In a world that celebrates mobility, migration continues to be at the center of intense and often lethal conflicts. Refugees and migrants drowning in the Mediterranean Sea or stuck “on the road” in the Balkans; murder and kidnap, exploitation, rape, and enslavement, shaping the trail of migrants from Central America across Mexico, en route to the fortified border of the United States. These are only some of the iconic images that instantiate the intensity of the struggles and conflicts surrounding borders in many parts of the world. The images can be easily multiplied to include sites not located on the boundary between the “global South” and the “global North.”
While these struggles and conflicts involve people on the move, looking beyond the border, taking into consideration migrants who have already settled somewhere in the landscape, the picture is no less conflictive. The specter of race haunts the daily lives of migrants. “Islamophobia” reinforces “civilizational” boundaries rooted in colonial history. Processes of urban segregation limit the spatial as well as the social mobility of migrants. The stigma of a supposed cultural reluctance to “integrate” reproduces itself across generations.
“Some had played in previous years with a kind of ‘positive’ valence of notions
such as ‘monster’ and ‘monstrosity,’ drawing for instance on the work of Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari to emphasize migrants’ challenge to the national ‘norm’. Nowadays we confront a situation where migrants are constructed as monsters in
the sheer meaning of subjects to be evacuated from the national space.”
Migration over the last decades has been a powerful force that has driven a kind of “globalization from below,” challenging the “national order of things.” This challenge has not ever gone uncontested. However, today the national backlash against migration has gained a new momentum in Europe as well as in the US; and this has played a crucial role in the rise of the new and the old forces of the right. Some had played in previous years with a kind of “positive” valence of notions such as “monster” and “monstrosity,” drawing for instance on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to emphasize migrants’ challenge to the national “norm”. Nowadays we are compelled to confront a situation where migrants are constructed as monsters in the sheer meaning of subjects to be evacuated from the national space.
To be sure: migrants continue to defy barriers and to cross borders, although the conditions under which they do so are becoming increasingly risky. Within the national and metropolitan space they have entered they continue to build networks and to deploy cultural, social, and political practices that resist racism and exclusion – often connecting with other forms of social mobilization and constructing powerful coalitions. Nevertheless, the national backlash against migration is something that significantly impacts upon the lives both of the people on the move and of the migrants who have already settled.
The conditions for this national backlash emerged in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/2008, which continues to circulate in the conduits of the capitalist world system. It is difficult not to see the relationship at work here, independently of how one might evaluate the influence of factors like terrorism, or the new salience of religion. This invites consideration of migration from the angle of what “labor mobility” under capitalism means.
However, far from being a kind of unproblematic condition of capitalism, labor mobility has always been a field of struggle. It was and continues to be crisscrossed by forms of coercion and violence (starting with the “Middle Passage”, the transatlantic slave trade), as well as by practices of struggle and resistance, both by enslaved subjects and supposedly “free” migrants. In a way, one could say that the blurring of the boundary between “forced” and “free” migration characterizes crucial moments in the history of migration under capitalism.
Looking at labor mobility as a field of struggle has a double implication. On the one hand, it politicizes mobility; it sheds light on moments of resistance, struggle, and autonomy within the very fabric of mobility, and without obscuring the violence and dispossession that prompt it. On the other hand, it shows that both historical as well as contemporary capitalism attempt to valorize labor mobility while at the same time disciplining and harnessing it through a complex and historically variable set of limits.
From this point of view, the role of both the state and the nation are particularly important. One could say that “national” movements in refusal of migration have crisscrossed the history of capitalism at least since the late 19th century. Just think about, to mention but one important example the “nativist” backlash against transatlantic migration in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, when migrants from Southern and Central Europe played a crucial role as “unskilled” workers in the process of mass industrialization. At the same time, they were both central in labor struggles as well as in the rise of the revolutionary syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World. This kind of nationalist movement against migrants, when considered against the background of capital’s need for mobile labor, composes another field of tension and struggle. It contributes to the pressure put on migrants, and implements a sense of precarity.
“One could say that the fantasy that haunts contemporary migration management
is a ‘logistic’ one, according to the ‘delivery’ logics summed up in the expression
‘just-in-time and to-the-point migration.”
Tensions and struggles have played out over the last decades under conditions increasingly shaped by processes of the flexibilization of labor and the economy. Within these processes, migrants continue to be pivotal subjects, their labor being crucial in various economic sectors ranging from the construction industry to social care. In addition, just as migratory routes and patterns of migration have both become more complex, the composition of migration in many parts of the world has also been transformed dramatically by powerful feminization processes. This means that questions regarding gender and patriarchy are being posited in a new way.
The techniques and regimes of both the recruitment and management of migration have been reorganized concurrently flexibly, around criteria such as “risk” and “skills.” The development and operations of these flexible patterns intertwine with processes of securitization, transforming the way in which borders are managed.
Over the last few years several scholars have pointed out the notion of the “border regime” that is particularly challenging because it points to the inclusion within the governance of borders of “commercial” and “humanitarian” actors and to the multiple rationalities that increasingly shape it. One could say that the fantasy that haunts contemporary migration management is a “logistic” one, according to the “delivery” logics summed up in the expression “just-in-time and to-the-point migration.” It is easy to see how the movements and struggles of migration will resist fitting into these schemes and logics. However, it is also important to stress that behind what I term a “logistic” fantasy is a widespread awareness among policymakers and economic elites that migration continues to be required for the working of contemporary flexible capitalism. This opens up an effective angle on the “national” backlash against migration we are currently experiencing.
Considering both this “requirement” as well as the stubbornness of those still on the move as much as the already-settled migrants, it is easy to see that migration will continue to be a defining feature of our global landscape. The personal struggles of migrants as well as the struggles around migration will be crucial terrains for the forging of new common modes of being that go beyond the nation and its double bind with capital.