Introduction to Migration and Social Reproduction

The introduction to this book raises key questions about the shifting relationships between migration, labour, and social reproduction amid overlapping global crises. It reflects on how migrant workers reproduce themselves and their communities across spaces shaped by border regimes, precarious labour markets and conditional welfare systems. The authors contribute to interdisciplinary debates on how we might think beyond the workplace, the household, the nation-state and dominant care imaginaries to grasp the contested and global nature of reproductive life. Emphasising an inclusive understanding of reproductive labour, this introduction highlights how states and employers manage mobility at work and shape life beyond waged work, while foregrounding migrants’ everyday strategies of survival, resistance, and care. It reflects on migration and social reproduction in Europe as a multi-scalar terrain of governance, contradiction and struggle—always connected with the Global South. These reflections unfold in dialogue with materialist feminism, critical migration, border studies, and global labour studies.