Free trade and labour migration are necessary elements of contemporary global markets. Technical regulation of these processes is managed through an elaborate arrangement of the Bretton Woods institutions. These institutions and their underlying mechanisms are justified as instrumental to ushering the new age of global prosperity and unbridled economic growth. This essay analyses and challenges the paradoxes of these prevailing assumptions, which constitute the normative justification for the phenomenon of contemporary globalisation. It pitches the intrinsic conflict of interest between the regime of free international trade and the basic aspirations of migrant labour. The essay examines the entrenched problems of labour mobility through capabilities approach and social choice theory. It concludes that such conflicting and paradoxical relation between foreign capital and labour migration renders the latter’s deprivation as a significant externality of the former. The existing system creates global pockets of enrichment and growth, while localising severe deprivation and suffering within the Global South.