Immigration control, post-Fordism, and less eligibility

Abstract

The apparent de-bordering of the western world under the impulse of economic globalization has been paralleled by a simultaneous process of re-bordering of late-capitalist societies against global migrations. This re-bordering is part of a broader punitive turn in the regulation of migration which has emerged, particularly in the European context, since the mid-1970s. On the one hand, non-western immigrants are targeted by prohibitionist immigration policies which in fact contribute to the reproduction of their status of illegality; on the other hand, the systematic use of incarceration (together with administrative detention and deportation) as the main strategy in the ongoing war against unauthorized immigration configures a dynamic of hyper-criminalization of immigrants, whose result is the intensification of their socioeconomic and political marginality across Europe. Following the materialist criminological approach known as political economy of punishment, this article suggests that these punitive strategies should be analyzed against the background of an increasingly flexible and de-regulated neoliberal economy: in this context, the hyper-criminalization of migrations contributes to the reproduction of a vulnerable labor force whose insecurity makes it suitable for the segmented labor markets of post-Fordist economies.