What would a theory of migration that takes seriously the lived expertise of migrants and their families contribute to the scholarly conversation? Drawing from extensive qualitative interviews in Mexico with community members who journeyed to the United States to seek work and those they left behind, Prof. Ragini Shah has a compelling answer: a theory of migration as extraction. The thesis of her new book, Constructed Movements: Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities, builds on prior work on decolonizing migration and migrations as reparations, evolving those critiques into a comprehensive theory of migration.
This brilliant new work begins with the voices of migrants themselves, offering insightful quotes and a firsthand understanding of the journey to El Norte and its impact on individuals, families, and communities. One of the invaluable contributions that this qualitative work offers is a clear description of the emotional cost of migration as extraction. The interviews provide powerful insights into this profound price that families paid and continue to pay, and the ongoing impacts on migrant communities. Prof. Shah describes a vicious cycle of dispossession, dismemberment of family relations, and exploitation, as well as a story of agency on the part of migrants.
Prof. Shah takes these lived expertise interventions seriously, not only for their individual perceptions, but also as a blueprint for the policy and theory contributions of the book. From the insights of her interviews with migrants and the loved ones they leave behind, Prof. Shah builds a comprehensive theory of migration as extraction. She provides the reader with invaluable historical context, describing the political economy dimensions of this migration, offering a structural framework to understand the exploitation and profound harms these families have suffered as part of a broader pattern imposed on migrant-sending countries by migrant-receiving countries. In particular, the book explains the role of global economic inequality and neocolonialism in constructing migration as extraction, dividing this phenomenon into three phases: dislocation, displacement, and entrenchment.
For the dislocation phase, Prof. Shah describes the uprooting of migrants in search of sustenance and the separation of families. Connecting the interviews with global neoliberal mandates, she explains how the International Monetary Fund’s policy of structural adjustment and the North American Free Trade Agreement profoundly weakened the public infrastructure in Mexico, driving down wages and dismantling access to education, two key factors that push families to migrate. For the displacement phase, Prof. Shah examines the process of labor recruitment and incarceration as well as the turn to coyotaje. She presents a timeline that delves deep into history, from Spanish colonization to the bracero programs to the maquiladoras, to provide a comprehensive description of the extractive nature of migration. For the entrenchment phase, Prof. Shah highlights the disinvestment cycle, family disintegration, and the remittance industry, explaining these phenomena and the role they play in perpetrating ongoing cycles of extractive migration.
These three phases are invaluable in describing the phenomenon of migration as extraction, and also lay a foundation for potential responses, examples of, and possibilities for resistance. Prof. Shah highlights the importance of the return of resources, local employment, and the repair of relationships with kin and land, a response that she describes as “the right not to migrate.” This right centers human autonomy, contesting the economic conditions at home that divest migrants of the choice to move. In particular, the lack of infrastructure, the lack of support for agriculture, and the lack of access to education are key problems that require investment in order to uphold the right not to migrate and to dismantle the phenomenon of migration as extraction. To this end, Prof. Shah highlights the importance of group-based resistance, drawing from the insight offered by one of her interviewees, Don Santos:
People think that migration is a benefit, but we don’t have anything in my pueblo. If we can get good work [in the United States], we can build a house for ourselves, buy clothes, a car. But it does nothing for the whole pueblo.
