People from West Africa are risking their lives and surrendering their citizenship rights to enter exploitative labour markets in Europe. This book offers an explanation for this phenomenon that is based on close analysis of the contradictory economic and political agendas that create and constrain labour migration. It shows how global capitalism regulates different stages of the process within an interconnected system of economic dispossession, the construction of an illegal status, border control, labour exploitation and processes of underdevelopment. This is summarised as a regime of ‘unfree labour mobility’. Combined with structural and historical approaches, this book is based on ethnographic research. It incorporates those who are left behind, those who decide to stay, migrants who fail and those who are on the move, alongside clustered migrant communities in Senegal, Mauritania and Spain. The book’s panoramic approach shows how West African ‘step-wise’ journeys to Europe by land and sea sees competing territorial and economic policies regulating an unstable and unpredictable trajectory, creating ‘illegal’ labour through dual logics of border security and selective labour mobility. This book demonstrates that the diverse channels through which people migrate in the modern era are mediated by European states and labour markets, which utilise border regimes to control labour and be globally competitive. The themes and patterns that emerge, in their context of inter-generational change, present a challenge to the accepted wisdom about the individual and household dynamics of labour migration. This book is of interest to students and scholars of migration, transnationalism, politics, security, development, economics, and sociology.

International borders have become deadly barriers of a proportion rivaled only by war or natural disaster. Yet despite the damage created by borders, most people can’t – or don’t want to – imagine a world without them. What alternatives do we have to prevent the deadly results of contemporary borders? In today’s world, national citizenship determines a person’s ability to migrate across borders. Migration Borders Freedom questions that premise. Recognizing the magnitude of deaths occurring at contemporary borders worldwide, the book problematizes the concept of the border and develops arguments for open borders and a world without borders. It explores alternative possibilities, ranging from the practical to the utopian, that link migration with ideas of community, citizenship, and belonging. The author calls into question the conventional political imagination that assumes migration and citizenship to be responsibilities of nation states, rather than cities. While the book draws on the theoretical work of thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, David Harvey, and Henry Lefebvre, it also presents international empirical examples of policies and practices on migration and claims of belonging. In this way, the book equips the reader with the practical and conceptual tools for political action, activist practice, and scholarly engagement to achieve greater justice for people who are on the move. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315638300 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Harshly exploited migrant labour plays a fundamental role in the political economy of contemporary capitalism. The abstract and utopian theorising of many liberals and leftists on the migration question often ignores or downplays patterns of displacement and brutal class dynamics, which divide and weaken working people while empowering the ruling class. In this important new book, Hannah Cross provides a sober analysis of the class antagonisms of migration in the context of the nation, social democracy, and the racialized ordering of the world. Bringing Marxist methodology and strategy to a careful analysis of existing emancipatory movements, she sets out the programmes and approaches that are needed to promote global worker solidarity and create a future in which cheap labour is no longer a mainstay of wealthy economies. This focus on the labouring classes allows her to identify some important new directions for migration in a world beyond capitalism, exploitation and injustice. This book will be essential reading for students, scholars and general readers interested in the politics and political economy of migration in a world unhelpfully caught between racist authoritarian capitalism and the wishful-thinking of contemporary left-liberalism.

This book brings together philosophical, social-theoretical and empirically oriented contributions on the philosophical and socio-theoretical debate on migration and integration, using the instruments of recognition as a normative and social-scientific category. Furthermore, the theoretical and practical implications of recognition theory are reflected through the case of migration. Migration movements, refugees and the associated tensions are phenomena that have become the focus of scientific, political and public debate in recent years. Migrants, in particular refugees, face many injustices and are especially vulnerable, but the right-wing political discourse presents them as threats to social order and stability. This book shows what a critical theory of recognition can contribute to the debate. The book is suitable for researchers in philosophy, social theory and migration research. "A profound examination of how states and societies struggle to recognize migrants as fellow human beings in all their fullness. The contributions are exceptional for combining astute philosophy and social theory with a discussion of actual politics and real lives." Dr. Hugo Slim (Senior Research Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford and formerly Head of Policy at the International Committee of the Red Cross) “This impressive and timely volume offers an innovative way of understanding the issues of migration and integration by using a critical theory of recognition. Recognition theory has rich potential for effectively responding to the issues of autonomy, identity, integration, and empowerment that are at the core of the current public debates on mass migration, displacement, and the refugee crisis. By examining the normative and policy implications of recognition as they apply to migration, the book offers a pathbreaking look at the human dimension of the debate.” Dr. Helle Porsdam (Professor of Law and Humanities and UNESCO Chair in Cultural Rights University of Copenhagen)

Featuring readings of contemporary utopian poetry and fiction from authors such as Juliana Spahr, Mohsin Hamid, Bong Joon-ho, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lidia Yukavitch, and Cory Doctorow, this book investigates the commons - a form of organisation based on collectivity, communalism and sharing - as a type of transition between capitalist precarity and crisis and anti-capitalist futures. Each of the texts under examination was written in opposition to a particular crisis of the capitalist present - inequality, political representation, mobility, and climate change - and develops a particular mode of utopian 'commoning'. Through its examination of these writers, crises and texts, this book reaffirms the use of utopianism as a tool for generating and representing alternative futures for a world in the midst of ongoing planetary crisis.

This book investigates the hostile environment and politics of visceral and racial denigration which have characterised responses to refugees and migrants within the UK and Europe in recent years. The European ‘migrant crisis’ from 2015 onwards has been characterised by an extremely intimidating atmosphere which denies the basic humanity of refugees and migrants. Deep rooted in Western Enlightenment trajectory, this racially-driven politics is linked to the Western theories of scientific superiority which went on to become the basis of eugenics and coloniality as part of modernity. Focusing on the ‘migrant crisis’, Brexit, and the impacts of the global pandemic, this book unpicks the waves of crises and neuroses about the ‘Other’ in Europe and the UK. The chapters analyse the rhetoric of camps, refrigerated death lorries, the notion of channel crossings and ‘accidental’ drownings, the formation of relationship with border architecture such as the razor wire, and corporeal resistance in detention centres through hunger strike. In examining such specific sites of rhetorical articulation, policy formation, social imagination, and its incumbent visuality, the chapters deconstruct the intersection of dominant ideologies, power, knowledge paradigms (including the media) as part of the public sphere and their combined re-mediation of the dispossessed humans in the shores and borders of Europe. This important interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to researchers of migration, humanitarianism, geography, global development, sociology and communication studies.

This volume traces the African ramifications of Europe’s southern border. While the Mediterranean Sea has become the main stage for the current play and tragedy between European borders and African migrants, Europe’s southern border has also been “offshored” to Africa, mainly through cooperation agreements with countries of transit and origin. By bringing into conversation case studies from different countries and disciplines, this volume seeks to open a window on the backstage of this externalization of borders. It casts light on the sites – from consulates to open seas and deserts – in which Europe’s southern border is made and unmade as an African reality, yielding what the editors call "EurAfrican borders." It further describes the multiple actors – state agents, migrants, smugglers, activists, etc. – that variously imagine, construct, cross or contest these borders, and situates their encounters within the history of uneven exchanges between Africa and Europe.

This Handbook presents a comprehensive overview of the interaction between migration and development from a range of critical and counter-hegemonic perspectives. Exploring the strengths and weaknesses of existing practices connected with the migration and development nexus, contributing authors provide a clear understanding of their complex dynamics.

This book approaches migration from Marxist feminist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial perspectives. The present conditions of transnational migration, best described as a kind of social expulsion, include migrant caravans and detained unaccompanied children in the United States, thousands of migrant deaths at sea, the razing of self-organized refugee camps in Greece, and the massive dispersal of populations within and between countries. Placing patriarchal capitalism, imperialism, racialization, and fundamentalisms at the center of the analysis, Marxism and Migration helps build a more coherent and historically-informed discussion of the conditions of migration, resettlement, and resistance. Drawing upon a range of academic disciplines and diverse geopolitical regions, the book rethinks migrations from the vantage point of class struggle and seeks to ignite a more robust discussion of critical consciousness, racialization, militarization, and solidarity.

Throughout history, the functions and roles of borders have been continuously changing. They can only be understood in their context, shaped as they are by history, politics and power, as well as cultural and social issues. Borders are therefore complex spatial and social phenomena which are not static or invariable, but which are instead highly dynamic. This comprehensive volume brings together a multidisciplinary team of leading scholars to provide an authoritative, state-of-the-art review of all aspects of borders and border research. It is truly global in scope and, besides embracing the more traditional strands of the field including geopolitics, migration and territorial identities, it also takes in recently emerging topics such as the role of borders in a seemingly borderless world; creating neighbourhoods, and border enforcement in the post-9/11 era.