2. How ‘Low-Skilled’ Migrant Workers Are Made

Abstract

When discussing labour migration governance in Europe, many observers -including academics -rather intuitively take for granted regulatory distinctions.This includes schisms such as EU free movers vs. workers from outside the EU, or high-skilled vs. low-skilled migrant workers, and also a relative acceptance of the different rights regimes that apply across categories of migrant worker.This chapter challenges physically biased notions of borders, often featured in migration policy research, as territorial demarcation lines that lose their effectiveness when migrants cross them without authorisation.Instead, migration governance is conceptualised as a border-drawing activity by which migrants are classified and thus constructed as 'legal' or 'illegal' in highly selective and structurally embedded processes of 'meaning-making'.Paul forges a conceptual hub for critically unpacking the normative underbelly of regulatory distinctions of migrant workers in European migration governance, and for discussing how such deeply political distinctions fashion (exploitable) positions for low-waged migrant workers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.