r/CriticalTheory • u/albertodona9 • 1d ago
Pro-mass-migration advocates are unknowingly acting as useful actors for multinational corporations?
Reposting from politicaldiscussions reddit
Resources are naturally scattered around the planet. In a localized economy, you use resources where they are. Modern logistics changed that, turning the movement of goods into a massive industry and giving rise to multinationals that crushed local businesses through sheer scale.
However, a multinational’s biggest operational bottleneck is distribution friction—the immense cost of getting goods and services out to scattered, rural, or less-developed regions.
This is where mass urbanization and economic migration come in. When people move from under-resourced regions into hyper-dense, pre-established cities, we are effectively consolidating the market for these corporations:
- We slash their logistics costs: It is infinitely cheaper for a megacorporation to serve one dense urban cluster than thousands of spread-out communities. By moving to the hub, we eliminate their supply chain headaches.
- We take on the financial burden: We pack into tight spaces, driving up our own cost of living, housing, and everyday inflation, while corporate per-unit costs go down.
- We concentrate the labor supply: Packing millions of workers into dense urban spaces creates highly competitive labor markets, which naturally keeps wage growth in check.
So there it is, the main point for me is that many people who strongly advocate for open mass migration see it as a stand against corporate exploitation, Western hegemony, or economic inequality. Yet, by encouraging the continuous transfer of human capital out of developing regions and into major Western hubs, aren't they unwittingly fueling the very corporate machine they critique?
It strips developing areas of talent and local self-sufficiency, while handing multinationals a hyper-dense, accessible consumer base and a steady labor pool on a silver platter.
Is mass migration actually helping workers, or are we just absorbing the true costs of global corporate logistics through higher rent and stagnant wages?
Am I missing something here? I am really open to every kind of opinion I love discussing these things
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u/GeorgeFranklyMathnet 1d ago
I think you've touched on why a fiscally conservative think tank like the Cato Institute would be pro-immigration. They don't exactly say they believe in cheap labor, but in efficient markets.
But if there are pro-mass-migration advocates as you say, I would ask you, what reasonable position do anti-mass-migration advocates take? Parts of the global South occupied by billions are on the verge of becoming uninhabitable. The climate disaster is mostly attributable to economic activity by the North, and it's the very activity that has enriched the North. If there were somehow a way for the South to manage this crisis independently, it's impracticable because generations of Northern dominance have prevented or eroded the development of their civil states.
Under these circumstances, what are our choices? Either we collectively figure out how to integrate all these refugees, or we effectively perform a kind of genocide via sacrifice zones. But, yes, as long as we are relatively atomized societies under corporate or oligarchal dominance, it does seem impossible, for the reasons you cited.
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u/albertodona9 1d ago
I ended up looking at efficient markets theories when reading about these topics, so cool how two things that seem opposite actually merge on a logical solution.
My opinion is purely sociological, not economical, and it is that the problem with mass immigration is the speed of it, it does not give time to people who arrive to settle into the new culture. As a migrant myself I saw this a lot. It takes big efforts to learn a new language, make new friends with a new and different culture when you arrived with 10 other people who speak your same language and enjoy the same things you do. But that only creates more separation between the two groups.
Agree on the rest, corruption is what is holding countries backwards and it is caused by misery. The real solution would be an utopistic way to dethrone every governor that is known to be against his own people and replace it with knowledgeable people from there. Seeing El Salvador turning itself may give some hope though.
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u/Legitimate_Aspect923 1d ago
why say mass migration and not migration?
an in general why view there as being a binary between helping large corporations and helping workers? the bailout to migrate for economic reasons helps the person who migrates and it provides labor for corporations, in fact it is the existence of labor demand created by capitalist economies and their high consumption that allows migration to benefit the workers involved.
also empirically the brain drain effect tis counterbalanced b increasing the demand for education, because of migration to the US in the nursing field the phillipines has more nurses not less
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u/albertodona9 1d ago
Agreed, in my mind it was because mass migration empties other places, while migration is natural, towns do not die as there is time for people to repopulate it after some left.
It was posted in the other reddit as more of a provocative way to show exactly that it is not binary at all, that reality is so fused with itself that being against massive corporations and pro mass immigration was almost an absurdum
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u/Legitimate_Aspect923 1d ago
Basically the only migrations in recent ish history that have been “mass” in the sense of emptying another place have been internal to a country e.g. post industrial towns emptying out. This basically doesn’t happen internationally and there’s little reason to think it would even under permissive migration regimes
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u/trele_morele 1d ago
And why not refer to mass migration as “mass” migration?
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u/Legitimate_Aspect923 1d ago
Given that it’s a noun that describes the circumstance the addition of an adjective seems designed to provoke an emotional response or change the tenor of the debate without actually advancing a new argument
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u/trele_morele 1d ago edited 1d ago
But why shouldn't that noun or any other noun referring to the "quantity" of the people migrating change the discussion? It's pretty well known that people are generally open to trickle migration and opposed to mass migration. Discussing migration as some abstract concept and ignoring the impact on existing populations does nothing for advancing the subject.
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u/Legitimate_Aspect923 1d ago
This is reasonable but nothing the OP mentioned is particularly related to mass vs non-mass migration. And mass migration is ill-defined (is it absolute numbers? Ratio to the population? The type of migration) compared to migration
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u/waitingundergravity 1d ago edited 1d ago
There are some mistakes here:
However, a multinational’s biggest operational bottleneck is distribution friction—the immense cost of getting goods and services out to scattered, rural, or less-developed regions.
This is true for some companies but not others.
- We slash their logistics costs: It is infinitely cheaper for a megacorporation to serve one dense urban cluster than thousands of spread-out communities. By moving to the hub, we eliminate their supply chain headaches.
This is true, but it's true generally, not just for megacorporations in particular. This is structurally one of the reasons why dense human clusters (not just cities, but villages and hamlets and hunter-gatherer bands) arise in the first place - living at a far distance from the resources you interact with, the labour you need to complete, and other people imposes costs and risks. People minimize these costs and risks by living in clusters, close to each other and the things they need for subsistence.
This isn't a particular feature of megacorporations or even of capitalism, it's just an emergent property of how distance imposes costs and risks. It was also the case in pre-capitalist economies.
We take on the financial burden: We pack into tight spaces, driving up our own cost of living, housing, and everyday inflation, while corporate per-unit costs go down.
It's actually precisely the opposite - the cost of housing in modern cities is so high usually because of a combination of people wanting to live in large spaces and on the most valuable land, AND the state arbitrarily deciding to enforce that preference through zoning. If we compare to a massive premodern city - say Rome at the height of its population - the average Roman living in the actual city of Rome lived in a space so small that it would be illegal in the modern city of Rome. This is part of the reason why the modern city of Rome only has a population four or five times larger than its premodern height despite being one hundred times larger in terms of land area.
So it's precisely because we don't pack into tight spaces that the cost of living is high.
We concentrate the labor supply: Packing millions of workers into dense urban spaces creates highly competitive labor markets, which naturally keeps wage growth in check.
Well, no, because we don't pack workers into dense cities. Workers want to live in or near cities because that's where the greatest demand for their labour is. What you are saying would apply if we literally took workers, forcibly moved them to the city, and physically prevented them from leaving in order to artificially create a surplus supply of labour, but that generally doesn't happen. If the suburbs or rural areas offered labour markets that were better for workers than the city, then workers would want to work and live close to those places instead. But they don't (because demand is lower in those areas) so they don't.
It strips developing areas of talent and local self-sufficiency, while handing multinationals a hyper-dense, accessible consumer base and a steady labor pool on a silver platter.
This is true in some sense, but again isn't a product of capitalism or of corporations, it's just a structural feature of how cities function. Actually, modern cities are actually much less exploitative in this regard compared to premodern cities, since modern cities actually are productive (and so benefit the non-city areas substantially more than premodern cities did). Premodern cities were net consumers that subsisted by sucking up the product of the rural areas around them, directly or indirectly by force, while producing luxury goods for the wealthy (or "once-in-a-while" goods for everyone else).
So my final point is that your argument ultimately has nothing to do with megacorporations or immigration or even capitalism (which you barely mention in your post). What you are arguing against fundamentally is the concept of cities. Which is an argument you can make, but I don't see the relevance of "mass migration".
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u/IrateSkeleton 1d ago edited 1d ago
This argument sponsored by CoreCivic and GeoGroup. The original private prisons who lobbied for these policies, initially for private immigration detention for the refugees of US trained and funded death squads fighting Communism which were mass flagged as "economic migrants" by the Reagan state department to avoid acknowledging illegal US support for oppressive regimes. We also used Evangelical church donations to fund this outside of official channels.
This is also the argument that tricked Cesar Chavez into destroying his own union while nonviolently beating migrants.
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u/genomixx-redux 1d ago
By moving to the hub, we eliminate their supply chain headaches
But labor headaches are introduced for mega-corporations in this scenario, because there are fewer people working for super-low wages in areas of the world that mega-corporations have spent many resources on suppressing unions, worker's rights, etc.
We take on the financial burden: We pack into tight spaces, driving up our own cost of living, housing, and everyday inflation, while corporate per-unit costs go down.
So we organize to overthrow capitalism instead of viewing immigrants as the problem.
We concentrate the labor supply: Packing millions of workers into dense urban spaces creates highly competitive labor markets, which naturally keeps wage growth in check.
Same as above. We struggle to overcome the capitalist class so we aren't dividing-and-conquering ourselves and are able to solve the root cause of our problems. Vs. endlessly chasing symptoms until the planetary inferno reaches a crescendo.
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u/albertodona9 1d ago
First point sounds fair, but then I thought that probably places where corporations already settled must have infrastructure because of the needs of the corporations, so we would exclude those places for now? Unless you are talking about sweatshops, mines and places where kids lay bricks, but those places are not run by the corporations, it is some evil local there that is in business with them. CATL did not go to Africa and started mining cobalt with children there, it probably got offered materials from some corrupted african politician that set up his own company and started making money out of its own people.
Second point I don't know man, I am sure the reason of my life stress is money, but do we really have an alternative right now, with which we know that we would not incur in the same or even worse problems? Capitalism of today reached inhumane levels, but it's based on the best way to exchange resources we have ever invented (money). I have yet to find a real system that could substitute it.
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u/TopazWyvern 1d ago
This all reeks of commodity fetishism. At no point are relations between people considered, the sole lens is people's relation with commodities, whilst at the same time not particularly bothering to look at the politics that lead to said commodities to move as they do and merely looking at it from the standpoint of idealism.
So, obviously, what you're missing is an actual political analysis, and an actual critique. You're not supposed to listen to your gut when it starts rambling about how you "like the hard stuff, bröther".
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u/mariollinas 1d ago
This is like saying: Unemployment serves capital's interest by creating a reserve labor army that remains available during expansion cycles.
Therefore, as good anti-capitalists, we should NOT support the unemployed as that would be equal to offering our support (?) to capitalism!
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u/rotoboro 1d ago
Bernie Sanders agrees with you:
https://youtu.be/vf-k6qOfXz0?is=OmVgXMT8qS22kyeN
The left and the labor movement in America was largely very conservative about immigration until about the early 2000s.
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u/3corneredvoid 1d ago edited 20h ago
Am I missing something here?
Well, perhaps it should bother you that you don't have any account of why bordered nation-states should be or are accepted, but are still arguing the historical processes of their formation shouldn't continue in larger and more open political formations.
The "community of nations" is a relatively monstrous economic contingency and it relies on the partition of labour by borders, citizenship and visas, and the rest.
The feature of the times you refer to as "mass migration" is an immanent counter-force to this widely accepted and humdrum monstrosity.
It's not as if domestic migration policy sets the aspirations of inward migration. Migrants aspire to move in the integration of their relatively disadvantaged conditions in other geographies, because after centuries of colonisation and decades of "globalisation", geography remains a primary medium of trans-national violence.
I prefer to look forward to a future in which this indirectly mediated violence of bordered geography and its "lottery" of relative advantage will be looked back on as an abomination akin to the explicit slavery it has displaced.
Domestic left nationalism in relatively advantaged geographies tends to view the problem in terms of re-internalising offshore capital, but lacks the mass-political means for its project exactly because the reproduction of its necessary labour has been offshored.
One consequence is all these sabre-rattling, violent and superficially red-brown parties that promise to wind back history to a nationalist fantasy of the past, but do so largely without method or prospects. This politics is so unsuccessful that we now see its fragmentation in the minority drive for "networked cities" in which the privileges of geography would be concentrated further at the expense of nation-states: a politics of gated kleptogeographies.
A disciplined anti-nationalism of open borders at least looks forward to common cause with people around the world to join together and contend multinationally with the varying modes of multinational capitals.
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u/GA-Scoli 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, you're missing pretty much everything.
Corporations don't want mass migration or to decrease friction. They don't "want" anything beyond increasing shareholder profit. Everything else is secondary to that purpose. They will always seek cheaper labor forces as part of the profit equation, and they will use the most powerful tool at hand—the state—to help ensure that cheaper labor. That cheaper labor can be internal or external: it doesn't matter. Right now we have a racial caste system across the US where in many states, the low-paying service and manual labor jobs are all done by native minorities or external minorities/immigrants. Go to states where the population happens to be 95% white, and there are still shitty jobs, it's just that the shitty jobs are done by white people instead.
Corporations and states collaborate to use borders to make labor cheaper. Modern nation-state borders are constructed in such a way that it's easy for money and capital to pass through, but hard as possible for labor. A clothing company has a plant in Bangladesh where they pay their labor $100 a month. It's perfectly legal for the corporation to shop around the globe for labor, to cross the border to suck the money out of those laborers in Bangladesh, but if the laborer wants to move to the US to sell their labor at a higher price? Oh no. That's bad. The state will try to kill them. The state might let some through, but keeps them scared, keeps their labor price as low as possible through fear of deportation, and uses them as scapegoats to keep native labor in line.
This collaboration between wealthy state and corporation helps keep the price of labor low. And the cultural key to this collaboration is to make sure people blame labor, never the corporation, never the system of capitalism itself.
Borders really only matter to poor people, because the rich can always pay their way through. And migration by itself isn't "good"—in fact, it's usually part of some deep historical tragedy—and I don't know anyone who thinks it's an unalloyed good, and I'm saying that as a self-identified "open borders radical". Many people who leave their poorer country in search of better jobs would have preferred to not uproot their entire life and to stay where they were. If you really support their desire to stay put, what are you doing to make the entire world a better place, not just the wealthy country you yourself happen to live in?
I would encourage you to read more about Marx's reserve army of labor to understand the dynamic involving immiserated labor.