Parallel to increasing border controls, temporary labor migration is increasingly touted as a climate adaptation strategy. As part of the 'Nansen Initiative', a multilateral, state-led project to address climate-induced displacement, the Australian government has put forward its temporary seasonal worker program as a key solution to building climate resilience in the Pacific region. The Australian statement to the Nansen Initiative Intergovernmental Global Consultation was, in fact, delivered not by the environment minister but by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.
It is not an anomaly that Australia is turning displaced climate refugees into a funnel of temporary labor migration.
Beginning in April 2022, the new Pacific Australia Labor Mobility scheme will make it easier for Australian businesses to temporarily insource low-wage workers (what the scheme calls "low-skilled" and "unskilled" workers) from small Pacific island countries including Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, Samoa, Tonga, and Tuvalu. Not coincidentally, many of these countries' ecologies and economies have already been ravaged by Australian colonialism for over one hundred years.
It is not an anomaly that Australia is turning displaced climate refugees into a funnel of temporary labor migration. With growing ungovernable and irregular migration, including climate migration, temporary labor migration programs have become the worldwide template for "well-managed migration." Elites present labor migration as a double win because high-income countries fill their labor shortage needs without providing job security or citizenship, while low-income countries alleviate structural impoverishment through migrants' remittances.
Dangerous, low-wage jobs like farm, domestic, and service work that cannot be outsourced are now almost entirely insourced in this way. Insourcing and outsourcing represent two sides of the same neoliberal coin: deliberately deflated labor and political power. Not to be confused with free mobility, temporary labor migration represents an extreme neoliberal approach to the quartet of foreign, climate, immigration, and labor policy, all structured to expand networks of capital accumulation through the creation and disciplining of surplus populations.
The International Labor Organization recognizes that temporary migrant workers face forced labor, low wages, poor working conditions, virtual absence of social protection, denial of freedom association and union rights, discrimination and xenophobia, as well as social exclusion. Under these state-sanctioned programs of indentureship, workers are legally tied to an employer and deportable. Temporary migrant workers are kept compliant through the threats of both termination and deportation, revealing the crucial connection between immigration status and precarious labour.
Through temporary labor migration programs, workers' labour power is first captured by the border and this pliable labor is then exploited by the employer. Denying migrant workers permanent immigration status ensures a steady supply of cheapened labor. Borders are not intended to exclude all people, but to create conditions of 'deportability', which increases social and labor precarity. These workers are labeled as 'foreign' workers, furthering racist xenophobia against them, including by other workers. While migrant workers are temporary, temporary migration is becoming the permanent neoliberal, state-led model of migration.
Reparations include No Borders
"It's immoral for the rich to talk about their future children and grandchildren when the children of the Global South are dying now." - Asad Rehman
Discussions about building fairer and more sustainable political-economic systems have coalesced around a Green New Deal. Most public policy proposals for a Green New Deal in the US, Canada, UK and the EU articulate the need to simultaneously tackle economic inequality, social injustice, and the climate crisis by transforming our extractive and exploitative system towards a low-carbon, feminist, worker and community-controlled care-based society. While a Green New Deal necessarily understands the climate crisis and the crisis of capitalism as interconnected -- and not a dichotomy of 'the environment versus the economy' -- one of its main shortcomings is its bordered scope. As Harpreet Kaur Paul and Dalia Gebrial write: "the Green New Deal has largely been trapped in national imaginations."
Any Green New Deal that is not internationalist runs the risk of perpetuating climate apartheid and imperialist domination in our warming world.
Any Green New Deal that is not internationalist runs the risk of perpetuating climate apartheid and imperialist domination in our warming world. Rich countries must redress the global and asymmetrical dimensions of climate debt, unfair trade and financial agreements, military subjugation, vaccine apartheid, labour exploitation, and border securitization.
It is impossible to think about borders outside the modern nation-state and its entanglements with empire, capitalism, race, caste, gender, sexuality, and ability. Borders are not even fixed lines demarcating territory. Bordering regimes are increasingly layered with drone surveillance, interception of migrant boats, and security controls far beyond states' territorial limits. From Australia offshoring migrant detention around Oceania to Fortress Europe outsourcing surveillance and interdiction to the Sahel and Middle East, shifting cartographies demarcate our colonial present.
Perhaps most offensively, when colonial countries panic about 'border crises' they position themselves as victims. But the genocide, displacement, and movement of millions of people were unequally structured by colonialism for three centuries, with European settlers in the Americas and Oceania, the transatlantic slave trade from Africa, and imported indentured laborers from Asia. Empire, enslavement, and indentureship are the bedrock of global apartheid today, determining who can live where and under what conditions. Borders are structured to uphold this apartheid.
The freedom to stay and the freedom to move, which is to say no borders, is decolonial reparations and redistribution long due.
