Re-territorializing the flux of foreign labor force: the birth of a new total institution in the Catalan agriculture

Abstract

The agricultural union Unió de Pagesos has established on Catalan soil a system designed for the social control and the permanent disposition of foreign workers. The State's migration polity is responsible of the emergence of such a system, and we can trace its origin in the symbiotic relation between the State and the union, whose interests —the social control of the foreign worker and the just in time delivery of labor— are harmonized in it. In the lodgment a transformation is intended through different devices (lodgment regulations, the presence of personnel in charge, a visit regime and exit permissions, among others). Its particular penitentiary character and its tendency to totalize the social life inside, resembles what Erving Goffman called Total Institutions. The footprint of this new institution is its liminality, characteristic of this space devoted to the concentration of men and their transformation.