The paper examines the distinction between 'economic' migrants and 'genuine refugees'. I argue that the economic/political migrant binary belongs to a particular ideological presupposition which is present in classic economic liberalism. In migratory systems, this ideology construes the 'economic' and the 'political' vis-à-vis violence and lays the ground for subject differentiation. This logic, furthermore, imposes itself on the migratory system and its empirical reality (e.g. detention and reception centres). The struggles that we witness at borders and detention centres attempt to disintegrate definitions of what constitutes violence. The struggles against the imposed categories take place at two interconnected levels: at the border and in the repositioning of migrants from detention to reception centres. I empirically trace these levels within the practice of the asylum-system in Bulgaria.
Following Christina Schwenkel’s call to attend to different temporalities in the study of the Vietnamese diaspora, I examine three historical representations of workers sent to Bulgaria between the early 1970s and the beginning of the 1990s. These representations mediated Bulgarian-Vietnamese interstate relations: first, workers in relation to internationalist duty; second, workers in relation to financial debt; and finally, the workers as racialized, indebted subjects. My goal is twofold. Firstly, I turn my attention to the role and the figure of the Vietnamese worker under the ethos of actually existing socialism and navigate through the socialist rationalities that stood behind their arrival in Bulgaria. Second, I trace how representations of Vietnamese workers have changed from upholding the moral duty of socialist internationalism to becoming a labor force destined to repay Vietnam’s debt. This shift took place within a framework of changing power configurations that remodeled the extraction of surplus labor by relocating debt risks from the Vietnamese state to Vietnamese workers. I then trace the production of the indebted subject, which materialized in a historic type of racialization of the Vietnamese people, and which proved indispensable to Bulgaria’s transition to a market economy.
The article develops the notion of restless bodies to explore the interaction between regimes of social reproduction and freedom of movement. The notion captures the methodological difficulty to account for ‘return migration’ and goes beyond the isolation of a singular migration determinant. The author relies on two empirical cases. The first draws on one hundred interviews with ‘return migrants’ in Bulgaria. The second is based on fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2015 in Germany. Both show how the political economy of movement is characterised by a contradiction between fixity and motion in the context of capital accumulation and fading welfare state. The concerns at hand are raised both because of their methodological importance but also as a potential instrument that could supplement ongoing policy debates in the field of EU social security portability coordination.
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