Contemporary global processes of industrialisation in Asia and de-industrialisation in the rural periphery of Scandinavia produce connections and new figurations of labour that need to be studied in order to tell effective stories about our contemporary world. While urbanisation, industrialisation and labour struggles and organization are increasingly taking place in East Asia (Therborn 2013), some groups of workers engage in international labour migrations to the natural resource based economies of rural Northern Sweden. These industries depend heavily on, primarily, male migrant workers. The ‘coeval multiplicity’ and ‘radical contemporaneity’ (Massey 2005) of rural-urban changes in Asia and transformations in the peripheries of Scandinavia link in complex ways the lives of Asian migrant workers to the rural North of Sweden, through for instance, global production networks and supply chains, and social networks and recruitments by intermediaries. The purpose of this study is, by way of studying representations in media, examine globalist strategies within these rural areas as we argue these areas both function as contrasts, and make up important modernization projects for the global capital and globalist planning (Tsing, 2000). Furthermore, global processes make certain futures possible for different places and people and these processes are transforming relations of class, gender and race/ethnicity. Hence, by analysing the narratives of workers and different actors in natural resource based industries in northern Sweden, we examine the new figurations of labour and the ways in which international labour migrants are implicated in these new figurations; through their everyday practices of work, family life and political agency.