1Whiteness and Transatlantic European Settler Colonialism-Migration

Despite the transculturation (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010b) and creolization (Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Tate 2015b) of European societies, the ‘ordinary citizen’ is largely represented through a white racial ethnic-national lens. Myths about cultural homogeneity, racial and ethnic endogamy, immobility, and territorial rootedness prevail and are re-actualized in European nationalisms in the rise of right-wing national populisms. Tropes invoking the Ur-myths of racial purity, cultural endogamic authenticity, and ethnic encapsulation within accounts of European nationalism disregard the global historical entanglements in which Europe has evolved. Contemporary Europe has been marked by these issues: by trade, by political expansion by different regional powers, and by movements of people due to poverty, social deprivation, and religious and political persecution. Thus, it is remarkable that in contemporary popular media and political representations alluding to European national identity and belonging, Europe is imagined as unsettled by its own global entanglements, resulting from its history of colonialism, enslavement, imperialism, settler colonialism, indentured labor, global labor migration, exile, capitalist ventures, global governance, and wars.

Considering Europe’s entangled global history, it is surprising that political and media discourses often perceive contemporary migratory movements as singular phenomena, and as external to Europe’s history. In fact, transatlantic European migration has been foundational in the nation-states of the American continent104 and the nations of Australia (Jupp 2002), New Zealand, and South Africa, which are marked by histories of European colonialism, settler colonialism, and transatlantic migration (see Lowe 2015). Defining themselves in the 18th and 19th centuries as countries of settlers and immigrants, these nation-states’ public discourses on national, cultural, and linguistic representation oscillated in the 19th century between negation and partial acknowledgement of the transcultural fabric of their societies (see Martinez-Echazabal 1998). Through this day, these national narratives have masked the exploitation and dehumanization of the original inhabitants of these territories, ending in some instances with their genocide (see Lowe 2015). Also, the African presence in these territories due to transatlantic slave trade during the 16th and 19th centuries is omitted from the official national representation (Hall 2015), despite that approximately 13 million people from West and East Africa were enslaved and shipped to Europe and the American continent during this time (see Eltis and Richardson 2008, xiv–xv).

In the 21st century, the indigenous populations of these territories are still treated as non-citizens or second-class citizens (see Coulthard 2014; Simpson 2014). They are erased from national historiographic, cultural, and political representation; when they are remembered, they appear as objects of past times, displayed in a folkloristic manner in museums. Nonetheless, the presence of indigenous intellectuals, artists, and activists challenging the white supremacist discourse of the Eurocentric narratives of ‘discovery’ and ‘country of immigration’ is more public than ever (see Tuck and Young 2012; Tzul Tzul 2015).

This same narrative discloses the continuity between European colonialism and European transatlantic migration. Europe’s colonialism defined world immigration patterns from 1500 to 1800: while Europe was establishing its colonial rule in Africa and Asia, between 1800 and 1925 approximately 48 million emigrants left Europe for the American continent, Australia, and New Zealand (Massey 2000, 62). Settlers arriving in the American continent from Britain, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden in the 18th and 19th century formed part of settler colonialism. This transatlantic migration, coupled with the ongoing settler colonialism in Oceania, forms part of the modern European overseas colonial settlement project. Driven by the annexation of land, the appropriation of raw materials, and the subjugation of the indigenous population to pure exploitable labor, this project was also propelled by the economic boost produced by transatlantic slave trade, enabling industrialization in England and other parts of Europe as well as in the Americas. Within this context, many impoverished, religiously and politically persecuted Europeans were recruited to work in the rapidly expanding overseas plantation industry during the late 19th to early 20th centuries.

Though migration due to religious persecution, poverty, and epidemic menaces represents a constant feature of European history, it was not until the late 19th century that migration came to center stage in the regulation and control of the nation, differentiating between national citizens and the nation’s Other, ‘alien’ or ‘migrant.’ As a biopolitical tool of governance, migration policies were engineered and implemented first in countries transitioning from colonial rule to sovereign national power. The first modern migration policies were developed in the late 19th century in North, Central, and South America, and in parts of the Caribbean (Lesser 2013; FitzGerald and Cook-Martín 2014). Guaranteeing the political, economic, and cultural influence of former colonial powers, migration policies established a set of instruments prioritizing the recruitment of white European migrants. This process took place in Canada, the United States, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and Latin America, or in territories kept in political dependency to the British Crown until the second half of the 20th century, such as Australia105 and New Zealand.106

Due to the expansion of various modes of transportation and the need for workers in rapidly expanding industries, 19th-century white European transatlantic migration signaled the advent of racially structured capitalist progress, technological advancement, and urbanization. The system of racial capitalism (Robinson 2005) constituted the nation-states’ rationale for the racial coding in migrant labor recruitment policies, introducing a racial division in the workforce in former European colonies. The recruitment of white European migrants was also determined by a cultural and educational project of nation-building in these former colonies, and the colonial discursive mantra of Europe as the cradle of civilization, modernity, culture, and progress underpinned the nation-state project.

The newly constituted sovereign nation-states in the American continent reacted to increasing immigration by establishing policies banning certain social, national, religious, and racial groups from entry. For example, after Britain introduced its first immigration service to promote the emigration of Irish and poor people to Canada in 1827, the Nova Scotia Assembly reacted in 1828 by establishing a bond system for immigrants entering the country. The bond system set a £ 10 tax on the master of any migrant vessel aiming to land on Canadian shores, if that could guarantee that the migrant workers arriving would not become a “burden” for the Canadian state, they would be refunded the bond within a year. At this time, the Canadian state refuse elderly, mentally and physically sick and poor migrants to enter the country. This was later changed to a head tax system, which was applied to all migrants. In the 1870s, the United States followed the lead of the Canadian head tax system by passing legislation prohibiting certain groups of migrants from entering the country. In 1875, Congress prohibited the entry of prostitutes, convicts, and persons with mental health issues or physical incapacities; in 1891, the ban was expanded to persons suffering from contagious diseases, and allowed the deportation of migrants not complying with entry requirements. Some years later, this biopolitical screening began to include the categories of race and nationality in its selection criteria. A group of Black Bermudians entering Canada as British colonial subjects caused an uproar in the Nova Scotia Assembly in 1815. The Assembly complained to the British Crown about sending black people to Canada, asking the Crown to repatriate this group of people and prevent further migration of black people (Plender 1988). Similar reactions to non-European migration also took place in the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America.

In the United States, as Gerald Neuman (1993) notes, similar laws were passed in the 18th century, uncovering the myth that the United States of America was a country of free borders until the introduction of migration laws in 1875. In the 18th century movement between states was already regulated by the British Crown, and after independence, by the United States itself, in the form of incipient migration regulations. Also David Scott FitzGerald and David A. Cook-Martín (2014) concede that the United States has been one of the first nations to initiate racially coded naturalization and migration policies in the 18th and 19th centuries. The introduction of the Naturalization Law in 1790 reserve eligibility to naturalize to “free whites,” excluding the indigenous and enslaved population from citizenship. Further, at this time the first federal migrations laws are past. For example in Massachusetts a law passed in 1794 penalizes “any person who knowingly brought a pauper or indigent person into any town in the Commonwealth” or the masters of vessels bringing “unauthorized” colonial settlers, banning in particular poor people from entering the state (Neuman 1993, 1849). In 1803, the first federal laws coded by race were passed. In the same year, in the southern states of the US an “enactment of a federal statute prohibiting the importation of foreign blacks into states whose laws forbade their entry” was passed (Neuman 1993, 1869). This federal law articulated the racist attitude of this state towards the movement of black people fleeing from slavery in the Southern States of the United States and seeking political asylum in states that had abolished slavery. Further, in the aftermath of the anti-colonial and anti-slavery rebellion in Saint Domingue in the early 19th century, black people coming from abroad to the United States were not only already considered suspicious as “free blacks,” but their revolutionary engagement was feared as they were perceived as potential rebels that could organize resistance against racism (Neuman 1993, 1849). It was not until the beginning of the 19th century that a difference between ‘aliens’ and ‘colonial settlers’ was made. In 1831, laws passed in Massachusetts penalized the entry of ‘aliens’ into US territory.

In the second half of the 19th century, migration regulations were explicitly guided by racial differentiation. For example, the United States government reacted to Chinese migration by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 (Plender 1988). The Chinese Exclusion Act established a system of registration whereby all Chinese workers were obliged to register or face deportation. Though lawyers partially challenged this act, restrictions on Chinese immigration were nonetheless tightened throughout the next decades. Canada also passed a Chinese Immigration Act in 1885 introducing a head tax of fifty dollars on Chinese migrants. Eleven years later, Australia passed an Immigration Restriction Bill to prevent access by Southeast Asian immigrants, followed by the White Australian Policy in 1904, which banned immigration from South Asia, particularly from India, and from Africa (Plender 1988). This policy continued into the second half of the 20th century.

In Latin America, as Tanya Ketarí Hernández (2013, 23) notes, “debates over immigration policies in Spanish America were often couched in racial language.” At the beginning of the 19th century, the Congress of Gran Colombia (constituting what is now Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela) promoted settler colonialism by granting land to European migrants. Brazil and Argentina followed suit and prioritized European migration in their constitutions, arguing that this would be beneficial for technological and economic progress. After the constitutional emancipation of the enslaved population in 1853, Argentina actively promoted and sought European immigration. Between 1869 and 1895, the European population in Argentina increased from 1.8 million to 4 million people, and in 1914 it was 7.9 million, which made up 30 % of the population (Ketarí Hernández 2013, 23). This increase was not coincidental, but resulted from a concerted effort by the Argentine government, lobbying abroad for European workers, gifting them land, and, in the early years, partially covering white European migrants’ transportation costs. Similar developments took place in Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay, and 90 % of the 10–11 million European migrants that arrived between 1880 and 1930 settled in these countries or in Argentina. In Venezuela, after the constitutional emancipation of the enslaved population in 1854, the government’s interest in white European migration was confirmed in public intellectual debates around the blanqueamiento (whitening) of the nation. Through the biological metaphor of a “transfusion of blood,” the Venezuelan government recruited migrants from Ireland, Gran Canaria, Germany, and Italy, with the aim of keeping the nation white. In 1891, legislation was passed that prevented non-white migrants entering the country. This policy was integrated into the 1906 constitution, which also explicitly prohibited immigration by anyone of African descent (Ketarí Hernández 2013, 23). In a similar vein, in 1890, Brazil instituted Decree No. 528, which excluded all migrants from Africa and Asia from entering the country. This Decree instituted the primacy of whiteness and dispossessed the inhabitants of Abya Yala107 from their entitlement to land they had inhabited for centuries as the migrants arriving mainly from Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Germany were thought to legally owned and settled in individual allotments of this territory. Brazil states in its 1853 constitution: “The federal government shall foster European immigration, and may not restrict, limit or burden with any tax whatsoever, the entry” (Ketarí Hernández 2013, 24). In 1921 Brazil’s Federal Law prohibited the entry of “undesirables” (Lesser 1999). This legal regulation was factually executed, when Brazil rejected the settlement of a group of African-Americans that were planning to create a settler colony in Mato Grosso (FitzGerald and Cook-Martín 2014). Legislation was also passed in other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean that prevented Chinese and non-European immigration in particular. In Haiti, legislation forbidding the entry of Syrian immigrants was introduced in 1903 (Plender 1988, 69). Similar laws banning Arabs, Armenians were also passed in Costa Rica (1914), Panama (1909–1917), and Venezuela (1919) (Plender 1988, 69). Although Europe expanded its economic, political, legal, and cultural control over colonized territories overseas through settler colonialism-migration until the mid-20th century, in Europe itself, migration was not problematized until the second half of the 20th century.

2The Coloniality of Migration and Racial Capitalism

Caribbean and South-East Asian immigration to the United Kingdom in the late 1940s and 1950s, and North African immigration to France in the 1950s, challenged the public myth that the European nation-state was cut off from the circuits of transatlantic settler colonialism-migration. In the 1960s and 1970s, immigration as constitutive of the nation-state was unavoidable, if we are to understand Fordism in Germany, France, and Britain as characterized by the recruitment of a labor force from the disfranchised territories of southern Europe, Turkey, Morocco, and the (post-)colonial territories. In the case of the migration from still or former colonial territories, this was happening within a new organization of territorial imperial power. Thus, the person arriving in France or the United Kingdom from the still or former colonies were subjected to imperial membership and in the case of Britain after independence those countries form part of the Commonwealth or in France, some became the Overseas Countries of France. This form of migration thus did not take place between nations, but within the territory of one imperial power and was negotiated between the citizens of the Empire and their colonial subjects, excluded from citizenship or semi-included as ‘second citizen.’ Yet, all these migratory movements did not push to the fore Europe’s memory about its own history of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism, and neither of its own migratory movements due to settler-colonialism, transatlantic migration and exile to Africa, Asia, Oceania and the American continent. The 1980s made the global entanglement of Europe with its former colonies evident, the movements of people due to political persecution, poverty, war, austerity, social constraints, cultural restrictions, lack of employment, study, leisure, or a simple wish for change constitutes the fabric of current societies. It is within this context of transnational migration that migration and border control measures, technologies, devices, and tropes have been engineered in the last three decades. Set within this context, analysis of the connection between transatlantic European migration and racism in the 19th century, and of current migratory movements occurring within the framework of the migration-asylum nexus, requires an analytical framework that reconsiders migration as a metonym of the modernity-coloniality juncture. It is in this regard that I propose the analytical framework of the coloniality of migration.

The coloniality of migration operates within the matrix of a nomenclature of social classification based on racial hierarchies reminiscent of colonial differentiation. Colonial difference departs from the idea that the colonized population is fundamentally different and inherently inferior to the colonizer (Chatterjee 1993). It conceives the Other as a projection of the colonizer as radical and unassimilable other. In both cases, the Other is defined from a hegemonic position of the self as oscillating between the position of strangeness or similarity (Hall, Evans, and Nixon 1997). In discourses on migration and migrants, a similar dynamic of differentiation is played out, which is reminiscent of the logic of coloniality. Migration regulation remains a fundamental societal field in which the Other of the nation, of Europe, and of the Occident is reconfigured in racial terms. The logic generated in this context constructs and produces objects to be governed through restrictions, management devices, and administrative categories such as ‘refugee’ and ‘asylum seeker,’ or through a variety of migrant statuses. The entry, mobility, and settlement of migrants are strictly regulated and administered. Migration policies reiterate a matrix of objectification reminiscent of colonial times, and as such, operate within the nomenclature of racialization.

As W.E.B. Du Bois (2007) noted, modern societies are constituted through processes of racialization.108 Exported from the 16th century to Europe’s colonized and occupied territories, and developed further by European philosophical and scientific discourses in the 18th and 19th centuries (Bernasconi and Coole 2003), racism has become the fundamental matrix through which a world order is constituted and the world’s population is divided (Bethencourt 2014). Within this system of racial classification, social categories of ethnicity, indigeneity, race, and religion emerged, classifying the population and developing a system of power through which relationships of governance, labor, economy, and culture were shaped. This matrix of power has been coined the “coloniality of power” by Aníbal Quijano (2000, 2008). The coloniality of power defines a matrix of knowledge deriving from European colonialism, which represents the epistemological grounds on which rational discourses, technologies, and practices of governing the global population were drafted. Coloniality defines the endurance of this mental script governing our present times; the link to power further refers to Foucault’s understanding of power as ubiquitous and potentially productive, but also as a repressive apparatus. The coloniality of power refers to the racial matrix within which occurs the contemporary organization of labor, the configuration of relations of production and social reproduction, the production of cultural and political representation, and the circulation of knowledge and educational endeavors.

Though not spelled out through the term coloniality, this understanding of the colonial condition and its social, political, and cultural endurance has been outlined by anti-colonial thinkers such as Cyril L. R. James (1989), Eric Williams (1994), Claudia Jones (see Davies 2011), and Kwame Nkrumah (2006) in their analyses of European colonialism, pointing at racisms as the primordial axis of modernity. As they demonstrate, the differentiation between citizen and non-citizen (alien and others), which regulates access to the labor market, education, political participation, the health system, media, and cultural representation, was not only established in the colonies but also ruled the metropoles. Thus, racism was not just exported to the colonies, but existed within the fabric of European societies before colonization (Eliav-Felden et al. 2009). Racism is not an exception to European modernity, but is at its very foundation.109 Thus, following Eric Williams’s observation (1996), the transatlantic slave trade foregrounds the entanglement between European modernity and the colonial plantation economy. It is in this entanglement that migration emerges in the 19th century as a modern nation-state colonial tool of governing the population in racial, ethnic, national, religious, and cultural terms.

Prior to this date, regions in Europe differentiated between citizens and aliens. For example, in 4 B.C. in Athens a differentiation between citizen, metic110 , and strangers/travelers existed, which regulated the entry of these persons to the city. In ancient Rome and the Roman Empire, the control of aliens determined access to imperial territory. Legislation regulating the relationship between citizens and aliens was crucial for the creation of the nation’s Other in European migration policies. Historically, the ‘alien’ has been defined in Europe by two lines of membership. In early medieval times, large parts of Europe were ruled by a tribal kinship and a feudal system. While the tribal system departed from a biological kinship model, the feudal system established a relationship to the territory through property or serfdom. The tribal kinship model relies on the notion of sanguinity – blood ties – while the feudal system model depends upon the relationship to property (Plender 1988). The first constitutes the jus sanguinis principle, the second the jus solis principle.

The perception of the nation’s Other in association with migration in Europe is related to these systems of imagining national communities according to (a) a tribal kinship model or (b) as property-related communities. In both cases, migration is perceived as exterior to the nation. In the first, migration seems unassimilable by the nation, and in the second, favorable political and economic conjunctures might promote forms of regulated immigration. However, in both cases the matrix of racialization is played out in the definition of the nation’s Other. As we have seen, in the course of the introduction of nation-state migration policies in the 19th century, the status of ‘alien’ was developed into an administrative category occupying various regional and national imaginaries related to colonial difference. Within this setting, who would be considered an alien depends on specific historical, national, and local genealogies of Othering, the establishment of racial formations configured on legal and political terms. As I will argue next through the example of the migration-asylum nexus, migration policies still develop within the entanglement of thinking about the White national citizen and the racially different Other as two opposing sides mirroring the entrenchment of modernity and coloniality.

3The Migration-Asylum Nexus and the ‘Refugee Crisis’

In the 1970s, Chileans, Argentinians, and Uruguayans were recognized as exiles in the UK, Germany, France, and Spain (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010a). Nowadays, the term ‘exile’ has almost disappeared from public discourse, and has been replaced by asylum policies and discourses on ‘asylum seekers.’ These policies and discourses are characterized by a perspective on ‘asylum’ that undermines the meaning of this word, which means entitlement to sanctuary or shelter for persons fleeing from violence and persecution. The current debate about the ‘refugee crisis’ has mirrored this trend towards the regulation of asylum based on political and economic interests. As such, the right to asylum has been eroded by increasingly coupling it with national migrant labor recruitment strategies.

In this context, I borrow Stephen Castles’s (2006) term “migration-asylum nexus.” When Castles (2006) introduced this term in his essay “Global Perspectives on Forced Migration,” he intervened in a political and academic debate discussing the distinction between economic and forced migration. This distinction assumes that economic migration is a voluntary option, and as such, is not the result of conditions that force people to migrate. Yet, as Castles argues, behind the idea of “economic migration” there is a societal analysis that disregards how migration can be an outcome of complex political, economic, and social constraints that force people’s movement. When people migrate because of poverty, unemployment, and deprivation, these societal conditions are connected to political constellations, very often tied to the exercise of power by authoritarian regimes. Thus, political or religious persecution might interact with economic deprivation, and economic constraints might be connected to political repression. The differentiation between asylum as forced migration, and labor migration as voluntary migration, approaches complex societal constellations in a schematic way, disregarding the interplay between the social, the economic, and the political. Castles challenges this divide by suggesting that we examine the relationship between migration and asylum. Castles’s observations are relevant for the analysis of the contemporary articulation of the migration-asylum nexus as articulated through the European ‘refugee crisis.’ The interdependency between migration and asylum has increased due to three elements: (a) the increasing erosion of the humanitarian aspect of the right to asylum, (b) the tightening of restrictions in regard to migration, and (c) the economic demand for labor migration. In this regard, migration is regulated politically through asylum as the field of asylum is increasingly regulated by labor migration demands. These two fields are further coupled through the deployment of securitization measures.

Since September 11, 2001, asylum and migration policies revolve around the theme of securitization. Antonio Negri’s analysis of war as an integrative principle in the formation of the social order (“guerra ordinativa”)111 is more relevant than ever (see Negri 2003, 23; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010a). In this sense, war has become integrated in the everyday social order due to its virtual omnipresence, through the development of a rhetoric of war, and by war tactics outside of physical war zones. As such, the rhetoric of war is not just “the continuation of politics by other means; it becomes the fundamental aspect of politics and legitimation” (Atzert and Müller 2003, 136). The migration-asylum nexus serves this logic on three levels. First, it represents a field of management and administration of collateral damage and victims of global war and conflicts. Second, it functions as a tool for guarding and securing borders, such that asylum seekers are increasingly treated as invaders. Third, policies differentiating causes, patterns, and trajectories of persecution and escape undermine the ethical legitimation of asylum as a humanitarian resource. Within this context, the definition of countries as ‘safe countries’ or ‘countries of persecution’ depends increasingly on global political conjunctures and national or European interests. Yet, the migration-asylum nexus is not only characterized by policies of securitization, but also in that the categorization of refugees into different statuses attached to the process of application and recognition of asylum produces a hierarchical order, a nomenclature drawing on an imaginary reminiscent of Orientalist and racialized practices of European colonialism and imperialism. As such, asylum policies are coupled to the logic of racialization inherent to Quijano’s coloniality of power and represent a contemporary expression of the coloniality of migration.

While current EU migration and asylum policies do not explicitly operate within a matrix of racial or ethnic difference, by coupling nationality and the right to asylum they have the effect of formulating hierarchies in the recognition or rejection of asylum in terms of nationalities. This places people in zones of recognition or rejection of the human right to livability (Pannett 2011). This coupling follows from the foundation of racialized notions of the Other. For instance: in autumn 2015, while Syrian refugees were being accepted into Germany, people from Kosovo, Albania, and Montenegro were being deported. While these latter countries were declared ‘safe countries of origin’ on October 24, 2015, those affected by the deportations were primarily Roma families who had fled these areas because of racist violence. The perception and categorization of this group was determined in Germany not only by their national origin, but also because through Western European racism against Roma and Sinti, deeply rooted since the Middle Ages and re-articulated in the new political constellations, this group of people became objects of securitization measures (Jonuz 2009; Randjelović and Schuch 2014; Ivasiuc 2015).

Further, the discourses on the ‘refugee crisis’ operate within the duality of the Self and the Other, determined either by a humanitarian perspective or a regulatory approach. The humanitarian perspective, appealing to Christian and humanitarian traditions of charity and empathy, emphasizes the duty of wealthy nations to provide support to people fleeing from wars and conflict zones. The regulatory approach argues instead for the prioritization of securing local wealth. This debate is taking place in countries with strong welfare regimes, such as in Western Europe and Scandinavia, and is present across all political party ideologies. In Germany, for example, very different political actors debate the argument about the limits of the welfare state in providing support for refugees. While there are, of course, ideological and policy-related differences between the political camps, it is surprising to see how they converge in the use of the figure of the refugee as the ‘Other’ of the nation, or, in Enrique Dussel’s (1995) terms, as Europe’s “exteriority.” This Other is evoked in the logic of what Stuart Hall (1997) has defined as “the spectacle of the ‘Other.’” Produced on the identitarian dichotomy of Self and Other, the Other becomes a negative template reflecting the “hegemonic Self’s” anxieties, worries, contempt, and fear (Popal 2011).

However, the migration-asylum nexus not only follows the logic of the production of a racialized exteriority to the nationally imagined and proclaimed norm of European whiteness. Instead, this nexus operates within the dynamics of exploitation that have functioned for the last five centuries within the colonial-modern world system, and particularly within the context of nation-state migration policies since the 19th century.

4Conclusion: Racial Capitalism

As I have shown through the discussion of the coloniality of migration, as developed from Quijanos’s “coloniality of power,” the discussion of migration as an articulation of a modern world-system needs to be connected to the cultural, political, economic, and social legacies of European colonialism. The development of transnational migratory movements and migration policies unfold within this context. This observation leads us to consider the coloniality of migration as a conceptual perspective for examining current articulations of racial capitalism as discussed through the trope of the ‘refugee crisis.’ A differential logic of racialization emerges in this context, which finds expression in nation-state institutional and organizational parameters of managing and controlling migration and asylum.

As we have seen above, the joining of productivity, migration, and racism marked the rise of migration policies in the Americas and Oceania (Reinhardt and Reinhartz 2006; Oltmer 2016). The recruitment of migrant workers took place within European racial notions of sameness and strangeness. Until the mid-20th century, as we have seen, countries like the US, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa explicitly recruited white Europeans. These policies resulted in a settler colonialism-migration that constructed these nation-states as extensions of a white Christian Europe. The recruitment of white European migrants was officially legitimized as a means for national industrial achievement, technical progress, and urban industrialization. Yet despite the restrictions applied to migration movements from non-European territories, people from the Middle East, North Africa, China, and the Caribbean still immigrated to these areas, despite regular attempts to stop them.

For migration policies in Western Europe, a racialized logic of exploitation was decisive as well. We are speaking here, for example, about the “guest-worker” programs in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s (see Türkmen 2011, 2010), which were originally intended to temporarily recruit workers from Southern Europe, Turkey, Tunisia, and Morocco. Another example may be found in the Empire Wind rush, a ship from the Caribbean that arrived at Tilbury Dock in London in 1949, carrying a highly skilled workforce intended for work as nurses, bus drivers, and teachers. In the current migration-asylum nexus, economic interests also shine through. One of the measures agreed upon across all party lines in the German parliament in June 2016 was the introduction of “One-Euro jobs for refugees” (see Öchsner 2016). This measure was intended to initially create jobs for 100,000 people who had arrived in Germany as refugees. The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that these people only received 80 cents for every Euro, because the costs for travel and work clothes were deducted. Here too, recommendations from the International Labor Organization for working standards were ignored for those given asylum. These forms of utilization recall Enrique Dussel’s “objectification” of the indigenous and Afro-descendent populations during the Portuguese and Spanish colonization of the Americas (1995). Migration policies tend to follow up this logic by reducing human beings to exploitable labor. Asylum policies seem to be turning into a new way of regulating and controlling racialized labor migration. The coloniality of migration not only draws attention to the racism in contemporary migration regulation, policies, and official national discourses, but it also addresses the link between racism and capitalism.

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