Immigrant Labor and the Racialized Differentiation of Disposability During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Keywords: labor geographies, immigration, racial capitalism, social reproduction, Covid-19
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Scholars have long recognized the disposability of labor as a constitutive feature within a capitalist mode of production. Using the contradictory position of immigrant workers in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study - in which noncitizens laboring in industries ranging from meatpacking, to agriculture, to healthcare were variously defined as “essential,” while simultaneously excluded from a host of government programs intended to act as safety nets that would help limit peoples’ exposure to the virus - we examine how the condition of disposability becomes racially differentiated and mediated via coercive state policy. Introducing the theorem of racially differentiated disposability, we discuss how this process of differentiation results not just in a disciplining of labor, but also in an ability for employers to pay wages to one substantial cross-section of the U.S. working class significantly below the cost necessary to sustain their everyday and generational social reproduction. We conclude by discussing how this outcome plays a critical role in stabilizing the accumulation of surplus value, as a contribution to broader theorizations of the heuristic of racial capitalism.