Mobility, Social Reproduction and Exploitation: A Critical Legal Perspective on the Tension between Capitalism and Freedom of Movement

Abstract

A wide range of literature has placed social reproduction at the centre of migration processes. Although diversified, this body of literature has rarely focused on exploring, in depth, the entanglements between mobility and reproduction. In this article, I argue that, from a critical legal perspective, such entanglements are crucial for developing a feminist view on borders and migration that goes beyond the analysis of the female component of migration processes.  On the one side, such a focus reveals the extent to which regimes of mobility control are structured around and, at the same time, reproduce a conceptual separation between production and reproduction. On the other side, the challenge that the reproduction and maintenance of life poses to capitalism highlights what is at stake in the tension between border regimes and the claim for freedom of movement. Seen from both these competing perspectives, human mobility appears constitutive (rather than functional) for contemporary social reproduction processes, as much as circulation is for production.