Refugees as Surplus Population: Race, Migration and Capitalist Value Regimes

Hidden in Plain Sight: Coloniality, Capitalism and Race/ism as Far as the Eye Can See

“…The informal work of undocumented migrants also serves capitalism's central purpose, much more so than formal labour with their wage claims and benefits: the extraction of maximum value from labour to the point of disposability.' 28 Similarly to Sharpe's Black noncitizens, Rajaram points to the fact that focusing on migrants and refugees as this residual, disposable group produced and necessary in a context of capitalism could be a place from which to think solidarity anew. A such it is presented as a politics to counter the divide and conquer feature that is also ever present in the politics of coloniality.…”

Refugees in the IT Sector: Young Syrians’ Economic Subjectivities and Familial Lives in Jordan

“…Despite the growing policy attention to livelihoods and economies, existing critical scholarship tends to see the figure of the refugee as having no relation with global and localised class structures, modes of production, and political economies (Rajaram, ). As a consequence, refugee economic subjectivity—understood here as “the multiple positionalities and intentionalities that infuse individual experience” (Rankin, , 28) and that can be ascribed to the economic sphere—tends to be scarcely explored.…”

“…As Gatrell's work on “the making of the modern refugee” has highlighted, the lack of attention to the economic sphere is at risk of “stripping away attributes of social distinction and class” from refugee subjects (2013, 43, quoted in Ehrkamp 2016, 814). Across the social sciences, with the exception of recent contributions in political economy (Wagner ; Rajaram , among others), work on refugee subjectivity focuses primarily on performativity in the context of the asylum process (such as Lacroix, ; Rivetti 2013; Luker, ). In geography, recurring themes are border securitization, and the gendered and sexualized categories through which contemporary asylum is governed (see also Szczepanikova ; Hyndman and Giles ).…”

“…Considering economic life as strictly intertwined with the multifaceted agencies and positionalities that characterize the refugee condition, in what follows I approach the question of economic subjectivity by putting young Syrians’ experiences of professional training and work in the tech sector in the constrained context of their refugee family life. Here, economies are not seen as simply “a mode of exchange”, but as “mediated by social values and hierarchies” (Rajaram , p. 1). Their spatialized dimensions involve first and foremost the space of the “tech camp”, but also family as a social and geographical space that is lived both intimately and transnationally, as well as the multiple scales of the globalized securitization of borders and asylum policies.…”

The ‘street politics’ of migrant il/legality: Navigating Malaysia's urban borderscape

“…Yet, despite this clear reliance upon migrant labour to sustain economic growth, foreign workers remain politically and socially marginalised in Malaysian society. In fact, while foreign workers are in many ways ‘super‐included’ in capitalist modes of production, their inclusion is conditioned on their exclusion ‘as exploitable and dispensable labour’ (see Rajaram, : 2). Key to this has been the introduction of a policy framework that aims to ensure a continued supply of foreign workers to the crucial sectors of the economy, while at the same time preventing them from being incorporated into Malaysian society in the longer term (Garcés‐Mascareñas, : 64).…”