Governing refugees in raced markets: displacement and disposability from Europe’s frontier to the streets of Paris

Accommodation for profit, not for refugees: Racial capitalism and the logics of Berlin’s refugee accommodation market

“…Capitalism exploits and marginalizes migrants and refugees as racialized surplus populations in order to maintain profits and power. In this regard, Georgi (2019) establishes the notion of “fortress capitalism” to capture the elements, state, and economic rationales that restrict and control the mobility of refugees, migrants, and the “global working class” for the requirements of labor, or for their (often profitable) fixation, containment, and rejection as “surplus population” in response to the “capitalist multicrisis.” They are made surplus to the requirements of capital and regimes of accumulation, framed as socially undesirable, and unabsorbed by capital (Bhagat, 2022). Therefore, “the ways in which refugees and migrants are governed in Europe is related to their position within contemporary capitalism” (Rajaram, 2018: 627).…”

“…Second, it helps us to reveal the connected dynamics of racial capitalism vis-à-vis the power structures and systems of value and the state related to migration that are linked to and animate capitalist modes of production, and through which “race,” “refugees,” and “migrants” are produced in the service of racial capitalism. This is relevant, because even though refugees may not be “an external population different in its relation to political and economic structures” (Rajaram, 2018: 629), they may nevertheless face even deeper marginalization and conditions of systemic racial violence exceeding that “of extant relative surplus populations due to economic hyper-precarity, detention, deportation and circuitous displacement” (Bhagat, 2022: 974). Migration and asylum laws and policies operate within logics of racial capitalism and racializing and class-making processes, both at the level of the organization of labor recruitment and through border and migration control technologies (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018).…”

“…Urban scholars, including Danewid (2020), Rucks-Ahidiana (2021), and Fortner (2023), apply racial capitalism to explain that urban development and urban policymaking are rooted in constructions of race, racialization, and differentiation, and that “urban processes produce and maintain race-based pursuits of profit” (Dantzler et al., 2022: 168). Similarly, migration and refugee researchers such as Frydenlund and Dunn (2022), Bhagat (2022), and Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2018) reveal that migrant movements and lives are regulated in the service of racial capitalism through racialization processes and violent and restrictive border and migration regimes with the aim of fixing and governing (over)accumulation and migrants as relative surplus populations. This migration fix includes containment, channeling, and bordering technologies to manage migrants for capital accumulation (Bird and Schmid, 2021).…”

Queer Global Displacement: Social Reproduction, Refugee Survival, and Organised Abandonment in Nairobi, Cape Town, and Paris

“…For instance, Darling (2017:184–185) suggests, the urban emerges as a space “produced through the desire to variously control, contain, or expel forced migrants … the experiences of refugees are framed in terms of how they articulate an imposition of state authority”. In general, local government, NGOs, and police have both greater responsibility and violent authority to manage refugees—the city is the site where organised abandonment plays out an aspect which Darling (2017) refers to as the “re‐scaling of border control” (Bhagat 2022; Rajaram 2018). Refugees in the city are caught between state‐led strategies of exclusion that weaponise the border and create the refugee other.…”

Hybrid (un)freedom in worker hostels in garment supply chains

“…For example, gender, migration status, caste and class, race and ethnicity, and contract type are key individual-level traits that shape vulnerability to unfreedom (Fudge and Strauss, 2014; LeBaron and Gore, 2020; Mezzadri, 2017). Also, historical factors like processes of dispossession or forced migration (Bhagat, 2020), and structural, political, and economic relations such as the extent to which policy paradigms privilege businesses and profitability over the protection of workers and labour rights (LeBaron and Phillips, 2019), also shape worker unfreedom. In addition, particularly relevant to our research is the extent to which social power relations based on gender difference and men’s power over women’s bodies and labour pervade the workplace as well as the home (Ferguson, 2020; Smith, 2020).…”