Recruiting skilled labour, while closing borders? The connection between migration, border regimes and capitalism

The following text was originally written in German and has been translated by the Exploring Economics team. You can find the original text here.

14 May 2024 marked a turning point for the European border regime. After almost ten years of political deadlock and a breakthrough in negotiations in June 2023, the EU Council of Ministers adopted a compromise between the European Commission, the European Parliament and the governments of the EU member states. This includes far-reaching reforms to the Common European Asylum System (European Council 2024). The common denominator of the associated changes is a new level of repression against forced migration. The majority of asylum applications submitted in the EU could be rejected as ‘inadmissible’. Tens of thousands of people seeking protection could face months of detention in camps near the border. Pushbacks become even more likely (Pro Asyl 2024). Europe's closed borders policy will not work. Instead, chaos, bitter conflicts and mass suffering are inevitable (Pichl 2023; Kasparek 2023).

Parallel to this restrictive development, Germany and other EU countries have been complaining about a labour shortage for many years, particularly for skilled workers (see Georgi et al. 2014). In this context, active efforts are being made to promote immigration. Germany is recruiting care workers in countries such as the Philippines, Ghana and Brazil and passed the ‘Gesetz zur Weiterentwicklung der Fachkräfteeinwanderung’ (‘Act on the Further Development of Skilled Labour Immigration’) in July 2023. This allows foreign workers with the right qualifications to come to Germany without a specific job offer (Palop-García/Engler 2023). Freedom of movement within the EU also continues to apply. Parallel to the repressive measures against forced migration, the policy towards certain labour migrants is thus being increasingly liberalised.

How can we explain this simultaneous increase in repression against asylum seekers and the continued liberalisation of labour migration policy? In this context, migration policy think tanks often complain about ‘paradoxical’ or ‘irrational’ policies and call for more ‘coherence’ (Godin et al. 2022). They find it difficult to explain the contradictory nature of the two tendencies. From the perspective of a critical political economy and a materialist theory of the state, however, things are different. From these perspectives, the contradictory policies are analysed as a manifestation of the contradictory structural principles of capitalist reproduction and the social struggles and power relations that accompany them (Buckel et al. 2014: 31ff.). It is therefore necessary to clarify how migration and borders are related to capitalism, both fundamentally and in the current historical phase.

The ‘management’ of mobile labour

The mobility of workers is both historically and theoretically a central starting point of the capitalist mode of (re)production. Capitalist production and reproduction require mobile labour. These workers must ‘migrate’ flexibly to the places where they are needed to realise the profit strategies of states and companies. This includes plantations, mines and factories, but also places of care or reproductive labour such as hospitals, nursing homes or private households. According to Karl Marx (MEW 23: 183), in order for people to become such flexible workers, they must be free in a ‘double sense’: free from feudal fetters and other restrains that bind them to a particular place and at the same time free from alternatives to selling their labour power, such as their own means of production or a large fortune. If workers were immobile, because they were legally or politically forced to stay in a particular place, or because they had alternatives to selling their labour power, capitalist production could not take place in a stable and profitable way. The reproduction of capitalist social relations would quickly collapse (Gambino/Sachetto 2009; de Genova 2019; Basso 2021).

This fundamental dependence of capitalist (re)production on the mobility of labour leads capitalist companies and states to strategically attempt to control, direct and 'manage' the mobility of workers in ways that are advantageous for profit-making. However, it is not enough for any labour to be mobile just somehow and somewhere. From the perspective of sectors that rely on mobile labour (today, for example, agriculture, construction, care, IT), it is necessary to control the mobility of the working classes in such a way that workers with specific skills are available in sufficient numbers in specific locations (Georgi 2016: 196ff.). If people had not only the formal right but also the real, materially secured free choice to go or stay where they wanted (even across national borders), this would be dysfunctional for capitalism. This is especially true for the complex and dynamic labour needs of capitalist production in terms of skills, numbers and location. The free autonomy of people to leave and stay would often be incompatible with the regionally and locally specific labour needs of capitalist companies and state apparatuses. If state apparatuses and companies did not try to ‘manage’ the mobility and immobility of workers, the labour problems of capital would often not be solved, or not in their own interests.

Depending on the historical situation, this 'management' of labour mobility takes different forms (Cohen 1987; Potts 1988; Gambino/Sacchetto 2009). Sometimes workers are pushed or forced into immobility, for example because they are needed at a particular place of work. Sometimes mobility and migration are encouraged or forced, for example when labour is needed at new production sites. In addition, immigration controls on migrant workers allow them to be categorised under different residence permits. This makes it possible to grant them different rights or subject them to different restrictions. Workers at the bottom of such hierarchies can thus be forced, in conjunction with racist practices, to accept precarious and harsh working conditions and low wages that allow them to live (or survive) only with great and painful difficulty, if at all (Sarbo 2022: 43f.; Georgi 2022a: 99f.). One example is non-German EU citizens who are allowed to work in Germany but have fewer social rights. They are therefore often forced to accept precarious and harsh working conditions and low wages in agriculture, construction or the meat industry. From the point of view of capitalist companies and states, therefore, there are various advantages to be gained from controlling migrant labour.

In this context, it becomes understandable why labour migration policies are gradually being liberalised. It is a strategic response to supposed 'skills shortages' and demographic change. In principle, however, companies and state apparatuses have a whole range of other 'labour force strategies' at their disposal in the event of labour shortages. Eight strategies can be distinguished (Georgi et al. 2014: 211f.). First, companies and states can increase economic, legal or even physical pressure on local workers to accept certain jobs, for example through workfare policies, threats of violence or immigration regulations. Second, they can improve working conditions and increase wages to attract workers; third, they can integrate groups underrepresented in the labour market (such as the unemployed, older people, unemployed women or minorities excluded from the labour market). Fourth, they can provide new or different skills and trainings for specific workers in response to plans to change or expand production processes. Fifth, they can intensify the exploitation of the existing workforce (extending working hours or increase the speed or rate of work per hour); sixth, they can replace human labour with machines and new technologies. Seventh, they can try to relocate production to places where there is a sufficient supply of suitably qualified or cheaper labour ("offshoring", global supply chains). Finally, they can work to ensure that mobile labour migrates from other locations to the production site (migration policy). The specific configuration of these and other strategies constitute historically changing ‘labour regimes’ (Cohen 2006: 20ff.; Gambino/Sachetto 2009: 117; Georgi et al. 2014: 212).

Labour force strategy 1: Increase pressure to accept specific work

Labour force strategy 2: Increase incentives to take on specific jobs

Labour force strategy 3: Integrate underrepresented groups into the labour market

Labour force strategy 4: Qualify and train workers

Labour force strategy 5: Exploit existing workforces to a greater extent

Labour force strategy 6: Replace labour with technology

Labour force strategy 7: Relocate (re)production geographically

Labour force strategy 8: Attract, promote or enforce labour migration

As the aforementioned recruitment programmes for care workers and laws for the immigration of skilled labour indicate, the labour regime in Germany is attaching increasing strategic importance to strategies focusing on migration policies (labour force strategy 8).

Hegemony and the imperial mode of production

The following can be said: In capitalist economies, the mobility and immobility of workers must be politically influenced and 'managed' to meet the complex and dynamic labour needs of profit production. In the current German labour regime, migration policy strategies are becoming increasingly important, as reflected in recruitment programmes and other measures. On a first glance, it is not easy to understand why this liberalisation of migration policy for sought-after workers has coincided with an increasingly harsh repression of the obstinate and illegalised mobility of refugees and migrants. From a capitalist perspective, would it not make more sense and be easier for EU governments to open the borders wide to attract more workers?

The fact that this is not happening at present, and that there is an increasingly radical repression of refugees and of ‘autonomous’ strategies of migration alongside a regulated openness to labour migration, can be explained with the help of materialist state theory. The focus of the analysis here is on the strategies of materially and ideologically leading class fractions that seek to maintain their societal hegemony, or at least their political dominance. Hegemony, in the sense of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), describes a situation in which powerful social forces succeed in forging an alliance of social groups and factions that accept and support the leading position of these powerful forces (Opratko 2022: 37ff; Gramsci 2013a: 32; ibid. 2013b: 60). These leading factions dominate the guiding principles of economic, political and cultural relations to their own advantage. However, they can only maintain their leading role, and only in the medium term, as long as they are able to 'discursively' integrate the groups and factions that support them with attractive ideas and narratives, while at the same time providing them with substantial material benefits.

Neo-Gramscian research argues that this leading hegemonic position in Germany and the EU has been occupied by a neoliberal bloc in recent decades. This was led by a coalition of key forces of industrial and financial capital as well as national and international state apparatuses - and was socially supported by their core workforces. Numerous international organisations, business associations and think tanks provided ideological support (Gill 1998, p. 12f.; Apeldoorn 2009: 23f.). This hegemonic bloc has its economic basis in a growth model oriented towards the world market and globalisation, which is complexly intertwined with a finance-dominated accumulation regime. From the perspective of regulation theory, this constantly crisis-ridden formation has been made possible and stabilised by specific state policies. These combined privatisation and deregulation in labour and social policy with increasingly authoritarian securitisation and police repression against marginalised, often racialised groups and left-wing political protest. For this interpretation, which is based on hegemony theory, it is crucial that since the 1980s the neoliberal bloc has succeeded in securing material benefits and considerable prosperity on a global scale for the core workforces of transnational companies and successful small and medium-sized companies, as well as for the employees and civil servants of key state apparatuses in the Global North (see Brand/Wissen 2017; critically Radl/Schmid 2022). At times, this resulted in broad support for 'centrist' political forces and their neoliberal agenda among the middle and upper classes in the Global North. At the same time, the promoters of these neoliberal hegemonic projects and their political, cultural and academic supporters were able to ideologically integrate large sections of the population in the EU and other countries of the Global North into the new formation and to persuade them to politically support and accept their policy guidelines. This was achieved with the help of discourses on flexibility and freedom, meritocracy and the promise of consumption, as well as with reference to (alleged) ‘economic necessities’ and the concept of ‘man’ as a benefit-maximising homo economicus (Habermann 2008; Fisher 2013). Other social groups were excluded from this hegemonic compromise and suffered corresponding disadvantages, including precarious workers, social benefit recipients, refugees and illegalised workers, as well as large sections of the population outside the Global North. For decades, political stability in Germany and the EU was based on this hegemonic constellation (Georgi 2019a: 570ff.).

The increasingly repressive nature of the European border regime is due to the fact that this hegemony, which was already in a constant state of crisis, has been eroding further since the financial and economic crisis of 2007-2009 at the latest. This process has intensified in the context of the dynamics of a poly- or multi-crisis that has unfolded in recent years (including the euro crisis, the care crisis, the 'migration crisis', the pandemic, the climate crisis, war) (Demirović et al. 2011; Georgi 2019b). The increasingly 'fragmented hegemony' (Martin/Wissel 2015) is thus increasingly based on the fact that the populations of the Global North, and especially its citizens, can enjoy the increasingly precarious but still real benefits of an imperial mode of living and (re)production. The remnants of the hegemony of the neoliberal bloc are thus based, among other things, on the fact that the economic, ecological and socio-political costs and disadvantages of these lifestyles and modes of (re)production in the Global North can be outsourced and externalised to other areas and marginalised social groups in the North (see Lessenich 2018, pp. 28f.). Migration and border regimes play a crucial role in determining who can earn what wages, who receives what social benefits, who has access to housing, public services or participation in public security and infrastructure. This is due to the fact that presence on the territory of a state in the Global North that is rich in global terms can already provide limited and hierarchical but real access to comparatively good wages, living conditions and infrastructure. The massively different (re)production conditions and ways of life in the Global North and South could not exist in a stable way without sealing the borders against the autonomous movements from the Global South. Given the obstinate attempts of refugee and migration movements from the Global South and the periphery of the North to realise 'security and a better life' in the North, according to Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, the 'capitalist centres [...] can only try to stabilise their way of life through isolation and exclusion'[1] (Brand/Wissen 2017, p. 14f.; Lessenich 2015, p. 25). Sonja Buckel also notes, with reference to the EU, 'that border controls as migration controls in Europe have a hegemonic function because they serve to secure an imperial way of life' (Buckel 2013, p. 62), they become its 'enabling conditions' (ibid. 68).

In the face of the multi-crisis, the fragile dominance and hegemony of capital factions in the Global North is thus increasingly based on the fact that border regimes favour the populations of the Global North in the distribution of the global surplus product in relative terms (Georgi 2022b: 91, 98f.). It is, among other things, this relative privilege that is demanded with great aggression by right-wing chauvinist forces in the North and legitimised through radical nationalist and racist discourses. Although the rise of these forces also poses new challenges for economically dominant groups, for example when right-wing actors question the European single market, both sides can reach compromises in the area of the protection of the EU’s external border against ‘autonomous’ movements of refugees and migrants. The necessary exclusion and deprivation of rights is centrally organised by the elements of the European migration and border regime that focus on repression and isolation (Georgi 2022a: 98f.; 2022b: 395ff.). However, the European policy of isolation does not only function as a method of materially stabilising the relative advantages of sections of the population. It also fulfils ideological functions that (can) stabilise the hegemony of the ruling factions. Discourse strategies regarding security and sovereignty, as well as discourses about culture and nation, are increasingly replacing previous patterns of legitimation that have been established since the 1980s (freedom, consumption, meritocracy).

Conclusion

At this point, it becomes clear why the European border regime contains seemingly contradictory policies - on the one hand, increased recruitment of skilled labour, on the other, brutal repression against illegalised forced migration. The combination of a liberal labour migration policy and a restrictive asylum policy has two central aims: On the one hand, a flexible pool of migrant workers with different, hierarchised rights should be available to meet the labour needs of European economies. On the other hand, the increasingly radical repression at Europe's external borders is intended to exclude non-residents both materially and discursively. This is because this exclusion is necessary for the functioning of the imperial mode of living and production, for the externalisation of its costs to the outside and to the bottom, and thus for the dominance and hegemony of the leading class forces. The perceived contradiction between isolation and openness in European migration policy thus becomes recognisable as the result of different capitalist logics and contradictory regulatory imperatives. In both dimensions, the situation is becoming more tense: the availability of suitable labour is becoming increasingly difficult to guarantee in the context of demographic change. At the same time, escalating social crisis dynamics are undermining the imperial mode of living and production, with the result that the impetus for its authoritarian and violent stabilisation is becoming ever stronger.

Ultimately, social struggles and their outcomes will determine whether this dynamic pushes towards the dismantling of relations of social domination or, as seems to be the case at present, towards even more authoritarian forms of regulation. In these struggles, it is important to recognise the autonomy of migration and the inevitable failure of migration control due to the obstinacy and resistance of 'people on the move'. It is important to understand migration as a struggle for freedom of movement that has the potential to shake up prevailing conditions. A further insight follows from the recognition that the dynamics of European migration policy are fed by contradictory capitalist logics: migration control in general, and the EU's brutal border regime in particular, cannot be seen in isolation from the capitalist mode of (re)production. The suffering caused by border regimes can only be eliminated if we succeed in overcoming the capitalist mode of production and implementing eco-socialist transformations. Utopias and transformation programmes that ignore the reality of growing migratory movements, or that would only work if borders were largely closed, must therefore be decisively rejected. Instead, we need to work on social perspectives in which the needs and hopes of those already here and those yet to come can be met together in the spirit of solidarity and radical democracy.