Natasha Iskander

The ILR Review invited this group of scholars who work within the fields of sociology, history, and urban planning to share their perspective on the politics of skills. We called on their expertise to draw attention to the politics that drive the definition and development of skill and its use in shaping the rights and voice of workers. The essays in this forum explore the politics of skill along three lines. First, they interrogate the definition and assessment of skill, with particular attention to the ways that structural markers of social difference—such as race, gender, class, and immigration status—shape the valuation of skill. Second, they analyze the ways that the interpretation of skill is shaped by power dynamics at the worksite and in the broader economy. This line of analysis also considers possibilities for industrial renewal and labor mobilization. And third, the essays explore how skill classifications are used to narrow political and civil rights and to justify forms of exploitation and dehumanization

Skill—specifically the distinction between the “skilled” and “unskilled”—is generally defined as a measure of ability and training, but Does Skill Make Us Human? shows instead that skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire. Natasha Iskander takes readers into Qatar’s booming construction industry in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup, and through her unprecedented look at the experiences of migrant workers, she reveals that skill functions as a marker of social difference powerful enough to structure all aspects of social and economic life.

Through unique access to construction sites in Doha, in-depth research, and interviews, Iskander explores how migrants are recruited, trained, and used. Despite their acquisition of advanced technical skills, workers are commonly described as unskilled and disparaged as “unproductive,” “poor quality,” or simply “bodies.” She demonstrates that skill categories adjudicate personhood, creating hierarchies that shape working conditions, labor recruitment, migration policy, the design of urban spaces, and the reach of global industries. Iskander also discusses how skill distinctions define industry responses to global warming, with employers recruiting migrants from climate-damaged places at lower wages and exposing these workers to Qatar’s extreme heat. She considers how the dehumanizing politics of skill might be undone through tactical solidarity and creative practices.

With implications for immigrant rights and migrant working conditions throughout the world, Does Skill Make Us Human? examines the factors that justify and amplify inequality.

Labor standards are not just enforced; they are enacted, and often in ways that are different from their stated intention. This distinction creates an opening to consider the ways that frontline workers extend and repurpose enforcement practices. Drawing on qualitative research in two US cities, the authors focus on Latino immigrant construction workers to identify the strategies they use to rework formal safety mandates to advance technical knowledge, create skill-based alliances across organizational hierarchies, and protect career trajectories. These resourcing strategies were present in both locations, but workers’ ability to affect the quality of their jobs through the collective enactment of labor standards varied significantly by city and depended on the enforcement practices in play. Workers’ attention to these localized resourcing opportunities suggests possibilities for progressive innovation at the multiple levels of government driving emerging research on regulation and federalism.

This article looks at the use of public health strategies to define political membership in the nation. I examine the use of the cordon sanitaire to mitigate the novel coronavirus in Qatar. I argue that it acts primarily as a boundary to map out zones of political exclusion, splitting those who are entitled to protection from disease from those who are not. Through an analysis of the logic, application, and history of the cordon sanitaire in Qatar and elsewhere, I argue that it is only a more explicit example of the ways that governments have applied public health measures such that they apportion exposure to COVID-19, protecting some while mandating exposure for others. Exposure, or protection from it, has become a means to spatialize power and territorialize the national imaginary, separating full members from those who are excluded and reduced to their economic function.

Climate warming is the fundamental challenge of our time, not only because it will radically transform our natural environment but also because it will redefine jobs and livelihoods. This article builds an interpretive bridge for understanding the political consequences of how climate change pressures will affect work, production, and technology. We organize this review along three themes: commodification and the processes through which costs and resources are made visible; the production of knowledge and the politics of representing the future; and just transitions and how to distribute the costs and the opportunities of change equitably. These themes all address the ways that the dominance of the market—both in rhetoric and in policy—eclipses the materiality of economic production and social exchange. Together, however, the three themes also allow us to contemplate new political and institutional actions for tackling the twinned challenges of mitigating climate change and safeguarding our livelihoods.

The use of detention as a tool of immigrant enforcement has grown in the United States and around the world. In this article, I examine the practices used to structure the physical detention of immigrants and explore the role that carceral immigrant control plays as a form of labor market governance. I argue that the same security and detention practices that equate being out of status with criminality are also used to tag immigrants as unskilled. Through the delineation of skill categories, which are vested with certain political rights, I posit that this carceral enforcement of skill categories shapes how immigrants are able to navigate the labor market, with particular attention to the implications for recipients of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) protections.

Skill has played a central role in immigration scholarship, most notably in a protracted debate over whether ‘unskilled’ immigrants threaten job security for less or moderately educated native-born workers. In recent years, scholars have re-examined whether immigrant workers, particularly those with limited formal education, are unskilled. Extending this further, the chapter argues that immigrants are not simply individuals that possess, acquire, and apply their skill. Immigrants are also contributors to collective learning processes through which industry skills are developed, replenished, and recombined overtime. But immigrants are especially vulnerable to skill misclassification because they lack access to institutions that can protect and defend spaces for collective learning. Considering immigrant skill reproduction in the absence of institutional protections allows us to reflect on the role those institutions play in shaping the politics of skill—a role that can be strengthened as part of a growing movement in support of low-wage workers more generally.

In Spanish Legacies, Portes, Aparicio, and Haller offer the results of their longitudinal study on the assimilation of the children of immigrants in Spanish society. Thanks to their study design, which parallels the earlier Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study conducted by Portes and Rumbaut, the authors are able to compare assimilation trajectories in Spain with those of second-generation youth in the United States. This comparison raises important considerations about how immigration policy shapes assimilation processes. More centrally, the contrast between the cases invites a deeper consideration of normative questions that not only undergird immigration policy but also shape the assimilation experiences of the second generation. The juxtaposition of the two cases also elicits provocations about how the sociological theories about assimilation might have been different if they had been developed based on the Spanish, rather than the American, experience, and how those Spanish-inflected theories might support different directions of inquiry.

Scholars of gender and work have considered the gendered interpretation of embodied skill, and have shown how discourses about gender inform the visibility of skill and the value attributed to it. In their focus on discourse, they have overlooked the impact of institutional structures in shaping how skill is valued. This essay considers the situation of male workers in Qatar’s construction industry to argue that gender analyses of work should pay attention to the legal and institutional constraints placed on workers. These structures abet understandings of gender that enable employers to erase the embodied skill of workers and their contribution to the production process, even as they limit the ability of workers to perform their gender identity in a way that assigns value to their expertise.

Employment restructuring is a transformative process that brings about significant changes in how work is organised and experienced. Scholars who study restructuring in industries that employ large numbers of immigrant workers, including construction, food processing, or janitorial services, often point to the undermining effects of this transformation on industry wage standards, working conditions, and training supports. But often missing from these accounts is a recognition that restructuring is uneven and incomplete at best and often produces shortcomings and limitations that continue to frustrate and perplex immigrant and native-born workers alike. Drawing on a multi-year study of construction workers in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, we find Latino immigrants are far from passive inheritors of the problems of restructuring that they and others encounter during their daily work. Rather, they respond to these challenges with innovative and lasting solutions, developing new work structures and routines that support industry skill development, knowledge sharing, and quality standards. Equally important, their native-born supervisors and co-workers have learned to value these solutions and ultimately have stepped in as influential allies, helping immigrant workers leverage these contributions to secure improved working conditions and higher compensation levels. These exchanges have tethered immigrant and non-immigrant workers together and in ways that challenge standard narratives of native dominance and immigrant exploitation. The result is intensified interdependency and ultimately the creation of an enduring relational resource for promoting worker rights and also for guiding further immigrant advocacy.

The impact that remittances – the monies that migrants send home – have on the development on migrant-sending economies is a matter of considerable debate. This essay presents the case of Morocco and its state-controlled bank, La Banque Centrale Populaire (BCP), to argue that the major determinant of remittance impact on development is the quality and breadth of financial intermediation to which migrants have access. By providing a set of financial tools that allowed migrants to deposit, save, and invest with the institution, the BCP, since 1969, simultaneously made remittances funds available the migrants for their personal expenditures and to the Moroccan government for large-scale industrial investment. However, to create financial services for migrants with an appeal broad enough to bring significant amounts of remittance liquidity into the banking sector, BCP had to engage migrants in an open and collaborative process of product design. Ultimately, this paper argues, migrants’ involvement in the design of financial products enabled them to use the banking system to redirect remittances resources to rural and semi-rural areas most migrants were from, and to amend the industrial development priorities of the Moroccan government.

Studies of low-wage workers have long recognized the role of space in mediating access to employment. Significantly less attention has been paid to the ways in which space informs workers' ability to develop the attributes that would make them more employable. In this article, we address this gap through an examination of how immigrant workers use the relative spatial organization of residence and production to cultivate the skills that enable them to shift out of low-wage occupations. We also argue that workers' spatial job market strategies have an important, but often overlooked, temporal aspect: workers use space over time not only to shape their access to jobs but also to create breathing room for learning skills that enable them to improve their employment trajectories over the long term. Drawing on a multiyear ethnographic study of Mexican immigrants in downtown Philadelphia, we show that immigrant workers used the functional proximity among the restaurant industry, small-scale residential construction work pertaining to housing renovation, and the neighborhoods where they lived to develop skill sets that enabled them to shift into higher-wage construction jobs. In essence, these workers knitted together two seemingly separate industries, such that they could use their employment time in one for learning in and about the other. Our study suggests that interventions that curtail immigrants' mobility may have implications that are far more serious than limiting immediate access to jobs: these measures may undercut immigrants' strategies for developing the skills required for long-term occupational mobility and advancement.

Using an ethnographic case study of Mexican immigrant construction workers in two U.S. cities and in Mexico, the authors illustrate the contribution of immigrant skill as a resource for changing workplace practices. As a complement to explanations that situate the protection of job quality and the defense of skill to external institutions, the authors show that immigrants use collective learning practices to improve job quality from inside the work environment—that is to say from the inside-out. The authors also find that immigrants use collective skill-building practices to negotiate for improvements to their jobs; however, their ability to do so depends on the institutions that organize production locally. Particular attention is given to the quality of those industry institutions, noting that where they are more malleable, immigrant workers gain more latitude to alter their working conditions and their prospects for advancement.

In recent years, the relationship between migration and development has received renewed attention, and analysts, policy-makers, and development experts have returned to the question of how to use emigration to foster economic growth in countries and communities of origin. The main thrust of this inquiry has focused on how to use remittances – the monies that migrants send back home – to support economic activity (de la Garza & Orozco 2002; Orozco 2002; Munzele Maimbo & Ratha 2005; Ratha 2005). However, among countries with high emigration rates, a handful of governments have expanded their emphasis past remittances to create policies that link emigration and development in a more comprehensive way (Castles & Delgado Wise 2008). Morocco and Mexico feature prominently among them. Both countries have policies to link emigration with local and national economic transformation that reach beyond a narrow focus on remittances, and that, more importantly, are creative, participatory, and dynamic (Iskander 2010). At their outset, however, the policies were as single-minded in their focus on remittances as any of the more mercenary examples of today.

This essay reviews Enrique de la Garza Toledo’s anthology on atypical work, titled Trabajo no clásico, organización y acción colectiva (Vols. 1 & 2) and situates it within the larger tradition of Latin American sociology of work. It argues that the anthology merges an emphasis on labor processes in a specific industry with an attention to the subjectivities and relationships that support worker agency and labor movements. Moreover, it posits that the rich case studies on atypical work in a wide spectrum of settings in Mexico City that are included in these two volumes provide grounded material for meso-level theorizing about the factors that shape atypical work and the ways that workers in those jobs respond to them.

This article examines informal training and skill development pathways of Latino immigrant construction workers in two different urban labor markets: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. We find that institutional differences across local labor markets not only shape how immigrants develop skills in specific places but also determine the localized obstacles they face in demonstrating and harnessing these skills for employment. To explain the role of local institutions in shaping differences in skill development experience and opportunities, we draw on the concept of tacit skill, a term that is rarely incorporated into studies of the labor market participation of less educated immigrants. We argue that innovative pathways that Latino immigrant workers have created to develop tacit skill can strengthen advocacy planning efforts aimed at improving employment opportunities and working conditions for marginalized workers, immigrant and nonimmigrant alike.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, with the amount of money emigrants sent home soaring to new highs, governments around the world began searching for ways to capitalize on emigration for economic growth, and they looked to nations that already had policies in place. Morocco and Mexico featured prominently as sources of "best practices" in this area, with tailor-made financial instruments that brought migrants into the banking system, captured remittances for national development projects, fostered partnerships with emigrants for infrastructure design and provision, hosted transnational forums for development planning, and emboldened cross-border political lobbies.

In Creative State, Natasha Iskander chronicles how these innovative policies emerged and evolved over forty years. She reveals that the Moroccan and Mexican policies emulated as models of excellence were not initially devised to link emigration to development, but rather were deployed to strengthen both governments' domestic hold on power. The process of policy design, however, was so iterative and improvisational that neither the governments nor their migrant constituencies ever predicted, much less intended, the ways the new initiatives would gradually but fundamentally redefine nationhood, development, and citizenship. Morocco's and Mexico's experiences with migration and development policy demonstrate that far from being a prosaic institution resistant to change, the state can be a remarkable site of creativity, an essential but often overlooked component of good governance.

This paper documents the rise and fall of a micro-learning region in Philadelphia. The central actors in this region are undocumented Mexican immigrants who until recently were able to draw on the intensity of their workplace interactions and their heterodox knowledge to produce new and innovative building techniques in the city's residential construction. The new knowledge they developed was primarily tacit. More significantly, the learning practices through which immigrant workers developed skill and innovated new techniques were also heavily tacit. Because these practices were never made formal and were never made explicit, they remained invisible and difficult to defend. With the housing market collapse and subsequent decline in housing renovation in south-center region of Philadelphia, this tacit knowledge and the practices that gave it shape and significance, are no longer easily accessible. We draw on this case to demonstrate the importance of access to the political and economic resources to turn learning practices into visible structured institutions that protect knowledge and skill. Whether or not the practices that support knowledge development are themselves made explicit can determine whether the knowledge they produce becomes an innovation that is recognized and adopted or whether it remains confined to a set of ephemeral practices that exist only so long as they are being enacted.

Nominally, the wave of protests by undocumented immigrants that swept through France in the late 1990s successfully challenged the restrictive Pasqua immigration laws. However, despite appearances, the mass movement was at base a labour protest: undocumented workers demonstrated against immigration laws that undermined the way they navigated informal labour markets and, in particular, truncated their opportunities for skill development. Furthermore, it is proposed in this article that examining social movements for their labour content can reveal erosions of working conditions and worker power in informal sector employment. A case study of the Paris garment district is presented to demonstrate how the spread of ‘hybrid-informality' made legal work permits a prerequisite for working informally and relegated undocumented immigrants to lower quality jobs outside the cluster.