Half-Rejected, Half-Permitted Migrant Workers

In CHAPTER THREE I elaborate upon how, structurally vulnerable migrants, like those arriving after 2000s from Eastern Europe, have been half-rejected and half-permitted or a ‘regrettable necessity’. Their labour power was needed to cover difficult, unwanted night jobs. Yet, they have been derided, if not condemned, for ‘swamping’ the market, as well as the country, and for not quite being fellow humans. I explore the critical significance of understanding the E.U. – U.K. migration, through analysing the effects of racialisation, a form of colonialist logic that rigidly controls borders and impacts negatively on workers. I also focus on the processes by which hierarchies are reproduced and persist through normalisation and invisibility. In this chapter, I lay the theoretical foundation of this study and review literature on relevant topics in migration, such as ‘differential inclusion’, global inequalities, and debates on Saskia Sassen’s notion of the ‘global city’. The same unseen, undocumented and rejected migrant workers within global city sites of polarised employment, have a strategic role in supporting the lives of the affluent corporate executives invested in maintaining a global infrastructure disproportionately located in London, a migrant city. For this reason, migrants are half-permitted.