Dario Melossi "Crime Punishment Migration." London: Sage, 2016 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015)
Buy at Stanford: http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23425
This book offers a much-needed new political theory of an old phenomenon. The last decade alone has marked the highest number of migrations in recorded history. Constrained by environmental, economic, and political instability, scores of people are on the move. But other sorts of changes—from global tourism to undocumented labor—have led to the fact that to some extent, we are all becoming migrants. The migrant has become the political figure of our time. Rather than viewing migration as the exception to the rule of political fixity and citizenship, Thomas Nail reinterprets the history of political power from the perspective of the movement that defines the migrant in the first place. Applying his "kinopolitics" to several major historical conditions (territorial, political, juridical, and economic) and figures of migration (the nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat), he provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary migration.
The Captive and the Migrant: Re-Configuring Strategies of Containment in the State of Exception
Mass abductions such as the one which has recently occurred in Nigeria have stirred an international outcry and have functioned as additional examples for the justification of the need for the ‘War on Terror’. Notable US figures ranging from Michelle Obama to Sylvester Stallone joined the campaign of reaching out to the Nigerian government, feeding the media with pictures of themselves while holding signs which read “Bring Back Our Girls”. One cannot but note the stark irony between this expression of solidarity from American leaders, public figures and celebrities towards the female captives in Nigeria, and the relative acquiescence towards other forms of captivity within the nation itself: as more than 300,000 men, women and children are detained by US immigration authorities each year, our modern era bears witness to what Giorgio Agamben has described as the “state of exception” and the government’s unrestrained extension of power over individual rights. Beginning with Agamben’s notion of how the “state of exception” is best exemplified through defining – and in effect containing both rhetorically as well as physically – the homo sacer, the man who can be killed but without considering the killing as murder, this paper sets out to investigate contemporary captivity narratives and how the specific motif is employed by American media and the rhetoric of the sovereign power (i.e. the government) in order to justify rhetorical as well as physical strategies of containment. The paper, however, will also set out to examine how these strategies can be re-defined and re-configured by the homo sacer himself, the liminal figure which is both included in and excluded from the modern state’s politico-juridical domain. For such liminality is also centrally at play in the acknowledgement of the migrant’s central position in today’s global economy; as Hanif Kureishi so aptly puts it, “since we depend so much on that which we hate the most, the worse the economy the more the need for the immigrant”.
Introduction: The Migrant's Paradox
University of Minnesota Press, 2021
A migrant is a person required and refuted by Western sovereignty. To inhabit this impossible dualism requires living with a steadfastly unstable status, readily questioned at the onset of national elections or economic crises, while tenuously embraced under the banners of celebratory multiculturalism. The Migrant’s Paradox is located in the brutal contradictions of border-preserving politics and border-expanding economics that increasingly constrict the life and space available to the migrant. This book is about the street life of the migrant’s paradox and what it means to make life and livelihood within a citizenship that is always called into question.
This is a comment on a special issue about the labor superexploitation of unauthorized immigrant workers. It uses the broadly Marxist understanding that inequalities are not just bad conditions or positions but are social relations in which goods are transferred in one direction and bads in the other. Hence, the comment asks about the observed kinds of suffering of unauthorized people, which bads are transferred on to them and which goods are removed from them, and also who accumulates those goods. Based on the papers in the special issue, it proposes that we think widely and flexibly about what is transferred and what is the key relation. Topics examined include surplus value in immediate workplace relations, access to space via unequal redistribution of mobility, insecurity of lifeworlds (precarity) transferred to those who accumulate security and predictability, redistribution of life career assets (such as injury, illness, and old age benefits), and unequal distribution of identifiability and surveillance. It also draws out a comparison of direct and evident recipients of these transfers with diffuse, hidden, and indirect recipients, and asks if that affects the politics of unauthorized immigration.