Immanuel Ness in the book, Migration as Economic Imperialism, challenges the dominant narrative that labour migration benefits all.

Instead, he exposes how international labour mobility has become a form of economic imperialism.

Through in-depth case studies and fieldwork, Ness shows how sending countries lose skilled workers while receiving countries benefit from cheap, exploitable labour, without responsibility for social welfare.

He argues that remittance economies entrench dependency and that global labour regimes are built on coercion and dispossession. This work is critical for understanding how migration is entangled with imperial finance, corporate outsourcing, and the erosion of labour rights.

This reference was recommended by the Bartlett Pan-African Indigenist Collective.

The Collective is a space for critical dialogue, activism, and scholarship that foregrounds Pan-African Indigenist ways of knowing, being, and creating. Formed by members of the Bartlett community dedicated to uplifting the voices, knowledge, and cultural legacies of people of African heritage and their respective Indigenous communities and lands, it aims to challenge colonial legacies and inspire transformation within institutional structures, research and curricula. By integrating creative and scholarly practices, the Collective works to restore narratives that have been silenced or misrepresented. Their work advances decolonial efforts in higher education by creating inclusive spaces and centring diverse African knowledge systems. Bartlett Alternative recognises the Collective’s vital contribution to broadening intellectual and cultural horizons through radical inclusivity and exclusivity, and thanks them for sharing resources that foreground lived experience, land-based knowledge systems, and epistemic justice.

Department Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment