A Win–Win for Who? Complementary–Labour Pathways for Refugees through a Decolonial Feminist Lens

Abstract This article interrogates how refugee labour mobility pathways reinforce and reinvent gendered exclusions and hierarchies in the international refugee protection regime. By drawing on a decolonial feminist lens, we can delineate how the subaltern, including women, are excluded from such pathways based on race, class, and other intersections but also how those intersections exist under structures of global capitalist patriarchy. By connecting understandings of ‘productive’ work with refugee protection, labour pathways attribute value to liberal understandings of rights and labour, all the while offering increased precarity and temporal protection regimes to the dispossessed worker, under the guise of humanitarian protection. This article addresses a critical theoretical gap within existing literature on the turn to refugee labour pathways. By questioning who benefits, it sheds light on how refugee labour pathways can produce and reinforce different values of labour and workers, all of whom are gendered, racialised, and classed and subsumed by global capitalism, serving neoliberal logics that gain from the exploitations of the displaced. As such this article warns that connecting labour with refugee protection in this way is an agenda to be wary of.