UC Berkeley

The three papers that comprise this dissertation contribute key building blocks for my analysis of migration corridors as critical spatialities with the potential to significantly rework our approach to global migration governance—including in legal, political, and scholarly discourses. The study is a multi-site ethnographic account of migration corridors—circuits of human mobility within and across national borders that are governed by nation states as well as transnational financial, political, and social forces. It examines governance of migration corridors traversed by migrant agricultural, domestic, and garment workers in relationship to three building blocks: (1) expulsions that propel migration (e.g. national/global patterns of uneven development, environmental devastation, corporate land grabs, and conflict); (2) junctions where disparate migration flows converge and are redirected, including urban production and service hubs, special economic zones (SEZs), and territorial borders; and (3) forces that direct migration flows (e.g. legal regimes, product and labor supply chains, securitization, patriarchal norms, and local processes shaped by women labor migrants, recruitment intermediaries, and kinship and social networks).