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Introduction: understanding migrants’ economic precarity in global cities

Cities are increasingly marked by deep and pervasive precarity – in housing, employment and security. Dominant frameworks themselves, such as the “creative city” and the “global city”, are premised upon the precarity of their workers, many of whom barely earn a living wage. This special feature focuses on the precarity of (im)migrants located in global cities, making the following original contributions to the field: (1) it builds on, but also looks beyond, the migrant-labour market nexus which currently dominates understandings of precarity, in order to consider intersections with themediating roles of the welfare state and third sector; (2) it focuses on comparisons across and within the Global North and Global South; and (3) it reveals how precarity can be asmuch a strategy as a condition, which lends the term a sense of agency and constraint. “Precarity” usually refers to a condition marked by vulnerability and marginalization. It is useful to deploy Wacquant’s concepts of “advanced marginality” and “postindustrial precariat” (Wacquant, 1999, 2008) to frame understandings of work precarity among migrants. Symptoms of these two conditions have been ascendant since the 1970s in urban centers of the West, especially in the United States but also in Western Europe and even Latin America. Of particular concern to us when dealing with migrants are the trends of wage labour mutation and of downward restructuring of the welfare state, combined with territorial stigmatization of immigrant ghettos. While migrants have avoided the widespread redundancy that characterizes so many former working class populations in large cities – witness the large jobless ghettos in many American inner cities – they have often taken up low-paid, non-unionized, insecure and irregular work to survive, epitomizing the rise of working poverty. The peripheralization and precarity inherent in this new working poverty, where having a job is no protection against destitution, are compounded by a meaner, leaner welfare state that excludes recent arrivals from a panoply of programmes, including labour market regulation, job training, health, schooling and citizenship. Such work precarity among migrants tends to concentrate in global cities (DeVerteuil, 2003; Coe, 2013; DeVerteuil, 2011, 2015). Sassen (2001) defined global cities as key sites in the command and control of the world economy; production sites for advanced services – accounting, law, consulting, advertising, bankingwhich effectively generate and police the rules, regulations and norms that structure the world