Migration and the World of Work: Discursive Constructions of the Global in ILO Narratives About Migration

Abstract

This article investigates how a recent report by the ILO works hard to make migration a global phenomenon. The analysis reminds us that reality is never immediately legible; it is always construed discursively and migration is therefore neither inherently local nor global. It is precisely the function of IGOs like ILO to transform a social process into a global reality, for example through the collection of (supposedly) comparable data from all countries, or through what this article calls 'totalizing tendencies,' i.e. different patterns of argumentation that all view migration as a global phenomenon and that produce a coherent story out of the multiple manifestations of cross-border mobility.