The unsettling nature of immigration: labour migration, racism, and discrimination

A basic question raised by immigration is that of how identity is incorporated into the labour market as the very fact of immigration introduces issues of race, ethnicity and religion. But for all the progress made in the study of immigrant employment in Europe the racialisation of migrants has been relatively neglected. Though Marxist scholars have a long tradition of analysing racism and migration their analyses are invariably restricted by the narrow prism of class relations and materialism. Even the recent wave of social audit studies, which have done much to document the prevalence of discrimination, are of less value in understanding how immigrants enter low wage, low status occupations. The challenge is to not only understand how labour migrants are excluded but also the conditions under which they are included. To that end, an alternative approach is proposed that draws on the application of queuing theory to immigrant employment.