Adding critical accounting voices to migration studies

The field of migration study is continually evolving and frequently controversial, as diverse people cross the globe and as social and economic transformations prevail. Although scholars in many disciplines have actively contributed to migration research, accounting scholars have been less actively engaged, despite migration's use of concepts so closely aligned with accounting: costs, benefits, risk, and control. This paper considers how accounting researchers may contribute to the study of migration, highlighting the potential for critical researchers to re-define terrains of discourse.Migration theories are introduced, illustrating the complexities and interconnectedness of the role of globalisation, poverty, state functioning, and the social sciences. We integrate previous research of accounting, revealing the discipline as part of the language and neoliberal agenda imbued in migration issues, and its participation in co-creating precarious boundaries and myopic concepts defining the debates. We provide a case analysis, specifically illustrating accounting's calculative practices and rhetoric as limiting and obscuring social issues in migration, providing yet another instance of accounting's participation in social controversies.The rhetoric of accounting as merely a technique and the prevailing view of its objectivity are disputed as we reveal accounting's role in creating a simplifying reality, ignoring the complex interdependencies and powerful forces at play in migration arenas. Although much work is to be done in the accounting field to illuminate its role regarding migration issues, we are optimistic that critical researchers can provide expanded ways of thinking and a contribution to the deliberations. The work's originality is contained in its unique framing of migration discourse, revealing the skewed and shadowy assumptions of its traditional discourse, and examining how critical research expands possibilities for promoting social justice in the migration landscape.