This paper proposes a theoretical reflection on the association between migration, labor, and the production of diseases in construction workers from an ethological and psychoanalytical perspective. We attempt to develop an interpretation of the affective aspects of subjectivity involved in psychological suffering in these workers, the vast majority of whom are migrants. Intimidated by cultural difference, they idealize the employer's culture, although the environmental, symbolic, and cultural conditions of their new place and new work are unfavorable and hostile. We conclude that a mute and impotent revolt by workers against this psychological hostility is expressed by means of a displacement, in the psychoanalytical sense of the term, through their psychological and physical suffering.
Migration; disease; construction worker; psychological suffering; psychoanalysis