Introduction: Invisible Migrants

CHAPTER ONE introduces the book’s sections organised in stand-alone chapters. It begins with an introduction of the hidden population group – migrant nightworkers at New Spitalfields market, London – that is excluded even more than other migrants from the public debates and political agendas, hence called in this book Invisible Migrant Nightworkers. The aim is to foreground these migrant labourers’ experiences as precarious manual nightworkers in glocturnal cities of the postcircadian capitalist era. This approach is scaffolded on biographical trajectories, work situations and labour abuse of these migrant co-workers trapped in nightwork and unable to seek work elsewhere. Next, the chapter breaks down an embodied tension by tackling the issues faced by half-rejected, half-permitted migrant workers travelling for work and to live in the E.U. This is a compelling issue to uncover, especially because the migrants that I focus on end up doing the most fundamental form of work – feeding a nation, for they travail in the food supply chain in the U.K. – and working at night. As such, I expect that readers of this book will thereafter be more aware of the valuable contribution of such people to the modern capitalist societies.