Destitution Economies: Circuits of Value in Asylum, Refugee, and Migration Control

Abstract

In this article, we argue that destitution economies of migration control are specific circuits of exchange and value constituted by migration control practices that produce migrant and refugee destitution. Comparative analysis of three case studies, including border encampment in Thailand, deprivation in U.S. immigration detention centers, and deterrence through destitution in the United Kingdom, demonstrate that circuits of value depend on the detachment of workers from citizenship and simultaneously produce both migrant destitution and new forms of value production. Within destitution economies, migration and asylum's particular juridico-political position as domestic, foreign, and securitized allows legal regimes to produce migrants and asylum seekers as distinct economic subjects: forsaken recipients of aid. Although they might also work for pay, we argue that destitute migrants and asylum seekers have value for others through the grinding labor of living in poverty. That is, in their categorization as migrants and asylum seekers, they occupy a particular position in relation to economic circuits. These economic circuits of migration control, in turn, rely on the destitution of mobile people. Our approach advances political geographies of migration, bordering, and exclusion as well as economic geographies of marketization and value, arguing that the predominance of political analysis and critique of immigration and asylum regimes obscures how those regimes produce circuits of value in and through law, state practices, and exclusion. Furthermore, law, state power, and forced mobility constitute circuits of value and marketization. Conceptualizing these migration control practices as destitution economies illuminates novel transformations of the political and economic geographies of migration, borders, and inequality.

Carceral economies of migration control

“…De Genova (2002) argues that 'some are deported so that others may stay' as labourers under the threat of deportation; Harrison and Lloyd (2012) show how illegality affects work conditions for dairy farm workers in the Midwest US. Thus, the production and valuation of migrant-as-surplus is part and parcel of broader trends in capitalism that rely upon both non-capitalist modes of exchange and reserve pools of under-employed labour (Coddington et al, 2020;Denning, 2010;Gidwani and Reddy, 2011). Non-citizenship and illegalization are fundamental conditions for the emergence of carceral economies of migration control.…”

“…Status value is, then, a value form produced by the illegalization of mobile people: it refers to the specific potential their illegality offers states and service providers managing that illegality. As Kate Coddington's (2018;Coddington et al, 2020) work in Thailand shows, refugees' legal status enables their encampment and enclosure and, subsequently, their identity as a captive labour force for a neighouring special economic zone. Status decisions embed migrants in dependent relationships with institutions that manage migrants' biological life and constrain their everyday mobility (see Aradau and Tazzioli, 2020, on biopolitical value).…”

“…These economic changes intersect with highly creative state territorial strategies of offshoring, outsourcing and externalization to manipulate when and where people claim refugee status from persecution (Tazzioli, 2018;Tazzioli and Garelli, 2018;Mountz, 2011). In deciding admissibility, detainability, and deportability, immigration and asylum laws attempt to make migrants dependent on service providers and, in doing so, valuable to others in their excludability (Coddington et al, 2020).…”

Die vielen Facetten der Vulnerabilität im Kontext von Flucht und Asyl

“…Lorenz 2018, p. 63) bzw. als einen Zustand der soziopolitischen und ökonomischen Exklusion und Marginalisierung (Stewart 2005, p. 499) bei gleichzeitiger Inklusion in die neoliberale Wirtschaft, allerdings oft in prekären Arbeitsverhältnissen (De Genova, 2013Genova, , p. 1180Coddington et al 2020;Baumann 2003;Goldring et al 2009Goldring et al , 2011.…”

Martin, L; Harker, C; (2020) Finance, technology and displacement: towards a research agenda.

“…While studies of migration have long examined relationships between labor markets, remittances, and policies (e.g. Dustman et al 2013), recent political economic work foregrounds the economic relationships supporting migration (Cranston 2017, Gammeltoft-Hansen andNyberg-Sorensen, 2013;Hernandez-Leon, 2013;Xiang and Lindquist 2014) and preventing unauthorised migration (Andersson 2014;Coddington et al 2020;Conlon and Hiemstra 2014;Doty and Wheatley 2013;Ferndandes 2007). US-based scholars have analysed the heavy reliance on private, for-profit corrections companies and argue that they comprise an 'immigration industrial complex' Hiemstra 2014, 2017;Doty and Wheatley 2013;Fernandes 2007;Martin 2017), while multi-sited ethnographic approaches have pointed to a diffused international 'illegality industry' (Andersson 2014).…”