This project investigates how pressures and circumstances of global production and regional development create contrasting regimes of labor migration within a single society. Using a strategic case, it examines how a variety of state and non-state actors govern labor migration in relation to global seafood production and regional economic integration initiatives. By examining the link between local processes and wider pressures, the project advances social scientific knowledge of migration governance, the social reproduction of labor, and state influence vis-Ã -vis regional and global processes.
Data will be collected through participant observation and interviews. Analysis will be through comparison of two cases of labor migration regimes: (1) a regime of regularization that advances a formal guestworker system in an interior site of seafood production and (2) a regime of flexible containment that maintains flexible and spatially-confined labor in a regionally-linked border zone. Interviews will be conducted with local officials and workers about practices in each site. Workers from another industry, origin, and site will be interviewed as well to provide comparison.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
