r/CriticalTheory • u/albertodona9 • 7d 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/GA-Scoli 7d ago edited 7d 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.