The five logics of the humanitarian migrant services industry

Humanitarian migration services can institute forms of governance that commodify clients and extract values from the labor power of low-wage non-migrant and migrant workers and volunteers. These processes were identified through an ethnography of migrant service provision in a disempowered city in eastern Germany in 2022, the moment Ukrainian migrants arrived. Five logics of the political economy of humanitarian service provision underlay service delivery by these organizations, which transformed service providers into workers in the “integration business.” Staff and volunteers’ humanitarian subjectivities were reshaped by privatized governance oriented to corporate goals of capital accrual. The logics highlight transformations in migration industries that connect changing processes of systems of governance, dispossession, the appropriation of labor power and the accumulation of capital. These processes challenge scholars to merge discussions of carceral economies of migration control with analyses of emerging regimes of illiberal governance by authoritarian capitalists that encompass migrants and non-migrants. [149]