Migration, Intersectionality and Social Justice (Guest Editors’ Introduction)

This special issue contributes to a growing paradigm shift among migration scholars seeking to unpack the complexity of power relations, inequities and forms of social oppression among migrants, and intrinsic to border and migration policies, through the deployment of intersectionality as an analytic tool (Abu-Laban, 1998;Anthias, 2012;Bastia, Piper & Carron, 2011; Carastathis, Kouri-Towe, Mahrouse, & Whitley, 2018, Grosfoguel, Oso & Christou, 2015; Truong, Gasper, Handmaker & Bergh, 2014).Both migration and intersectionality are inextricably linked to social justice.Both involve processes of categorization that are deeply embedded in social science and policy, providing an important means by which we construct and apprehend the social world.Both also serve political purposes and agendas, and are associated with hierarchical systems of "worthiness" and access to bounded systems of rights (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018, p. 51).International migration involves authorized and unauthorized human crossings across borders of nation-states whose sovereignty is daily enacted through legally and (in accordance with international law) "legitimately" discriminating between those who are deemed to be desirable entrants and those defined as undesirable.In the latter category are migrants who defy border restrictions, rendering them prey to a host of risks and predations.This special issue explores the multiple pathways across state borders and the multiple jeopardies and experiences within the borders of "transit" and "destination" countries among migrants who embody the characteristics of those whom the late African-American poet and activist June Jordan (2005) describes as "the wrong people of the wrong skin on the wrong continent" Daiva Stasiulis, Zaheera Jinnah & Blair RutherfordStudies in Social Justice, Volume 14, Issue 1, 1-21, 2020 2 and who also may be the "wrong sex" and the "wrong gender identity," or the wrong religion, nationality or ethnicity.Most of the papers gathered in this thematic issue were originally presented at a conference on intersectionality and migration held in Ottawa at Carleton University in the fall of 2016.This conference was conceptualized by the three guest editors as part of a broader research and teaching partnership between Carleton's Migration and Diaspora Studies and the Institute of African Studies, and the African Centre for Migration and Society at Wits University, South Africa, to raise questions and explore opportunities on migration studies.It brought together scholars based in South Africa and Canada whose research on migration encompassed these two destination countries as well as South Korea, and where migrants originated from countries in southern and eastern Africa, south and east Asia, and Central and South America.It soon became apparent that the focus of most papers was trained on the most precarious of migrants produced by the intersection of their non-citizenship statuses with their location in low-wage work and "obfuscated employment relations" (Anderson, 2010, p. 300) or in statedesignated categories that left them highly vulnerable to hyper-exploitation and oppression.Commonly, destination and transit states either reinforce such precarity or ignore its effects in producing highly insecure and inhumane conditions and high probabilities of violence.Other transecting relations of power deepen and define migrants' exposure to structural insecurities vis à vis state authorities, employers, various mobility agents including traffickers, and hostile, xenophobic and fearful local populations.The topics in this special issue range broadly -and include work in segmented labour markets and struggles for livelihood; the links between family, security and nation-building; border, migration, health and employment policies; inter-migrant relations, law and legal reform; crimmigration and deportation.Collectively, the articles in this issue suggest that despite the many characteristics of migrants deemed "undesirable" through their location in racialized, gendered, class and other power relations, states both tolerate and selectively recruit certain groups of such "wrong" migrants who are perceived to serve significant purposes for states, employers and families of better-resourced residents.These include providing household care of children and elders, a captive cheap and disposable labour force, or (as in South Korea) biological reproduction of a nation grappling with declining fertility rates.The categories in which states place such migrants draw upon, compound, and deepen subjugating processes of racialization and class oppression, that are also gendered, sexualized, and may be intertwined with other stigmatizing dynamics.Rarely, a promise for more permanent status in destination countries is extended to low-wage or poor migrants, whose combined and intersecting characteristics may be regarded as producing a cultural or civilizational deficit or drain on state resources.Yet to the extent that such pathways to regularization or permanence exist, they are almost always contingent on the

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