From politics to poetics of migration: Migrant workers’ ‘life-in-migration’ during the COVID pandemic

Abstract Many scholars have talked about learning from the sporadicity of the human world and the unpredictability of human life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet few have provided fully satisfactory answers for exactly what lessons we have learned or should have learned. This paper revisits the plight of migrant workers during the pandemic, focusing on foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. Such low-wage workers are usually perceived as under the blanket control and exploitation of the global labour regime. The pandemic seemingly generated an even more controlling structure, yet within that totalizing structure migrants enjoyed some ambiguous freedoms and unexpected bargains. The COVID experience thus illuminates how the lives of migrant workers are composed by many shifting encounters of space-time and people (in relation)—which connect migrants to variant materialities and imaginary life-scapes. Rather than putting workers to the two ends of a bipolar structure—either victims of the labour market or empowered agents resisting control—we employ a more dynamic framework balancing politics and the poetics of a life-in-migration. The poetic approach may not be new to migration studies; we provide a theorized base for advancing this approach.