Refugees and racial capitalism: Meatpacking and the primitive accumulation of labor |
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| Affiliation: | 1. University of Pennsylvania, Perry World House and the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, 3803 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA;2. Indiana University Bloomington Department of Geography, Student Building 120, 701 E Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA;1. University of Pennsylvania, Perry World House and the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, 3803 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA;2. Indiana University Bloomington Department of Geography, Student Building 120, 701 E Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA;1. University of Oulu, Finland;2. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA;3. University of Oregon, USA;4. University of California, Los Angeles, USA;5. Haverford College, USA;6. University of Geneva, Switzerland;7. University of Padova, Italy |
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| Abstract: | When meatpacking plants in the United States lost a third of their undocumented Latinx workers to Federal immigration raids in the late 2000s, the industry began recruiting vulnerable, but “legal,” refugee workers to replace them. In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 threatened to halt meatpacking, two separate executive orders designated meatpacking production as essential to the United States food system and introduced new restrictions on refugee resettlement in the United States. Bridging Marxian literature on race, labor, and capitalism and critical refugee studies, this paper examines the paradox of refugees’ positioning as both “essential” sources of vulnerable labor and “prohibited” threats to the American nation-state. We argue that the placement of refugees in meatpacking jobs is actually the primitive accumulation of unfree labor. In the case of “essential” meatpacking work in the United States, racial capitalism articulates with conditions of statelessness and unequal citizenship rights to anchor “prohibited” refugees to meatpacking work. |
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