Join us for a book talk on Migration as Economic Imperialism by Immanuel Ness in conversation with Corinna Mullin. For several decades, wealthy states, international development agencies, and multinational corporations have encouraged labour migration from the Global South to the Global North. The remittances that migrants send home have been touted as the most promising means of national development for poor and undeveloped countries.
But as Ness argues in this sharp corrective, temporary labour migration represents the most recent form of economic imperialism and global domination. Remittances deepen economic exploitation, unravel societal stability, and significantly expand economic inequality between poor and rich societies. Migration as Economic Imperialism exposes the damaging effects of migration on origin countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America; and how border and security mechanisms control and marginalize low-wage migrant workers, especially women and youth.
IMMANUEL NESS is Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and on contract as Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. Among numerous other books, academic articles, major reference works and book chapters on migration, he is the author of books and collections on global labor movements, globalization, and protest movements, including Migration as Economic Imperialism: How International Labour Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries (Polity 2023); Routledge Handbook of the Gig Economy (Routledge 2022); Organizing Insurgency: Workers’ Movements in the Global South (Pluto 2021); Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class (Pluto 2016); Guest Workers and Resistance to U.S. Corporate Despotism (University of Illinois Press 2011); and Immigrants, Unions and the New US Labor Market (Temple University Press 2005). His other works include: The Oxford Handbook of Migration Crises (2019); The Oxford Handbook of Economic Imperialism (2022); Global Perspectives on Workers and Labour Organizations (2019), and the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism (2014/2021). He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Labor and Society.
CORINNA MULLIN is professor of political science and international political economy at John Jay College and Brooklyn College (CUNY). She completed her PhD in 2008 at the London School of Economics (LSE), followed by a postdoc and lectureship at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She then spent five years living in Tunisia, where she taught at the University of Tunis. She returned to New York in 2017. Corinna’s research examines the historical legacies of colonialism, the role of capitalist expansion and imperialist imbrications
in shaping global South security states, with a focus on labor exploitation and natural resource extraction as well as other forms of value drain. She is currently working on a monograph for Brill: Race, Class, Empire and the (Re)making of the Tunisian Security State. Corinna has also researched and published academic works on anti-/decolonial theory and praxis, the colonial-capitalist university, land and labor struggles, and popular education with a focus on the Maghreb, West Asia and the United States.
