Value extraction through refugee carcerality: Data, labour and financialised accommodation

Abstract

In this article, we argue that modes of labour and value extraction have been under-researched and under-theorised in critical geographical research on migration, asylum and refugee humanitarianism. We examine data production, voluntary work programmes and financialised asylum housing as key sites through which value is extracted from asylum-seekers’ unpaid and reproductive activities. We argue that specific forms of migrant carcerality are, firstly, grounded in migrants’ and asylum-seekers’ carceral conditions and exclusion from paid work. Secondly, we argue that subtle forms of coercion and conditionality at work in asylum hosting require asylum-seekers’ invisible and unpaid labour. Thirdly, we show how financialised real estate firms further capitalise on government contracts for asylum housing, rendering accommodation as another site of value extraction. We thereby expand conceptualisations of carceral economies of migration control beyond detention and confinement and elaborate the specific forms of labour and value extraction emerging from migration, asylum and refugee governance.

Bordering public institutions through the routinization of borderwork and datafication: Internalized immigration regimes within UK health care and higher education

“…Whilst the literature on datafication in relation to borders acknowledges the role data plays in who can/cannot move, everyday bordering (Yuval-Davis et al, 2019) or the deterritorialization of bordering practices and processes (Lahav and Guiraudon, 2000) shifts our gaze to the role of data in these dispersed (Huysmans, 2011) assemblages of control on the lives of bordered people. In the UK, for example, the sharing of transaction data is a prerequisite for receiving state support as an asylum seeker (Martin and Tazzioli, 2023). We would argue that there has been not only a proliferation of data (Leese et al, 2022) but also the sources of data that are being drawn upon to border states.…”

Conceptualising US Immigration Detention as Carceral Real Estate

“…In some contexts, therefore, impoverishing migrants-making and keeping them destitute -is a key component of migration management strategies (Coddington et al 2020). This scholarship argues that bio-and necro-politics of national sovereignty relies on the extraction of time, value, and labour from those excluded from political membership (Darling 2022;Martin and Tazzioli 2023;Mayblin 2021).…”

“…As such, status decisions generate "status value", a specific form of value derived from noncitizens' detainability (Martin 2021). To extract status value, legal decisions on detainability become extractive operations (Coddington et al 2020;Martin and Tazzioli 2023;Mezzadra and Nielson 2019;Ouma 2016). For Mezzadra and Nielson (2013), immigration and labour migration policies have become essential to the differentiation of labour and, therefore, capitalism's ability to extract surplus labour from underpaid (but highly valued) mobile labour.…”

“…2020). This scholarship argues that bio‐ and necro‐politics of national sovereignty relies on the extraction of time, value, and labour from those excluded from political membership (Darling 2022; Martin and Tazzioli 2023; Mayblin 2021).…”

“…This article pushes emerging research on the political economies of state bordering, mobility control, and refugee protection practices, which shows how people on the move become populations marked for various forms of extraction (Achtnich 2022;Andersson 2014;Martin and Tazzioli 2023;Tazzioli 2022). For example, the World Bank is experimenting with Special Economic Zones adjacent to refugee camps (Coddington 2018;World Bank 2022), transforming legally exceptional populations into captive labour supplies.…”