Marginalized migrants and their demands for global justice

Transnational migration practices represent a challenge for social sciences and theoretical articulation of global justice. This article locates the transnational migration practices in a context of a geopolitical economy of capitalist globalization and argues for a necessary shift away from methodological nationalism as a defining analytical framework. Following this, the author presents the argument that while marginalized migrants do not necessarily share a cosmopolitan consciousness, they can be defined as actors of really-existing processes of cosmopolitanism if conceptualized as a structural group. She argues that while migrants' everyday struggles are seemingly only individual. Cosmopolitan critical social theory allows to refer to a migrants' lived critique as a source of generalizable claims for global justice although it does not take the form of traditional political protest. She then discusses the gendered dimension of the claims for global justice through analysis of care claims derived from migrant domestic workers' lived critique which implies a more ambitious demands on global justice than those asserted by organized collectivities.