Contemporary African Migrations in a Global Context

Abstract

Migrations from the South to the North are sometimes seen as representing civilizational counterpenetration, revolutionary cosmopolitanism, and cultural transnationalism. The culturalist biases of these perspectives tend to ignore a fundamental feature of international migration, that more often than not people migrate to sell their labor power and that the patterns of migration, labor procurement, and utilization are conditioned by the dynamics of capitalist development, expansion, and accumulation. Not only is international migration tied to the changing dynamics of capitalism as a world system, it constitutes a critical element of the international division of labor.