Migration and Racialization Part II: The Light and Shadow of Inclusion

Abstract

The five articles in this second of a two-part special issue on racialization and migration 1 discuss how racialization is not exclusively linked to the exclusion of migrants, at least not explicitly so. They challenge "crimmigration," which sits at the center of many pieces in the first part, as the core of migrant racialization in two ways. First, they speak to how organizations or contexts seemingly welcoming to migrants can (often unintentionally) reify the same racializing logics of the xenophobic social or legal regime that exclude migrants as disposable and exploitable. Or, more precisely, they demonstrate how the "inclusion" and "exclusion" of migrants are not contradictory or even in tension with each other but instead mutually constructive (De Genova, 2013). Second, they raise questions about what racialization is/does from the perspective of the migrants and consider migrants as not only the objects but also subjects of racialization. Both of these perspectives add nuance to the race and racialization scholarship by illustrating that racialization is not a status of being but a process of becoming and a process full of contention and inconsistency.This collection of articles empirically attests to the elasticity of hegemony and the complex struggle for a just or radical future. In "Building and Wedging Strategic Alliances: Racial Framing Contests in the Immigrant Rights and Nativist Counter-Movements," Hajar Yazdiha (2022) establishes the pivotal role of racial meaning in

Migration and Racialization Part I: Constructing and Navigating a Hostile Terrain

“…Rather, the main purpose of dominant ideologies is to rationalize the status quo and to uphold systems of oppression. This is certainly the case in the first part focusing on racialization through exclusion, and it is also very much the case in the second part of this special issue on racialization through inclusion (Liao et al, 2022).…”