Article The Neoliberal Governance of Global Labor Mobility: Migrant Workers and the New Constitutional Moments of Primitive Accumulation Hironori Onuki 1,2 Abstract One feature of the ‘‘age of migration’’ in which we live has been an increasing movement of labor from the Global South to the North, mainly in ‘‘low-skill’’ and low-wage jobs. This article examines how far and in what ways contemporary capital-driven migration-related policies in labor-receiving and labor-sending states have shaped the subjectivity of transnational migrant workers and their positioning in host societies. It does so through the notion of new constitutional moments of primitive accumulation that designates the production of social spaces for the commodification of labor through the implementation of specific migration policies by labor-receiving states in the Global North, which is reinforced by the interests of labor-sending states in the Global South. By using this concept, especially with reference to changes in Japan’s immigration policy since the early 1990s, I argue that the governance of global labor mobility has not only separated migrant workers from their means of subsistence in the home societies but also constructed them as precarious subjects in the labor markets of the host societies. Keywords neoliberal governance, migrant workers, primitive accumulation, new constitutionalism, Japan Introduction Global labor migration is not a historical novelty, but its forms and trends have shifted through ongoing changes in the global political economy. Revolutionary developments in transportation and communication technology, which have reduced the costs and enlarged the spatial range of movement, have dramatically reconfigured the pattern of global labor flows while increasing 1 School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia 2 York Centre for Asian Research, York University, Toronto, Canada Corresponding Author: Hironori Onuki, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia. Email: honuki@uow.edu.au Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 2016, Vol. 41(1) 3-28 ª The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0304375415570198 journals.sagepub.com/home/alt