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Paper short abstract

Based on an exploratory fieldwork with migrant workers in agriculture in the South of Portugal, the objective of this paper is to show how precarity, deportability, and racialization are deeply articulated and impact on the lives of these workers.

Paper long abstract

In the past years, the export oriented agricultural sector in the South of Portugal relied on a flexible transnational labor force. Based on an exploratory fieldwork with migrant workers (Bangladeshis – mainly Sylhetis and Dhakaias –, Nepalis, and Punjabis), local activists (cultural mediators and immigrant associations), and political representatives in Odemira (South of Portugal) and Lisbon, together with media analysis, this paper addresses the working conditions but also the increasing racialization and the production of several moral panics (Cohen 1972) about these workers. These moral panics mobilize a series of arguments centered on anti-immigration, racial prejudice, and menacing masculinities. This racialized violence has been accompanied by a growing hostility towards these migrants, that are ultimately projected as matter out of place. Simultaneously, though, these workers are perceived as indispensable not only within the logics of flexible forms of capitalism – as cheap labor – but also as a source of income to many locally (that are now able to rent previously empty houses, for instance), especially during the non-touristic months of the year. A preliminary reading of this ethnographic material reveals three dynamics that interpolate our interlocutors daily, namely, precarity, deportability, and racialization. The objective of this paper is to show how these three dynamics are deeply articulated and their impact on the lives of these migrant workers.