Nicholas De Genova is a scholar of migration, borders, race, citizenship, and labor.

He holds an appointment as Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston. He previously held teaching appointments in urban and political geography at King's College London, and in sociocultural anthropology at Stanford, Columbia, and Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as visiting professorships or research positions at the Universities of Warwick, Bern, and Amsterdam. He received his Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.

Against the background of changing capital/labour relations, extractivism, climate change, warfare and generalised violence across the globe, contemporary migratory movements have increasingly been characterised by specific processes of violence, exclusion and subordination, such as the virtual sealing of borders and transit corridors across the world, the criminalisation of undocumented migrants and refugees, and the sheer deaths and disappearances of uncountable people, particularly at the US-Mexican borders and in the Mediterranean. We’d like to ask you some questions relating to the specific mechanisms of this violence as you have framed it within your own academic work.

The first question we’d like to ask you relates to a theoretical proposition that has been crucial for you own work in-between anthropology and geography, that is to say the understanding of borders not merely as geographical lines but rather as processes of political, legal and social production. What is the relationship between the productivity of borders and the spaces of death crossed by undocumented migrants and refugees on both sides of the Atlantic in which you have conducted research?

Not only do I reject the simplistic and superficial cartographic notion of borders as geographical lines, I contend that we cannot think of borders as things (De Genova 2016). The common assumption is to imagine that the border is an objective place, a site, and in that sense, a kind of real thing. Consequently, we begin to associate the border with the other things that populate such a space – things such as border fences and checkpoints, but also therefore border guards. This latter detail is instructive, because once we recognize that the policing of borders is indeed a type of work, such as that performed by border guards, then we can begin to see the larger fact of borders not as mere inert things but as the congealed product or distillation of a confluence of human activities, or processes of political, legal and social production, as you put it in your question. For me the indispensable reference is Marx’s discussion of capital: capital not a thing but a social relation. And to the extent that it appears to be a thing, or gets crystalized in a material form, it is really just the objectification of labor already completed, labor performed in the past, or as Marx put it, “dead labor.” If we understand the border as a social relation, we understand that all those things that we associate with borders are just forms of work – both living labor and dead labor –that go into maintaining borders – a dynamic process that involves constant production and reproduction.

Moreover, if we can therefore understand borders also as the products of labor, we can see that they are the kind of products that come to be utilized or deployed as “tools” (or even weapons). In other words, borders become means of production – means of production for the creation and maintenance of differences in space. Such spatial differences generated by borders -- or more precisely, these border-making activities – are first and foremost associated with the sovereign power of nation-states and the ways in which nationalism partitions the whole globe and subdivides humanity into separate populations. Of course, that is not a trans-historical fact of the human condition. The division of the globe into territorially defined states is quite recent, historically speaking, but even more recent is the nation-state as the presumptive and ubiquitous form of political life, and in a way this proliferation of the nation form is best understood the premier product of the era of decolonization. It was not long ago that the world was divided less into national states and rather into competing empires. The global insurgency of anti-colonial struggles that broke the back of colonialism then provoked a reconfiguration of the geo-political world in which the nation-state model, as a specific feature of the post-colonial world order, became the norm and the universal form for the organization of our politics. This means in fact that the world is nowadays more crisscrossed by militarized and policed borders than ever before. In that sense, borders are means of production for the maintenance of differences across space that contribute to the nationalist project whereby each nation-state must produce a subject population in its own image, and thereby produce its putative (national) People. This is, in other words, the fictive People that is the hallowed premise of modern sovereignty – the source and foundation of the notion of democratic popular sovereignty, from which all state sovereignty is supposedly derived. It is, by the way, also the People of every populism (De Genova 2018b).

This point opens up the affinities between nationalism and race, inasmuch as there is finally a fundamental complicity between essentialist notions of nationality or nationhood and the notions of shared ancestry and common kinship that are the basis for every construction of racialized difference among us. Of course, the basic difference that a border produces tends therefore to be racialized difference – an elementary and essentialized difference between a purportedly national “us” and “them,” those on the other side of the border, which is really to say, everybody else in the world, the rest of humanity.

And this point brings us back to the second part of your question – about the ways that borders come to be implicated in deadly violence. There’s no question that the differences that borders produce create the conditions of possibility for the racist degradation and subjugation of many migrants as effectively sub-human, and this is especially pronounced in contexts where migrants from the world’s poorer (formerly colonized) countries aspire to transgress the borders of the richest countries. Those richest countries, of course, are the imperial or formerly colonialist countries whose wealth, power, and prestige were accumulated on the basis of long histories of conquest, pillage, and exploitation, precisely in those countries from which an inordinate number of migrants come. In this respect, we can understand contemporary migration as a key site where our global postcolonial condition is realized and made manifest.

So there can be no surprise in the fact that the descendants of the colonized now become the targets for various degrees of endemic border violence.

And here we must acknowledge that violence too is a form of production and entails a type of labor. Much as it is repressive or destructive – and for our purposes, destructive above all of human life itself – violence also frequently serves a productive end.

Secondly, your most influential contribution to the discipline of border and migration studies has been the one relating to the production of ‘migrant illegality’ as a distinct mechanism of production of disposable labour in contemporary capitalism. How does this process relate to ‘race’ and racialisation? And what are the implications of this concept for the wide section of unemployed migrant and refugee population who are stuck in detention centres from Mexico to Manus Island and Greece?

Increasingly militarized border regimes and violent border zones, more generally, generate and cultivate the conditions of possibility for escalating migrant deaths, but also mutilation, maiming, rape, torture, kidnapping, extortion, and predation. Nonetheless, borders are productive of more than just violence and death. This necropolitical dimension is always a complement to the still more fundamental biopolitical imperative whereby the productive power of borders actually converts mobile people into various juridical and governmental categories of “migrants,” “refugees,” “asylum seekers,” and so on. In the scenarios of violent border-enforcement regimes, the violence of border policing is part of a larger endurance test that operates, in effect, as a process of artificial selection. This violence partly serves to filter migrants who are illegalized and rendered susceptible to the enduring recriminations of the law, but for that very same reason, are not simply excluded or expelled so much as enthusiastically recruited and imported as a highly desirable work force of choice for many employers.

Moreover, border violence serves to discipline migrants and refugees in their illegalized crossings through such death-defying obstacle courses. The terrifying and traumatizing violence of these border regimes, in other words, never functions primarily to exclude people so much as it disciplines those who succeed to get across, and thus serves as a strategy of capture, whereby those who manage to get across are unlikely to ever risk leaving and later having to brave the border crossing again. The costs and perils are simply too prohibitive. But again, migrants are captured in this manner precisely because their illegalized and precaritized labor is desired – as long as it is maximally vulnerable and disposable.

The question nevertheless arises as to how this pertains differently to various migrant predicaments. There are those migrants who truly succeed to get across and proceed onward in their migratory journeys to the destinations where they may commence an indefinite and possibly lifelong apprenticeship in migrant “illegality” and illegalized labor. There are also those who, in one way or another get “stranded” or “stuck,” immobilized en route, such as those who get interdicted and confined in detention camps, or those who must wait out the border regime in self-organized camps in border zones, hoping to prevail in their migratory projects. These migrants and refugees -- from Mexico, to Calais, to Italy and Greece, to Manus Island – represent a whole spectrum of differing degrees of being “on standby” (De Genova 2020), from coercive dislocation and confinement to more amorphous forms of containment, including being “contained” within their own unfinished mobility projects. And of course, for many, during such periods of indefinite waiting and uncertainty, they may often be relegated to a condition of protracted unemployment and marginalization, even abject destitution. But again, while such situations may appear to contradict my argument about the conversion of these mobile lives into highly exploitable precaritized labor, the fact is that these circumstances are part of that larger process of precaritization which ultimately disciplines migrants into their socio-political condition of disposability as labor. Their eventual disposability of labor must first be predicated on the material and practical enforcement of the disposability of their lives.

The disposability of migrant labor is, indeed, always synonymous with the disposability of the productive powers and creative capacities of migrant lives. What appears for capital as “labor” is, from the opposite standpoint of laboring humanity, no less than our life-force, the elementary and elemental power of our life itself. The imperative to render labor disposable pertains to all labor under capitalism, but this disposability is distributed unevenly and unequally. Indeed, the ultimate limit-figure of labor’s absolute disposability under capitalism is enslaved labor and its racial branding in the figure of Blackness (De Genova 2018a). Modern slavery therefore may be understood to be the indispensable and foundational basis for capitalism’s drive to reduce real human lives and persons into labor and nothing but labor (what Marx called “labor in the abstract”). This is the place from which we can best recognize how the illegalization of migrant labor becomes a crucial feature of the racialization and racial subjugation of specific categories of people. In the United States, historically, it was precisely their illegalization as migrants that served as a central, and perhaps the defining, motif for the racialization of Mexicans: Mexican migrants became the iconic “illegal alien,” and their socio-political status has become constitutive in the larger racialization and racist subordination of all Mexicans (and of all Latinxs, more generally) in the U.S. racial order (De Genova 2005).

Finally, you’ve been a keen contributor to the ‘autonomy of migration’ theory, which foregrounds migrant subjectivity and agency against the widespread determinist theories that objectify and frame them in mere economic or humanitarian terms. Can you explain how your own concept of ‘politics of incorrigibility’ intersects with the ‘autonomy of migration’ theory? And why and how have you re-elaborated this in the concept of the ‘autonomy of asylum’ in a recent article with fellow colleagues Glenda Garelli and Martina Tazzioli? To what extent do you think that this stake is still valid in pandemic times whereby possibilities for mobility have heavily reduced both for the undocumented and the documented while securitisation has reached a totally different level of consensus in most countries?

The concept of the autonomy of migration foregrounds the subjective force of migrants, precisely, as you have suggested, in contrast and contradistinction to the variety of objective social forces at play in shaping and alternately compelling or constraining human mobility. Simply put, the idea of the autonomy of migration is a reformulation of concept of the autonomy of labor. Capital can only be accumulated by converting the human energies and vitality of living labor into things – products that can be exchanged as commodities, or money that becomes profit. Capital is therefore derivative of labor, and finally dependent upon the subjective force of labor. Analogously, rather than treat human mobility as a mere epiphenomenal effect or symptom of some presumably objective and material infrastructure, which is assumed to abide by its own laws and momentum, this theory underscores the primacy of the human freedom of movement as a subjective and creative force and productive power, to which regimes of immigration and asylum law and border enforcement are intrinsically responses – the reaction formations of states seeking to uphold and assert their sovereign power.

With the concept of the autonomy of asylum, Glenda Garelli, Martina Tazzioli, and I have extended those insights and critical interventions associated with the autonomy of migration to insist on how refugees – even when enmeshed within the most cumbersome and stringent governmental apparatuses for adjudicating whether or not their claims can be recognized as eligible for asylum – continue to exercise various measures of autonomy, and never fail to exude their own subjective orientations. Whereas the regime of asylum is dedicated to reducing them to mere victims – and thus, the pure objects of someone else’s compassion, pity, and protection – refugees (despite whatever violence or persecution and genuine victimization they may have suffered) nevertheless persist in having aspirations of their own for their mobility projects, and tactically and strategically exercise various measures of an elementary freedom of movement in the effort to reconstitute their lives. When refugees act like subjects, however, it renders them suspect in the purview of the asylum regime – because they then resemble mere migrants. And so they are an obstreperous and incorrigible force within the systems designed to govern them.

The autonomy of migration is inherently and objectively political, inasmuch as migrants and refugees can be understood to act in a manner that asserts the primacy of their human needs over and against the border enforcement authorities, and the law, and the state. This is objectively the case, regardless of whatever ideas that any given migrant may have formulated consciously or articulated. Just think of thousands of refugees on the march across Europe in 2015, charging one border after another. Or think of the caravans of hundreds of Central Americans arriving triumphantly at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018. When I invoke the idea of a politics of incorrigibility (De Genova 2010), it is deeply resonant with the more fundamental argument for the autonomy and subjectivity of migration, but it speaks to not only the objective intractability of migrant subjectivity within the workings of state powers that seek to “manage” or govern human mobility, but also to moments of deliberate disaffection and defiance. Furthermore, I designate this as a politics of incorrigibility because it confronts state power and its border police and the immigration and asylum regime with the impossibility of changing or “correcting” the abject excess that its own system of illegalization has generated and sustained.

The politics of incorrigibility, then, is radically anti-assimilationist, and also radically open-ended. As in the mass migrant protest mobilizations of 2006 across the United States, such a politics of incorrigibility is well expressed in the chant: ¡Aquí estamos y no nos vamos! ¡Y si nos sacan, nos regresamos! In effect, migrants in such moments not only defy the system but also confront it with its own irreconcilable contradictions and dysfunction. The millions who rallied and marched in those mobilizations were effectively saying not only “Here we are,” then, but also: Where do we go from here? By implication, the migrant politics of incorrigibility boldly articulates the contentious insistence that another world must be possible.

References

De Genova, Nicholas

2005 Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

2010 “The Queer Politics of Migration: Reflections on ‘Illegality’ and Incorrigibility.” Studies in Social Justice 4(2): 101-126.

2016 “The ‘Crisis’ of the European Border Regime: Towards a Marxist Theory of Borders.” International Socialism 150: 33-56; available at: <http://isj.org.uk/the-crisis-of-the-european-border-regime-towards-a-marxist-theory-of-borders/>.

2018a “Migration and the Mobility of Labor.” In Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and Paul Prew (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx. New York and London: Oxford University Press. Published online (December 2018). DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695545.013.25

2018b “Re-Bordering ‘the People’: Notes on Theorizing Populism.” South Atlantic Quarterly 117(2): 357-74. Published in Spanish translation as “Re-delimitando las fronteras del ‘Pueblo’ Apuntes para teorizar el populismo.” Theorein: Revista de Ciencias Sociales 4(1): 55-83 (Quito, Ecuador; 2019).