About

Natasha Iskander is a scholar specializing in immigration, work, knowledge generation, economic development, and climate change. Her research focuses on understanding the social and economic impacts of migration, particularly in the context of the global labor market and the role of knowledge in shaping economic development.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Economics
• Economic growth
• Political economy
• Geography
• Demographic economics
• Economy
• Law
• Psychology
• Environmental ethics

Selected publications

• Climate Change and Work: Politics and Power

  UNC Libraries · 2025-07-16

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Climate warming is the fundamental challenge of our time, not only because it will radically transform our natural environment but also because it will redefine jobs and livelihoods. This article builds an interpretive bridge for understanding the political consequences of how climate change pressures will affect work, production, and technology. We organize this review along three themes: commodification and the processes through which costs and resources are made visible; the production of knowledge and the politics of representing the future; and just transitions and how to distribute the costs and the opportunities of change equitably. These themes all address the ways that the dominance of the market—both in rhetoric and in policy—eclipses the materiality of economic production and social exchange. Together, however, the three themes also allow us to contemplate new political and institutional actions for tackling the twinned challenges of mitigating climate change and safeguarding our livelihoods.

  PublisherDOI

• Power Through Problem Solving: Latino Immigrants and the Inconsistencies of Economic Restructuring

  UNC Libraries · 2025-09-19

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Employment restructuring is a transformative process that brings about significant changes in how work is organised and experienced. Scholars who study restructuring in industries that employ large numbers of immigrant workers, including construction, food processing, or janitorial services, often point to the undermining effects of this transformation on industry wage standards, working conditions, and training supports. But often missing from these accounts is a recognition that restructuring is uneven and incomplete at best and often produces shortcomings and limitations that continue to frustrate and perplex immigrant and native‐born workers alike. Drawing on a multi‐year study of construction workers in Raleigh‐Durham, North Carolina, we find Latino immigrants are far from passive inheritors of the problems of restructuring that they and others encounter during their daily work. Rather, they respond to these challenges with innovative and lasting solutions, developing new work structures and routines that support industry skill development, knowledge sharing, and quality standards. Equally important, their native‐born supervisors and co‐workers have learned to value these solutions and ultimately have stepped in as influential allies, helping immigrant workers leverage these contributions to secure improved working conditions and higher compensation levels. These exchanges have tethered immigrant and non‐immigrant workers together and in ways that challenge standard narratives of native dominance and immigrant exploitation. The result is intensified interdependency and ultimately the creation of an enduring relational resource for promoting worker rights and also for guiding further immigrant advocacy. 

  PublisherDOI

• Commentary: America's arrival city – how immigration made New York and how immigrant exclusion almost destroyed it

  2024-01-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  New York is America’s quintessential arrival city. The city’s defining institutions; its economy; its skyscrapers, parks and infrastructure; its schools, hospitals and social services and its cultural ecosystem have all been produced through the city’s reception of the millions that have arrived at its shores. Nevertheless, New York’s urban policy has consistently defined immigrants as blight. Urban planning policies, especially those that address the build environment, have, throughout the city’s history, targeted immigrant communities, and have sought to contain and exclude immigrant populations. The tension between the city’s reliance on immigration for its vitality and its urban policies of immigrant exclusion has shaped the city’s development and defined its modern form. This commentary addresses this tension and shows that for an arrival city like New York urban policy and immigration policy are one in the same.

  PublisherDOI

• Biophilic Institutions: Building New Solidarities between the Economy & Nature

  Daedalus · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Climate change and economic insecurity are the two most pressing challenges for modern humanity, and they are intimately linked: climate warming intensifies existing structural inequities, just as economic disparities worsen climate-induced suffering. Yet precisely because this economy-nature interrelationship is institutionalized, there exists an opening for alternative institutional configurations to take root. In this essay, we make the case for that institutional remaking to be biophilic, meaning it supports rather than undermines life and livelihood. This is not speculative thinking: biophilic institutions already exist in the here and now. Their existence provides an opportunity to learn how to remake institutions founded on solidarities of shared aliveness and a shared alliance with life that advance the premise that nature and the economy are not just intertwined but indistinguishable.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Book Review: Author Conversation between Natasha Iskander and Rina Agarwala

  International Migration Review · 2023-07-13

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• America's arrival city: how immigration made New York and how immigrant exclusion almost destroyed it: commentary on “Global commerce, immigration and diversity: a New York story” by Philip Kasinitz

  Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2023-02-20 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  New York is America’s quintessential arrival city. The city’s defining institutions; its economy; its skyscrapers, parks and infrastructure; its schools, hospitals and social services and its cultural ecosystem have all been produced through the city’s reception of the millions that have arrived at its shores. Nevertheless, New York’s urban policy has consistently defined immigrants as blight. Urban planning policies, especially those that address the build environment, have, throughout the city’s history, targeted immigrant communities, and have sought to contain and exclude immigrant populations. The tension between the city’s reliance on immigration for its vitality and its urban policies of immigrant exclusion has shaped the city’s development and defined its modern form. This commentary addresses this tension and shows that for an arrival city like New York urban policy and immigration policy are one in the same.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The centre cannot hold: Arrival, margins, and the politics of ambivalence introduction to ‘arrival at the margins’, a special issue of migration studies

  Migration Studies · 2022-04-29 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract This special issue calls on scholars to simultaneously centre and unsettle the margin: to recognise the multiplicity of margins as politically generative spaces, frequently contoured by sustained and varied forms of mobility. Taken together, the studies collected in this volume are a call to view margins as vital socio-political spaces and objects of study. They are created, transformed, or maintained through interactions among the multiple ethnic, political, or religious groups within it but also through connections to allies, families, and interlocutors elsewhere that people in the margins draw in. Powerful states, corporations, and other play a role, but the contributors do not presume they are the most significant force at play. To be sure, margins can reflect liminality and suspension, but they are also sites of contentious politics. As space–time compression, multi-localism, economic precarity, and political fragmentation continue apace, margins are decreasingly discrete spaces between, but are instead spaces where lives are made. As sites that help structure engagements among groups—and sometimes within the groups themselves—appear and fade, margins take on varied levels of significance as contestations and convivialities take shape and transform. They are multiple, often intersecting, sometimes geographic and formally demarcated, sometimes largely invisible or unspoken but no less powerful. And they can be anywhere.

  PublisherDOI

• A Forum on the Politics of Skills

  Industrial and Labor Relations Review · 2022-07-08 · 15 citations

  article

  The ILR Review invited this group of scholars who work within the fields of sociology, history, and urban planning to share their perspective on the politics of skills. We called on their expertise to draw attention to the politics that drive the definition and development of skill and its use in shaping the rights and voice of workers. The essays in this forum explore the politics of skill along three lines. First, they interrogate the definition and assessment of skill, with particular attention to the ways that structural markers of social difference—such as race, gender, class, and immigration status—shape the valuation of skill. Second, they analyze the ways that the interpretation of skill is shaped by power dynamics at the worksite and in the broader economy. This line of analysis also considers possibilities for industrial renewal and labor mobilization. And third, the essays explore how skill classifications are used to narrow political and civil rights and to justify forms of exploitation and dehumanization.

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 4 Partners in Organizing: Engagement between Migrants and the State in the Production of Mexican Hometown Associations

  Berghahn Books · 2022-10-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond

  2021 · 98 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Demographic economics
  • Economic growth

  An in-depth look at Qatar's migrant workers and the place of skill in the language of control and powerSkill-specifically the distinction between the "skilled" and "unskilled"-is generally defined as a measure of ability and training, but Does Skill Make Us Human? shows instead that skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire. Natasha Iskander takes readers into Qatar's booming construction industry in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup, and through her unprecedented look at the experiences of migrant workers, she reveals that skill functions as a marker of social difference powerful enough to structure all aspects of social and economic life.Through unique access to construction sites in Doha, in-depth research, and interviews, Iskander explores how migrants are recruited, trained, and used. Despite their acquisition of advanced technical skills, workers are commonly described as unskilled and disparaged as "unproductive," "poor quality," or simply "bodies." She demonstrates that skill categories adjudicate personhood, creating hierarchies that shape working conditions, labor recruitment, migration policy, the design of urban spaces, and the reach of global industries. Iskander also discusses how skill distinctions define industry responses to global warming, with employers recruiting migrants from climate-damaged places at lower wages and exposing these workers to Qatar's extreme heat. She considers how the dehumanizing politics of skill might be undone through tactical solidarity and creative practices.With implications for immigrant rights and migrant working conditions throughout the world, Does Skill Make Us Human? examines the factors that justify and amplify inequality

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Nichola Lowe

  University of Minnesota

  18 shared

• Loren B. Landau

  University of the Witwatersrand

  4 shared

• Christine A. Riordan

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  3 shared

• Rina Agarwala

  3 shared

• Julien Brachet

  3 shared

• Victoria Louisa Klinkert

  University of London

  2 shared

• Nancy K. Lowe

  O'Neal Steel (United States)

  2 shared

• Nadia Bentaleb-Maes

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st Century Q…