are, in fact, those people are seeking to enforce them, because the basis of enforcement is through violating laws in New York City and maybe California, too, that say that these cities will not deport any migrants whatsoever. So we really don't have the democratic right to have policies of our own.

Starting point is 01:15:11 And yeah, I think that we are reaching a certain stage where migrant workers will be, they are being criminalized and they're going to be even further criminalized. And just the idea of potentially being criminalized, as you well know, Ravi, contributes to isolation and contributes to no demands for wages or wage increases and so forth. I recently interviewed an industry that is growing, workers in industry that is growing rapidly, perhaps the most rapidly growing industry in the world, and certainly in the United States, and that is the digital economy. And so I interviewed workers who were delivering food to people's homes.

Starting point is 01:15:50 In New York City, that's a big thing. I'm sure it's true in California as well. And all the workers at this center were from the country of Guinea in West Africa. And they're working for a pittance, But, you know, it was very difficult to speak with them. In fact, I had to get Eganian to interview them because there was no way they would speak to somebody like me, and I don't blame them because I could be an enforcer of the federal government in one way or another.

Starting point is 01:16:17 I mean, if I were them, I wouldn't speak to me either. But I got the questions, and, you know, most of these workers came here because of violence that took place in that country. In many instances, that violence is an extension of imperialist policies, whether it's French or British or in many instances, the United States, as well as some other countries like Israel, to be honest with you, that these workers are forced from their countries. They have no hope whatsoever. They do have dreams of going back home to a better country, but they're working at very, very low wages, no wages at all. They don't have an employer, as we know,

Starting point is 01:16:55 digital workers don't have employers, but they just work on the platform, the platform economy, gig workers. So they're on their motorized bicycles or motor scooters, and they go from one place or the other working 18-hour days. And they also have to pay for those motorbikes. They also have to pay for their helmets and all the accoutrements that are required, as well as the right to actually deliver. And of course, you have these app companies that are making fortunes off of them like Uber, Uber eats, and so forth. And then you have the intermediary restaurants that also are able to profit from them because they're there. Otherwise, they wouldn't get that business. So I'm just giving you one example that's drawn from New York City. I can give you

Starting point is 01:17:41 many others, but these are interviews that I conducted in November of last year before Trump was elected. Can you imagine there's no way they're going to talk to me now? I mean, they wouldn't then. There's just no way. And I wouldn't either with our then. So I know if I answered your question, but I think we can go on for a very long discussion, but I think I could say that we are in a new era under Trump. You hope for the least worst thing happening, I would say. And, you know, one would hope that these populations would not be criminalized and so forth under capitalism, but the situation has gotten even worse. Yet at the same time, people like Donald Trump hired undocumented workers when he was a construction magnet.

Starting point is 01:18:26 in New York City, a development magnate in New York City. I mean, he's one of the most corrupt people in the world. So, but he trafficked in, if you want to use that terminology, in migrant workers significantly, especially in the construction industry. I hope I don't get arrested for that, but anyway. You never know these days. So while we're talking about Trump, I just want to get your take on sort of your analysis on why the Trump administration is currently going after immigrants. I mean, I think we're familiar with the scapegoat argument here. I imagine, though, it's creating a lot of concern among the capitalist class themselves who rely on these workers for, you know, super profits. In fact, here, I'm just going to bring in a quick quote from the

Starting point is 01:19:13 book, it can be more readily recognized that rather than it being a simple case of migrant workers taking native-born workers, quote, jobs, they are in fact improving the standard of living and providing essential services in many countries, you go on to list a few, but primarily for this context, North America. And, of course, I mentioned the super profits that they make off of these workers. So maybe if you could sort of unpack what you think is going on here. You mentioned scapegoats, and obviously that's a clear point. I think if you take a look at the wage structure and wealth structure in the United States

Starting point is 01:19:51 amongst wealthy countries, it is the most unequal of any. wealthy country, yet it is the wealthiest country in the world to speak of. So if the GDP per capita is something like $73,000 to $75,000 a year, well, then the distribution of that will be far less equal than it would be in any Western European country, like Germany, France, and so forth, Britain even. So that the United States looks something like, if you take a look at the income curve in the United States. In some respects, it resembles a third world country, if I may, in the sense that you have a very small compador class of oligarchs, or in many cases these are not even oligarchs, but I'm just saying. And then you have wealthy people, and then you

Starting point is 01:20:39 have a very large majority of the population making a very small percentage of the wages and having no wealth whatsoever, very little wealth to speak of. So I think that that is, you know, as a historical materialist, I would say that's at the core of all this, that to maintain a system of exploitation, in this context of low wages in the United States and super wages for the wealthy, you bring in a migrant labor force and say,

Starting point is 01:21:12 well, these workers who are working in these meatpacking plants, et cetera, took our jobs away. Well, first of all, they never took their jobs away because these workers never worked in those industries. I mean, there might be some, but in most instances, those workers are retired or, you know, they're no longer in the labor market anymore. But I think it really does go back to this whole point of a answer to wage inequality. You see that Trump just enacted a, I guess not just the spring he passed a budget bill that preferences the bourgeois classes of this country to a great degree. And I think that that has a lot to do with the demonization of migrants, because if you can do that, if you

Starting point is 01:21:58 can maintain and, in fact, increase inequality amongst Americans. Now, I'm not saying that Americans are poor, but increase inequality. There are poor Americans, I would say, too. So if you take a look at those data that's amply available from OECD data and so forth and World Bank data, that the United States is starting to look like a third world country in terms of wage and wealth distributions. So, yeah, I'm going to look at it from the approach of materialism or dialectical materialism. But obviously there is a subjectivity to this so that those workers are saying we took,

Starting point is 01:22:36 or they took the jobs away, migrant workers took their job. away and that's easy so it kind of fulfills the subjectivity in the minds of these workers who are doing you know fairly well or they may be unemployed or but they're making much less than they used to i mean we do hear these stories and we know about them of people not able to afford their rent or buy a home etc i mean i can tell you right now in new york city i can hardly live here it's a very expensive place to live. So I think that's what it's tapping into, wage inequality in this country and wealth inequality, which is not really captured through any agency. So the trade union movement in the United States is really, I know people might not like what I have to say,

Starting point is 01:23:25 so I'll moderate what I would have said. I'll say it's really doing very poorly. It really, you know, basically only represents public sector workers and Trump is going after them as well. So that's kind of in a nutshell what I would say. And I can go far more into a discussion of this, but time is not preventing that. That makes a lot of sense. And just to kind of add an end cap to that portion of the conversation, I saw a statistic recently for more perfect union, the top 10% now holds 67.4% of all the wealth in the U.S. And the bottom 50% holds 2.5%.

Starting point is 01:24:02 so and the cost of housing has also doubled since 2009 the cost of homes and that's in 2009 they were still pretty fucking expensive so yeah just some numbers to sort of you know underscore what you're saying here the last question i want i had for you is so there's sort of two things happening right there's like you mentioned at the top like migration can be a good thing it is a good thing in the sense of it adds diversity and people should be able to move around the world and you know like of course so we support migration it's just the system under which global capitalism has subjected it which we are criticizing so what would a rational humane system of labor migration look like i think that's a very important question so um i think that the united states has a certain

Starting point is 01:24:59 appeal to people because of its cultural imperialism that advances through the junk culture, sorry, I'm being honest, that the United States pervades throughout the world. And I wanted to make this crucial point that, you know, there's a sense that if you get American values, that somehow it's going to be a better thing and you'll be able to take them back to wherever, Colombia, South America, or Venezuela, et cetera, and you'll be at the very top of those societies. And I think that's complete crack. I think it's completely wrong. And in fact, many of those cultural values, clothing, music, etc., are not necessarily good. If not, I would argue, they're pretty bad and they contribute to a certain kind of warped level of society. I don't think that people who buy American clothing and wear it in countries of origin are necessarily doing anything positive for those countries. But you're asking different. question is that what can we say good about migration? How can we say that migration is a good thing? Well, first of all, you know, we are, you know, as Marxists, we have to be real about stuff.

Starting point is 01:26:11 And one of those things is that, and I hope this doesn't trouble people, but open borders are not going to happen anytime soon, maybe 100, 200 years to know, but I don't see it happening in the near future. I mean, one may support them and so forth, but, I mean, I don't know what it means outside of an analytic approach. So we have to be very pragmatic and understand things from a materialist perspective. So when migrants, I think a very good way for migrants to exist is through studying, for instance, students want to go learn about something that a specific country has expertise in, well, then those people can go there and have a very important experience. If they decide to stay at that country, that's fine, but a lot of migrants don't stay

Starting point is 01:26:59 and a lot of migrants want to go back home. I think there's a certain sense that's completely wrong that migrants want to stay in the United States. They don't want to be part of a racially biased society. They don't want to be at the low end of the totem pole and so forth and so on and treated as if they're subhuman, which is, I think, how they're treated in many instances. But you would like to see those same people, working class people, come to the United States to maybe learn a trade that they can take back rather than working in the trade. You see what I'm saying, that rather than being exploited, these people can take back technological ideas and able to work in that technology. I mean, precisely what the IMF and World Bank say, but doesn't

Starting point is 01:27:44 happen, that there isn't any technology transfer that's going on. There isn't any training of people that's going on within these countries. But for the most part, people do not take ideas that are helpful back to a place of origin. Now, we also didn't think about ourselves as migrants. You know, wouldn't it be nice if we had the opportunity, young people in this country had the opportunity to migrate to a place like Nepal and so forth and live in that society for a period of time or maybe whenever, however long they want? So in that case, that open borders is a decent idea, not context, that people should be able to move from one place to the other, but there shouldn't be exploitation, wage exploitation, and that the center of migration should not be

Starting point is 01:28:28 the extraction of value from human beings. I would say super extraction and super exploitation. Rather, it should be a learning process. It should be a period of time that people enjoy their lives, go places and stay there for a period of time, maybe they're artists or musicians and so forth that can learn a specific skill, you know, instrument or whatever form of art that can only be or can be found in certain places like Ireland, let's say. I don't know. I'm just saying. So in that context, one would say that the United States is not the place that necessarily people would like to migrate. I think it's just been perceived that way for almost a century, but I think that is becoming less prevalent around the world. I don't think people necessarily want to come to the

Starting point is 01:29:12 United States, nor share the values that this country has, which it doesn't even practice. Yeah, so I think that people should be mobile, and people should have the capacity to migrate and the right to migrate within limits in the sense that you don't want to see the majority of those populations leave, but you want to see populations be trained in specific important skills that will lead to the development of, let's say, places like the AES, the Sahel region of Africa, which there's extreme poverty and not work in the gig economy where you really don't learn a thing. Those are kinds of aspects of migration, I think, could be very positive if people are able to take skills back home. But along with skills, they need to take capital, and that means that there needs

Starting point is 01:29:58 to be a redistribution of income on a global level, which means that the rich country should stop exploiting the global south. So, for instance, much of the development that took place in the in Oregon countries, including the United States, Britain, Western Europe, and so forth, was at the expense of imperialism. And so migration should not be a, it should not be the end all in terms of the answer to the problem alone. We have to understand the root of everything is within capitalist exploitation, within an imperialist global political economy, where you have states that exploit other states.

Starting point is 01:30:37 In this case, I would say Western states primarily. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Emanuel Ness, Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York, Brooklyn School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and author of Migration as Economic Imperialism, how international labor mobility undermines economic development in poor countries. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Bliss for the intermission music.

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Upstream - Migration as Economic Imperialism w/ Immanuel Ness

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