The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism

Abstract

This article departs from the discussion by Stephen Castles on the migration-asylum nexus by focusing on the political and cultural effects of the summer of immigration in 2015. It argues for a conceptualization of the asylum-migration nexus within the framework of Anibal Quijano’s “coloniality of power” by developing the analytical framework of the “coloniality of migration.” Through the analytical framework of the “coloniality of migration” the connection between racial capitalism and the asylum-migration nexus is explored. It does so by first focusing on the economic and political links between asylum and migration, and how both constitute each other. On these grounds, it discusses how asylum and migration policies produce hierarchical categories of migrants and refugees, producing a nomenclature drawing on an imaginary reminiscent of the orientalist and racialized practices of European colonialism and imperialism. In a second step, it focuses on migration and asylum policies as inherent to a logic of racialization of the workforce. It does so by first exploring the racial coding of immigration policies within the context of settler colonial-ism and transatlantic White European migration to the Américas and Oceania in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and second, by discussing migration policies in post-1945 Western Europe.

Is securitization theory racist? Civilizationism, methodological whiteness, and antiblack thought in the Copenhagen School

“…For example, in examining migration, the literature on race and securitization focuses primarily on politicians or other authoritative speakers framing migrants as security threats. What then tends to fall out of view is how the control of the movement of racialized people has been and continues to be constitutive of the ‘normal’ liberal order (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018). Even when a historical approach is taken, the focus is on historical instances of speech acts or the ‘securitization’ of migration, instead of, for example, the impacts of colonial drawing of borders or ongoing settler-colonial occupation.…”

New directions in migration studies: towards methodological de-nationalism

“…This connects migration with the politics of race, class and 'indigeneity' (with its very different implications in Europe and in settler colonies) (Back, Sinha, & Bryan, 2012;De Genova, 2018;Goldberg, 2006;Lentin, 2014;Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). People have started to bring the work of post-colonial scholars into conversation with migration literature, and explore the relationship between colonialism, citizenship and mobility controls and the ways in which the coloniality of power saturates contemporary immigration policy and practice (Carver, 2019;De Sousa Santos, 2007;El-Enany, in press;Sharma, in press;Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018;Mamdani, 2018;Mayblin, 2017;Mongia, 2018). These efforts challenge the assumed distinction between 'migrant' and 'citizen' that undergirds some of the toxic politics in many European countries and beyond.…”

Mobility assemblages and lines of flight in women’s narratives of forced displacement

“…According to Castles, the distinction between migration as voluntary movement and asylum as coercion does not stand, since migratory movements across the globe have historically been triggered by wars, regional conflicts, national and international politics, as well as local and global economic dynamics. Taking Castle’s migration/asylum nexus’ further, Encarnación Guttiérez Rodríguez has developed the analytical framework of ‘the coloniality of migration’ (2018), looking into socio-economic and political connections between asylum and migration in the process of their mutual constitution. In doing so she has drawn on Anibal Quijano’s (2008) notion of the ‘coloniality of power’, a system of racial classification that has historically underpinned the establishment of European nation states.…”