Transnational Corporations and the Making of Global Labor Markets : The Case of Foxconn in China and Europe

Scholars have identified borders and obstacles to the freedom of workers to move as central characteristics of capitalism (Anderson, Sharma and Wright, 2009; Gibson and Graham, 1986; Mezzadra, 2010). Accordingly, they have shown how national governments’ immigration policies are guaranteeing the controllability of migrant workforces and how restrictive labour laws create the conditions for the proliferation of illegality and labour exploitation by the employers (Castles 2014; De Genova and Peutz 2010). In the attempt to move away from the focus on borders and their securitization as the primary site for the regulation of migration, the recent ‘migration infrastructure’ approach (Xiang and Lindquist, 2014) posited that migration flows are increasingly mediated, in an interlinked fashion, by technologies, institutions and actors. The migration infrastructure approach offers a novel and expansive insight into how commercial private actors, in particular brokers and recruitment agencies, and public authorities jointly organise and channel transnational migrant mobilities (Xiang and Lindquist, 2018).