Decolonial Notes on How to Do Research on International Migrations in the World-System

As pointed out by the International Organization of Migration and the United Nations, international migration has increased since the year 2000 beyond all expectations. The expansion of global value chains and the extractive processes linked to them have modified the territories of origin, displacing and proletarianizing mobile populations as well as articulating mechanisms for the provision of cheap labor to their productive processes. At the same time, the capitalist systemic and climate crises, together with the increase in global food prices and the emergence of new armed conflicts, have driven population movements throughout the world-system. This chapter aims to provide a framework that, from a structuralist perspective, offers theoretical tools for analyzing international migration from a decolonial perspective. If historical capitalism colonized the territories of the so-called global periphery by establishing hierarchies among the world’s populations and subjecting their resources to the processes of accumulation in the core, current capitalism rests on these foundations, reproducing a coloniality of power that builds migrants as a global reserve army of cheap labor. In this global context, how should migration be understood? Based on Abdelmalek Sayad’s sociology of migration, decolonial thinking, and structuralist theories, mainly the world-system and the world-ecology, the chapter offers an interpretative macro-framework that will allow the development of studies that, understanding the global structure, do not overshadow the centrality of migrants and their agency processes in its formation.