The making of migrants’ wageless life: Exploiting by debasing

Abstract

This article engages with current debates on value extraction from migrants and claims that it is necessary to complicate analyses that insist exclusively either on profit-making activities at the border or that conceive migration in terms of wasted life. The paper investigates modes of valuing grounded not only on turning migrants into cheap labour force nor (exclusively) in capitalising on their forced immobility but, rather, on debasing life, which encapsulates psycho-physical debilitation and socio-economic devaluation. Drawing on feminist literature on social reproduction and on debates on value extraction in migration governance, the article proceeds in four steps. The first section takes into account scholarship on extractivism in migration governmentality and interrogates modes of value extraction beyond profit-making: mobilising the concept of ‘wageless life’, the article contends that it is crucial to rethink exploitation in light of the obstructions to migrants’ autonomous social reproduction activities. The paper moves on focusing on the Greek refugee context: it shows that migrants’ exploitation takes place also through the obstruction of their social reproduction activities. The third section argues that the systematic debasement and depletion of migrants should not be confused with the production of wasted or are life but, rather, it is constitutive of the frontiers of value through exploitation in migration governmentality. The article concludes with a discussion on governing migration through life-impeding activities and argues that governing by debasing lives forecloses migrants’ futurity and enhances raizlied hierarchies of political subordination and economic exploitation.