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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.

This article advances the notion of “extractive humanitarianism” to designate the role played by data extraction and knowledge extraction operations in refugee governmentality. It argues that extractive operations rely on refugees’ active participation to their own governmentality—what I define as participatory confinement. The piece engages with feminist literature on unpaid labor and shows that participatory confinement implies that refugees perform unpaid labor activities, which are disguised as voluntary work. It moves on by conceptualizing participatory confinement through the lens of the invitation to governmentality. In order to develop this, the article focuses on two modes of participatory confinement: unpaid labor that asylum seekers do as “voluntary” activities and knowledge and data extraction. It concludes by questioning extractive humanitarianism in light of the subtle coercion and invisible exploitation that asylum seekers are exposed to.

This article investigates the fragmented knowledges that migrants need to deal with in order to get access to asylum, and the related effects of disorientation it generates on them. The piece argues that disorientation is as a constitutive political technology of refugee governance and develops this argument by focusing on the Greek asylum system. It starts by drawing attention to the multiple technological steps and forced digital intermediations that asylum seekers in Greece need to navigate, focusing in particular on the Cash Assistance Programme, and it shows how asylum seekers need to deal with dispersed knowledges. The article moves on by analysing how the governing through disorientation underpin the asylum legal system in Greece and how this ends up in debilitating asylum seekers and hampering them from accessing rights and humanitarian support. The final section explores how asylum seekers are racialised and treated as deceitful subjects, and argues that not only their speech but also their conduct and behaviour are assumed to be deceptive, and therefore their knowledge turns out to be pointless. It concludes by challenging claims for more transparency and more knowledge as a response to the governing through disorientation.

This article investigates how the security-humanitarian rationale that underpins migration governmentality has been restructured by and inflected in light of hygienic-sanitary borders which enforce racialised confinement in the name of both migrants' and citizens' safety from infection by Covid-19. Focusing on the politics of migration containment along EUrope's frontiers, examining in particular border reinforcements carried out by Italy, Malta and Greece, we interrogate how the pandemic has been exploited to enact deterrence through hygienic-sanitary border enforcements. These enforcements are underpinned by an ambivalent security-humanitarian narrative that crafts migrants as subjects who cannot be protected by EU member states from the pandemic if allowed inside, and, at once, as potential vehicles of contagion - ‘Corona spreaders’ - and thus as dangers on a bacterial-hygienic level. Our article demonstrates that these EUropean border measures are more than temporary responses to an unprecedented health crisis. Rather, the pandemic has been seized as an opportunity to strengthen existing deterrence measures and hamper migrants' access to asylum through biopolitical and spatial tactics that aim to restructure the border regime. While emphasising the historical trajectories and continuities underwriting these current developments, we contend that the pandemic functions as an accelerator of dynamics of migrant incarceration and containment.

This article deals with the technologies and apps that asylum seekers need to navigate as forced hindered techno-users in order to get access to asylum and financial support. With a focus on the Greek refugee system, it discusses the multiple technological intermediations that asylum seekers face when dealing with the cash assistance programme and how asylum seekers are obstructed in accessing asylum and financial support. It explores the widespread disorientation that asylum seekers experience as they navigate un-legible techno-scripts that change over time. The article critically engages with the literature on the securitization and victimization of refugees, and it argues that asylum seekers are not treated exclusively as potential threats or as victims, but also as forced hindered subjects; that is, they are kept in a condition of protracted uncertainty during which they must find out the multiple technological and bureaucratic steps they are requested to comply with. In the final section, the article illustrates how forced technological mediations actually reinforce asylum seekers’ dependence on humanitarian actors and enhance socio-legal precarity.

This paper argues that COVID-19 has triggered a multiplication of heterogeneous bordering mechanisms that, far from stopping movement as such, have enhanced hierarchies of mobility. In particular, it shows that a confinement continuum has been put in place in the name of the “contain to protect” principle: migrants have been subjected to protracted lockdown measures in the name of their own protection. The piece concludes by interrogating how to rearticulate critique in COVID times in light of the enforcement of discriminatory “passports to freedom” (COVID-19 travel certificates).

This article advances a genealogy of migrant struggles and citizens solidarity practices, with a focus on the French-Italian migrant passage. It contends that scholarship has mainly mobilised a spatial approach to migrant struggles, while the temporality of solidarity and the collective memory of struggles have remained under-theorised. Then, the article moves on by focusing on the French-Italian Alpine border and it analyses the longstanding history of migrants’ passages there and, jointly, the mobilisations that took place in that area over the last decades exploring how these sedimented a citizen collective memory of solidarity practices. The final section deals with the history of mountain rescue at the French-Italian Alpine border and shows how migrants were saved by volunteers. The piece concludes by arguing that an insight into the memory of migrant struggles and solidarity practices enables foregrounding the transversal alliances which have been built between migrants and citizens and unsettling binary opposition between the former and the latter.

Coordinated and Edited by: N De Genova, M Tazzioli Co-Authored by: Claudia Aradau, Brenna Bhandar, Manuela Bojadzijev, Josue David Cisneros, N De Genova, Julia Eckert, Elena Fontanari, Tanya Golash-Boza, Jef Huysmans, Shahram Khosravi, Clara Lecadet, Patrisia Macias-Rojas, Federica Mazzara, Anne McNevin, Peter Nyers, Stephan Scheel, Nandita Sharma, Maurice Stierl, Vicki Squire, M Tazzioli, Huub van Baar and William Walters

This article deals with the political legacy of migrants’ spaces across Europe that are the outcome of border enforcement policies but that are also shaped by migrants’ struggles and movements. It interrogates what is left, after their vanishing forced eviction, at the level of spatial-political traces, as well as in the collective memory of the citizens of those places. The main argument of the piece is that in order to come to grips with these spaces beyond their ephemeral dimension, we need to consider the temporality of migrant struggles and of solidarity practices – between migrants and citizens. The article focuses, first, on the French-Italian Alpine border, and analyses how the sedimented memory of the struggles in that valley has been reactivated in the present to support the migrants in transit. Then, the article moves on by developing the notion of transversal alliances through an insight into the Gilets Noirs movement in France, a collective of undocumented migrants which mobilised towards getting to permit to stay and accommodation, while at the same time framing their struggle as a broader battle against precarity and exploitation. The piece concludes suggesting that by bringing in the genealogy of struggles and solidarity practices, migrants’ spaces appear as part of a precarious mobile common in the making.

This article identifies and analyses the tactic of kidnapping migrants that is increasingly deployed by states to disrupt, decelerate, and block migrants’ mobility. Kidnapping, we argue, is one of the political technologies of capture used by state authorities in their efforts to reassert control over migratory movements. This analysis contributes to a new understanding of the politics of border enforcement through strategies aimed at the containment of migration. The article focuses on the U.S.–Mexico border and the European border in the Mediterranean Sea as crucial sites where states have increasingly engaged in heterogenous modes of kidnapping.It also considers migrant struggles against these diverse kidnapping tactics. Through a focus on kidnapping, the article expands how we understand border violence and interrogates accounts of the biopolitics and necropolitics of borders that rely on the overly reductive formula of ‘making live/letting die’. The article concludes by highlighting how the critical examination of kidnapping migrants allows us to trace affinities and partial continuities among various historical modes of racialised subjugation that have affected both contemporary migrants and previously colonised populations.

This paper deals with data extraction and data circulation that are at stake in refugee governmentality with a focus on the Cash Assistance Programme in Greece. It focuses on the data extraction activities which are part of the cash Assistance Programme and on the ways in which data is shared and not shared among the actors involved. It starts by critically engaging with debates on techno-humanitarianism in refugee governmentality, and it moves on by drawing attention to the constitutive dynamics between data abundance and data disregard. Then, it analyses the extent to which different actors can access and act upon the data. The second part of the article centres on the peculiar modes of subjectivation that asylum seekers are shaped by, as cards beneficiaries and techno-users. It shows that asylum seekers are both passive surfaces of data extraction and, at the same time, are object of a request to speak and to produce data and feedback about their use of the card. The paper concludes with a section about the injunction imposed on asylum seekers to act as autonomous and responsible techno-users and, at the same time, to comply with multiple spatial restrictions.

This Symposium reflects on the growing relevance of biopolitical perspectives in camps studies, border studies, refugee studies, and in particular in research at the intersection between mobility studies and political geography. The five interventions accordingly engage with questions regarding the use of biopolitics as an analytical framework, but also as a pervasive strategy and governmental tool in Western societies. Through an analysis of several empirical cases – most notably hotspots on the Greek Aegean Island, refugee’s forced hyper mobility in Europe, speech acts connected to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people in Myanmar and the ‘voluntary return’ policies in Europe, and the paper borders created by visa systems – the authors indicate new possible fields of enquiry related to the biopolitical critically inspired by the work of authors such as Giorgio Agamben and Jasbir Puar, while also clearly restating the fundamental importance of Foucault’s original contribution to any biopolitical analytical framework today.

This article engages with the centrality that the push–pull theory regained in the context of border deaths in the Mediterranean Sea and particularly as part of the debate against the criminalization of nongovernment organizations (NGOs’) rescue missions at sea. The article opens by illustrating the context in which the push–pull theory re-emerged—after having been part of migration studies’ history books for over a decade—as part of an effort to defend non-state actors engaged in rescue missions in the Mediterranean Sea against an aggressive campaign of illegalilzation conducted by European states. We then take a step back to trace the history of the push–pull theory and its role as a foil for critical migration studies in the past 20 years. Building on this history, the article then turns to interrogating the epistemic and political outcomes that result from bringing evidence against the NGOs’ role as pull factors for migrants. The article closes by advocating for a transformative, rather than evidencing, role of critical knowledge in the current political context where migrants and actors who fight against border deaths are increasingly criminalized.

In this paper we examine the increasing criminalisation by states and the EU of citizen networks that have mobilised across Europe for supporting migrants in transit. Through these transnational solidarity practices a sort of infrastructure of migrant support has been built. The paper focuses on ‘crimes of solidarity’ that have taken place in France and in Italy and argues that the criminalisation of individuals which build solidarity connections across borders paradoxically constitutes a radical challenge to Europe’s principles of citizens’ solidarity across borders. The infrastructure of migrant support enacts a form of Europeanisation of citizens’ practices that states and local authorities try instead to undermine. The paper moves on by focusing on the ambivalences of the expression ‘smuggling activities’, which is increasingly being used to name individuals who help migrants to cross or to stay without making any economic profit from that. The essay considers the frictions between local, national and European authorities in tolerating or criminalising citizens that act in solidarity with the migrants, bringing humanitarian help and building material channels for safe passages. The final part of the paper reads the moment of crimes of solidarity in terms of a genealogy of European borders. It argues that one consequence of the criminalisation of solidarity is that new hybrid forums concerning migration, citizenship and borders questions are emerging. These arise, for example, when citizens are prosecuted for acts of assistance. Their trials have potential to become public scenes and spaces of counter-politics where it is not only the citizen but Europe that is in the dock. While some have argued that criminalisation and humanitarianism closes down the politics of European borders, we argue that it may allow for unexpected political opportunities.

‘Historically’, the novelist Arundhati Roy (2020) notes, ‘pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.’ Indeed, past pandemics such as the ‘Black Death’ or the ...

This paper looks at current migrant crossing on the Alps from the standpoint of a history of runaways. It interrogates the traces left by the recent migrants’ fleeting presence at the Northern French-Italian Alpine border situating these in connection with both the memory of past migrants’ passages and with mountain rescue practices and solidarity networks that have shaped those Alpine valleys. It starts with a section on mobile infrastructures of solidarity deployed at the French-Italian Alpine border, retracing its brief history as well as of the sedimented memory of the struggles in the Susa Valley. The paper moves on with a section about the history of mountain rescue at the French-Alpine border, showing how foreigners and also Italian “clandestine emigrants” were rescued there in the past. It concludes by advancing a history of mountain runaways as an analytical framework to politicise migrants’ passages on the Alps.

L’articolo analizza, prendendo la prospettiva di una storia dei fuggitivi, gli attuali transiti dei migranti attraverso le Alpi. Si interroga sulle tracce lasciate dalla presenza fuggevole dei migranti al confine alpino tra la Francia e l’Italia, leggendole in connessione sia con la memoria delle mobilita del passato sia con le pratiche del soccorso alpino e delle reti di solidarieta che hanno toccato queste stessi valli. L’articolo inizia con una parte sulle infrastrutture mobili di solidarieta dispiegate al confine alpino franco-italiano, tracciandone la loro breve storia e mettendola in parallelo con la memoria sedimentata delle lotte in Val di Susa. L’articolo continua approfondendo la storia del soccorso alpino al confine franco-italiano, indicando come gli stranieri cosi come gli “emigranti clandestini” italiani siano stati salvati in questa stessa zona in passato. Infine, si conclude proponendo il concetto di “storia dei fuggitivi” in montagna come quadro teorico che permette una lettura politica dell’attraversamento delle Alpi da parte dei migranti.

This article focuses on the twofold relationship between migrants’ mobility and modes of government, suggesting that mobility is an object of government and, at once, a technique for governing migrants. It focuses on mobility as a technology of government, investigating how intra-European migration movements are managed by national authorities, with particular attention to illegalized migrants who fall under the Dublin Regulation. Building on ethnographic research conducted between 2015 and 2017, the article centres first on the Italian–French border (Ventimiglia) and on the Swiss–Italian border (Como). Then, it moves on exploring how migrants are currently managed in France, being transferred from Calais to hosting centres across the country. It highlights how migrants’ movements are controlled, disrupted and diverted not (only) through detention and immobility but by generating effects of containment keeping migrants on the move and forcing them to engage in convoluted geography. It shows that one of the main strategies for governing migration through mobility consists in the politics of migrant dispersal, that is by scattering migrants across spaces and dividing emergent migrant groups.

Tazzioli engages with displacement as a political technology for governing migrants at the internal frontiers of Europe. The chapter deals with measures of displacement that have been implemented by state authorities, for regaining control over unruly migrants by keeping them on the move. It starts by taking into account critical analyses on displacement that have politicised the notion, beyond mere spatial dislocation. Then, it draws attention to internal displacements at the French–Italian border and in Calais, demonstrating that displacement measures generate migrants’ hypermobility. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the consequences that stem from thinking displacement through mobility: it highlights the effects of containment produced by migrants’ forced hypermobility and questions the nexus between freedom and mobility which sustains liberal political thought.

In this interview, the editors of this issue of SAQ ask Deborah Cowen about how the notion of the migration crisis has played out in the field of logistics.