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The violence of communicative erasure: Trust and the hyper-precarious migrant worker



The hyper-precarity of the migrant worker, expelled into the spaces of discardability in neoliberal economies, is constituted by a politics of communciative erasure. 

Yet, even as these grotesque forms of organizing that constitute discardable migrant bodies become visible, everyday forms of communication in hegemonic systems work to erase and render invisible the accounts of exploitation, extraction, and oppression.

The grotesqueness of the otherwise normalized politics of "use and throw" is carefully tucked away from discursive spaces through various forms of communicative strategies to erase the voices of low-wage migrant workers. 

Amidst their suffering and the negotiations of violence written into neoliberal societies, amidst the violence brought on their bodies by COVID19, workers speak up. 

These very acts of speaking up must be violently shut down to keep intact the neoliberal narrative. 

One such strategy, deployed by civil society organizations, state propaganda instruments, academics, and those that sit in placed of hegemomic power is the cultivation of the image of the untrustworthy low-wage migrant worker.

The figure of the worker, projected in infantile imagery, is one not to be trusted. His articulations are not credible. Casting doubt on his capacity to narrate a truthful account keeps the neoliberal structure intact, legitimizing the political economy of bureaucracies, service delivery organizations, civil society actors, and technocrats operating on expertise.

This discursive move of projecting the migrant worker as untrustworthy then gives effect to the erasure of his voice. The active work of erasing his voice finds legitimacy through the work of planting "seeds of doubt" about the quality of the story expressed by the migrant worker.

A wide array of state instruments are continually at work to plant the "seeds of doubt," to unsettle the accounts of oppression, extraction, unpaid wages, poor food, and poor housing voiced by the workers. 

Civil society actors often stand alongside the state actors in this discursive strategy although the performance of civil society can work toward both supporting as well as questioning the state. Even in instance where civil society organizations interrogate state action, the figure of the untrustworthy migrant worker is left intact. This discursive move is integral to sustaining communicative inequality, which in turn legitimizes the array of organizations-institutions that exist to exploit, oppress, and serve the migrant worker.

The recognition of this commuicative erasure is the foundation toward creating a just organizing framework. 


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