Productivity rates in the aging societies of the EU member states are increasingly possible to maintain due to migrant labor force filling up positions of undervalued and low-paid work, especially in construction, manufacturing, and the feminized sectors of care and domestic work. Migrants tend to increasingly occupy precarious jobs, often related to black market economies with no or low level of job security, low payment and with poor recognition of their skills. Also those officially employed on the basis of different types of work permit find themselves in the grips of the flexibilization of the market reality where they are forced to accept vulnerable, short-term, low-paid and low skilled jobs. Experiences of deskilling, language barriers, discrimination at workplace, coupled with racist and xenophobic attitudes, accompany migrants’ everyday. The actual demand for migrant labor remains poorly reflected in state policies, which, in turn, define and regulate the migrants’ positions primarily in terms of limitations and closure. The author argues that current migration and integration policies that are, as a rule, accompanied by populist rhetoric and anti-migration discourses sustain migrants in “rightless” positions where not only are their human rights not respected but they are not even admitted to claim their rights. Ensuring migrants the “right to have rights” is thematized as a precondition for any serious attempt to claim migrants’ integration as politics of equality, not exclusion. We’re faced with the need for the reinvention of migration politics that also requires serious reaction to racism and xenophobia. Currently we are not only witnessing a rise of self-proclaimed “patriotic” organizations across Europe that spread racism, but also see the rise in number of political parties and individual politicians adopting openly racist discourses. These resonate in actual anti-migration policies, such as the banning of visas, tightening border control or limiting employment or work for migrants to allegedly “protect” the national labor force.
Mojca Pajnik is a scientific counsellor at the Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies in Ljubljana and assistant professor at the Faculty for Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Her expertise lies in the fields of migrations, gender studies and the media. She is author of Prostitution and Human Trafficking: Perspectives of Gender, Labour and Migration (2008), co-author of Where in the Puzzle: Trafficking from, to and through Slovenia (2003) and of Immigrants, who are you? Research on Immigrants in Slovenia (2001). She has co-edited (with John D. H. Downing) Alternative Media and the Politics of Resistance (2008) and (with Simona Zavratnik) Migration – Globalization – European Union (2003). Currently she coordinates the international project PRIMTS, Prospects for Integration of Migrants from “Third Countries” and Their Labour Market Situations: Towards Policies and Action (European Commission, 2008–2010, http://primts.mirovni-institut.si/).