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Article Excerpt
As subordinate workers, migrants and foreigners are an essential labor force for industrialized economies. The author extends Pierre Bourdieu's ideas of capital to suggest that citizenship constitutes a key mechanism of distinction between migrant and nonmigrant workers. From this perspective, citizenship is a strategically produced form of capital, which manifests itself in formal (legal and institutional) as well as informal (practiced and cultural) aspects. Both aspects of citizenship can render migrant labor more vulnerable than nonmigrant labor and often channel migrants into the secondary labor market or the informal economy. The author presents examples from Germany and Canada to illustrate how legal and cultural processes associated with citizenship facilitate economic subordination and exploitation of migrant labor. The value of conceptualizing citizenship as a form of capital lies in integrating processes of inclusion and exclusion into a framework of distinction and in locating the strategic nature of citizenship with the motivation of reproduction. Based on the situation of migrants in the labor market, the author proposes that the logic of distinction and reproduction is an important underlying force in the construction and transformation of the concept of citizenship. KEYWORDS: citizenship, migration, labor, capital, distinction
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What was the case for the ancient and medieval plebs, for the third estate, for workers, for women, and what is not ended, is every bit as much the case today for foreigners--more precisely, for the quite particular foreigners who, even as they are "from elsewhere," are also completely "from here." Immigrants, today's proletarians.
--Etienne Balibar
Industrialized economies have become structurally dependent on the availability and continual supply of migrants labor. (1) In this article. I draw on Pierre Bourdieu's ideas of capital to argue that citizenship functions as a key mechanism of distinction that renders migrants vulnerable and exploitable, and therefore particularly valuable to the economies of the global North. Citizenship as a culturally produced category manifests itself in formal (legal and institutional) as well as informal (practiced and cultural) forms. I suggest that both aspects of citizenship function as a form of capital and a mechanism of distinction.
This view of citizenship corresponds to the treatment of citizenship as strategic concept not only in association with constructions of identity and belonging, struggles over recognition, and the politics of participation and contribution, (2) but also in relation to regulating access to scarce resources and institutionalizing difference. (3) In this article, I develop a perspective of citizenship that integrates processes of inclusion and exclusion under the logic of distinction and reproduction.
As a form of capital, citizenship serves as a strategy of accumulation (4) that is deliberately deployed and can be exchanged into other forms of capital. But rather than constituting an overarching cultural logic of capitalism, citizenship, as I develop it here, follows the wider logic of distinction. For Bourdieu, capital is about the reproduction of social order. In this context, social reproduction cannot be neatly separated into contexts of home, work, and politics. (5) The coexistence of interchangeable economic, social, and cultural forms of capital reflects the interlocking nature of processes of production, social practices, and cultural identities in the perpetuation of inequality and the reproduction of capitalist society. (6)
Labor markets are important sites for the reproduction of social order: They operate at the intersection of economic, political, social, and cultural processes, and they are politically, socially and culturally regulated. (7) International migrants serve as an illustrative example of the significance of non-market-driven processes of labor-market regulation through citizenship. Instead of gaining access to occupations that reflect their education and training once they upgrade their language skills--as human capital theory would predict (8)--many migrants categorically lack access to the upper labor-market segments or to the formal labor market altogether. The legal status and cultural meanings associated with citizenship play a key role in rendering many migrants into a labor force that is particularly vulnerable and exploitable. In industrialized countries, citizenship is an ordering principle of labor markets.
The view of citizenship as a form of capital offers not only valuable insights into the concrete labor-market segmentation of international migrants but also permits integrating political, cultural, and geographical processes of inclusion and exclusion into a conceptual framework that locates the strategic nature of citizenship with the motivations of distinction and reproduction. Although citizenship is a historically and politically constructed concept that changes over time and space, (9) the process of distinction and reproduction may constitute an underlying logic of its construction and transformation. Such a perspective of citizenship resonates with Etienne Balibar's words quoted in the epigraph above, (10) which highlight the discrepancy between immigrants' material struggles as "today's proletarians" and their being "from elsewhere" in respect to laying abstract claims to citizenship.
The remainder of this article is divided into three sections. First, I discuss the concepts of capital and distinction with particular reference to migrant labor. Second, I develop the notion of citizenship as a form of capital and a mechanism of labor regulation. By presenting evidence from Canada, a traditional immigration country, and Germany, a country that until recently held to policies of being a nonimmigrant country, (11) I illustrate the international and transcontinental relevance of the idea of citizenship as capital. Third, I conclude by addressing some implications regarding contemporary perspectives of citizenship and geographical scale that emerge from this discussion.
Capital and Distinction
The notion of capital assumes variable meanings throughout the social sciences. Orthodox economists tend to emphasize the economic and monetary forms of capital, but they also speak of, for example, human capital, referring to the educational and skill characteristics of labor. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels offered other interpretations of capital, including estate capital, associated with landholdings, (12) and variable capital, referring to labor. (13) Bourdieu (14) also endorsed this multidimensional character of capital. He identified various "species of capital" in his writing, including political, military, scientific, and technological capital, symbolic capital, (15) and cultural capital, which he further subdivided into objectified, embodied, and institutionalized cultural capital. (16) Expanding the definition of capital from its purely monetary form to include the social and the cultural, permits an integrated perspective of society and the processes of production. (17) While Marx, however, saw the concept of capital primarily as a "means of exploitation and domination," (18) Bourdieu emphasized the role of capital in the reproduction of society.
The various complementary forms of capital coexist, and people and social groups who possess the necessary "competence" (19) can transfer resources from one form of capital to another to achieve distinction and reproduction. This perspective of capital stresses human agency. Individuals and social groups do not simply respond to market forces but, rather, strategically create, valorize, and endorse different forms of capital. Capital is a way to actively construct difference and express distinction. People who possess it use...
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