The global mobile labour force in the modern/colonial world-system: analysing migrant integration in Germany

© 2019, Springer Nature Limited. Following the ‘European refugee crisis’, European states have initiated different migration and integration policies that often perpetuate and reinforce nation-state otherisation, capitalist exploitation, colonial legacies, and gendered and racialised oppression. Using an interdisciplinary approach based on decolonial theory, world-systems research, Marxist analysis, critical state theory, critical race theory and feminist critiques, this article finds that a rigorous investigation of a complex world-system and its deep structures, including modernity/coloniality, capitalism, the nation-state, racism and sexism, can shed light on the formation of a global mobile labour force that manifests itself in place- and context-specific ways. Based on this assertion, this article analyses processes of migrant integration in Germany’s domestic work force and points to its colonial, gendered and racialised dynamics. The article concludes by reviewing Napuli Langa’s account of and involvement in the migrant resistance movement in Germany which began in 2012. This resistance movement highlights alternative ways of living together in and against the modern/colonial world-system that goes beyond (neo)liberal inclusionism