How migrant aid can become a system of work and control

An ethnography in eastern Germany examines how support services for migrants may commodify clients and draw value from workers and volunteers.

Editorial illustration — not from the study.

The ethnography examines migrant service provision in a disempowered city in eastern Germany in 2022, when Ukrainian migrants arrived. It describes how humanitarian organizations can treat clients as commodities while drawing value from low-wage migrant and non-migrant workers and from volunteers.

How aid services operate

The study identifies five logics shaping the political economy of humanitarian migrant services. These logics turned service providers into workers in what the researchers call the “integration business,” while privatized governance reshaped staff members’ and volunteers’ humanitarian identities around corporate goals and the accumulation of capital. The researchers link these processes to changing forms of migration governance, the loss or taking of resources and power, the use of people’s labor, and capital accumulation.

Why the system matters

The findings suggest that migrant-support organizations do more than deliver aid: they can also participate in systems that govern migrants and organize labor. The study argues that understanding these systems requires examining migration control alongside newer forms of governance associated with authoritarian capitalism, which affect both migrants and non-migrants.

Evidence and limits

The article is based on an ethnography of migrant service provision in one disempowered city in eastern Germany during 2022. This approach provides a detailed account of how services operated in that place and period, but the abstract does not establish whether the same five logics operate in other cities, countries or periods. It also does not provide quantitative estimates of how widespread or large these effects are.

// Source

Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2026 · DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2026.2706864

View paper (DOI)Published 2026-08-24

Authors: Nina Glick Schiller

Institutions: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

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