Global Displacement and Local In-Placement: Transnational Stories of Rustbelt Revitalization

Faranak Miraftab is professor of urban and regional planning with joint appointments in the Departments of Women and Gender Studies and of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Drawing on insights from her research among meatpackers in central Illinois with transnational families in Mexico and Togo, Faranak Miraftab takes a close look at the contradictory dynamics that fuel the globally displaced labor force we call “immigrant workers” and the role they play in revitalizing the US rustbelt. She asks, “How does place matter for diverse displaced workers and how they negotiate their relationship with the rustbelt’s predominantly white population?” Focusing on the micro-politics of the everyday in life-making spaces outside the workplace, Miraftab challenges the metro-centrism of globalization and immigration studies that theorize based on immigrant experiences of metropolitan areas or so called “global cities.” Moving across local and global analytic scales, Miraftab reveals the invisible in-flow of resources that revitalize the rustbelt, a perspective critically relevant in the current era of demonizing and criminalizing immigrants.