Capture, coexistence and valorization of workers mobility across borders

The essay presents the main topics and analytical tools needed for an overarching understanding of transborder labor mobility nowadays. It investigates the transformation of space and its ever-expanding range of related concepts, it analysis workers mobility and the recent developments in the scholarship, and then it presents a critical perspective that discusses the capture of workers movements, the valorization of their mobility and the coexistence of labor forms in the same mobility regime by considering the pivotal example of guestworkers. The concept of regime questions the structuring processes of global political economy; it is a contested and unstable historical-analytical device generated by forces for capturing and exploiting life sources to be depleted in the global political economy, as well as by social forces for remaking the world through constituent practices and resistances. The chapter provides a novel insight by analyzing the valorization process of workers’ mobility and immobilization. The capture and valorization of workers do not occur only in the final site of production, or the working place, in other terms, they do not only rely on places as static geopolitical objects, but has also to do with the profitability of mobility itself that turns space into the very battlefield that is continuously recreated by frictions and crossings. The capture of life by capital occurs beyond the workplace, and is extensive to the whole process of mobility since the very imagination of their movement by workers. Mobile workers do not produce value just in the worksite; quite the contrary, they are already productive when they leave their home and much before the inspections at the border and for a long time after the end of the formal potential contract. The same workers’ circulation and immaterial dimension produce value, as every step in this cartography of mobility could be a source of value extraction.