Alice Bloch and Sonia McKay: Living on the Margins: Undocumented Migrants in a Global City

Published date01 September 2016
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2016.00763.x
Date01 September 2016
AuthorLinda McDowell
Book Reviews
LIVING ON THE MARGINS: U NDOCUMENTED MIGRANT S IN A
GLOBAL CITY by ALICE BLOCH AND SONIA McKAY
(Bristol: Policy Press, 2016, 216 pp., £70.00)
It is hard to imagine a more pertinent time to be writing about the lives of
displaced people, about legal and irregular migrants, as Europe faces the
largest movement of people across its borders since six million people found
themselves outside their country of birth at the end of the Second World
War. The current movement of men, women, and children from Pakistan,
Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, as well as from east to west Europe has
challenged EU politicians and policy makers to respond in a humanitarian
way to what is increasingly constructed as a `crisis'. Country after country ±
Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria ± have closed their borders and the EU as a
whole is responding with less than generosity in sending non-European
migrants back from Greece to camps in Turkey. Meanwhile the United
Kingdom closes its eyes as well as its borders, offering to accept only 20,000
Syrian refugees between 2016 and 2020, from camps in Syria, ignoring the
plight of thousands of potential migrants living in squalid conditions on the
north coast of France.
Desperate people are prone to take desperate action and unknown
numbers of people cross borders, without papers, every year, in large
numbers across land borders such as that long border in the south of the
United States of America and in smaller numbers across the sea to the United
Kingdom. Their exact numbers are, of course, difficult to assess but their
presence in the United Kingdom, as well as in the United States is
undeniable. Living and working in large cities, in sweatshops, small cafes, in
the construction industry, in care homes, as well as on farms and rural
manufacturing and packing plants, undocumented workers are crucial in
ensuring that low-wage and low-status jobs, that nevertheless are crucial to
the economy, are filled. These are the men and women who ensure that crops
are picked, turkeys plucked and packed, shirts machined, meals served,
bottoms wiped, and older people cared for. It is the role of this largely
invisible and often unexplored part of the economy that is the focus of Living
on the margins, whose authors have not only interviewed workers but also
their employers, often migrants themselves, who own the typically small
businesses in `ethnic enclaves' in the Greater London economy.
The decision to focus on undocumented workers and on ethnic enclaves
immediately raises complex theoretical and practical issues. It is clear that
undocumented migrants are at greater risk of exploitation in the labour
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ß2016 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2016 Cardiff University Law School

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