This dissertation illuminates the shifting socio-spatial dynamics of capitalism through a grounded study of industrial fishing in Taiwan from the perspective of its migrant workforce. It is an ethnography of an exploitative guest worker program and the cheapening of labor and life through the degradation and dehumanization of Southeast Asian fishermen for the benefit of the wealthy few. It is also an observation of the creative self-activity of migrant workers and the forms of collective organization that have developed in the past decade to improve living and working conditions through mutual aid and solidarity. Finally, it is a meditation on the construction of Southeast Asian migrant workers as social “problems” and a critique of the political interests served by seeing migrant fishermen through the lens of victimhood. To understand the problems of the Taiwan fishing industry, we must understand not only how workers actively shape their working conditions and the broader communities within which they live, work, and dream, but also how and why they are constructed as objects of political activity.