Search

Considering the ongoing, record‐setting migration in the Global South, this paper explores the values, principles and ethical tensions of Venezuelan migrants in the informal economy of Colombia. We found that migrants frequently prefer to stay within the informal economy as a way of preserving their identities, values and principles, rather than adopting those of their new country. This choice sets up ethical tensions for the migrants and their host countries. Our analysis challenges the current policy goals of transitioning migrants from informal to formal economies as a mark of success and inclusion. Instead, we attempt to recognize the migrant voice and their agency capacity through our research using focus groups and applied thematic analysis (ATA) of popular music and narratives. Our findings broaden the understanding of why migrants choose to stay in the informal economy and challenge policy goals that focus on inclusion and integration of migrants into formal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among geographers, recent focus on the illicit and illegal has tended to fall into two camps. Economic geographers focus on regimes of illicitness and corresponding production of specific forms of economic space; political ecologists and land change scholars, on the other hand, scrutinised how illicit commodity flows shape land and resource use, especially in the global South. This paper offers an initial integration of these two relatively separate subfields, specifically in terms of their complementary attention to uneven development. We use the concept of "global commodity chains" to explore the ways in which the regulation of agricultural commodities shapes how they are trafficked and embed in space, with particular attention to sites of international transshipment. When a commodity is illegal, spaces of transit take on significant analytical importance. As a heuristic, we present a comparative mapping of two agricultural commodity chains linking Colombia and the USA: coffee and cocaine. Their comparison highlights how "illicitness" fundamentally transforms cocaine's spatiality, requiring risk evasion that results in characteristically enlarged transit spaces and huge differentials between producer and consumer price. We show how rents circulate in those transit spaces, socially and ecologically embedding in diffuse, fluid networks with severe consequences for people and environments. We conclude with implications for work on illicit commodities and the collateral social and environmental harms they produce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]