(C) OpenDemocracy This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Displacement from Venezuela taught me that class has no borders [1] [] Date: 2025-10 I met Cindy** in New York. She’s a Venezuelan woman who crossed the jungle, arrived undocumented, and, unable to find other work, turned to sex work to support her children. She told me she’d broken down in tears after seeing her first client, but persisted because she needed to earn a living. She now lives in Queens, has saved enough to bring other family members to the US, and has bought a house in Venezuela. William, another person I met during my research, used to sell coffee outside his migrant shelter on Randall’s Island, New York. Within six months, he’d saved up enough to move out of the shelter and rent a room in the Bronx. The income from the coffee stall isn’t much, but William is still able to save for the future. He plans to go home to Venezuela one day and open his own coffee shop there. Cindy and William’s stories are not unique. Along with many others like them, they’re trapped in precarious labour regimes in the Global North. They’re also accumulating economic and symbolic capital previously out of reach for them in Venezuela. They defy socio-economic expectations through migration, not by escaping labour exploitation, but by enduring it long enough to change their status back home. In Venezuelan society, where poor and racialised people are rarely imagined as employers or property owners, returning with branded clothing and dollars to start a business or buy a house confers on them a form of class realignment. But these gains are built on invisibility, precarity, and exploitation abroad. And they do not dismantle the global structures that rendered these migrants’ lives disposable in the first place. What success hides Cindy and William’s stories don’t illustrate the power of migration to redistribute opportunity. They show how migration deepens global divisions of labour. Elites – migrant and non-migrant alike – flourish. Meanwhile, poor and racialised individuals – like many of my colleagues at the German bakery – migrate from one exploitative system into another, but this time with the added weight of surveillance, racism, deportability, and uncertainty. This may, for some, generate upward mobility at home later on. But that ‘success’, however real, depends on accepting exploitation and expendability abroad first. I was lucky to find a way out. I eventually gained credentials, then recognition, then access. My story could be read as a narrative of escape from these global regimes of cheap labour production – proof that migration is a global mechanism for levelling up. But it’s rather a story of class and racial privilege. I bypassed systems of labour extraction not only through effort, but through the cultural capital my class and light skin afforded me. It didn’t have to be that way. Many of the other migrants who worked with me at the factory are still packaging bread. Migration, I’ve come to learn, is not a rupture from the inequality and exploitation back home. It is a global reorganisation shaped by borders, race, class, vulnerabilities, and labour relations – dynamics which affect us at home and follow us abroad too. To understand labour migration today, we must ask not only who crosses borders, but also who is permitted to exit global systems of cheap, expendable labour – and who is kept inside. * I use ‘migrant’ to refer to people who move to another country for any number of reasons. I use ‘refugee’ for people formally granted protection by a host state because their life or freedom are at risk back home due to war or political persecution. **Names changed to protect identities. Explore the series so far Erick Moreno Superlano is a Ph.D. candidate in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford, and a Visiting Scholar at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility in New York. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/displacement-from-venezuela-taught-me-that-class-has-no-borders/ Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/