The Making of Migrants’ Wageless Life. Governing by Debasing

This presentation 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 presentation investigates modes of valuing grounded not only on turning migrants into cheap labour force nor (exclusively) in capitalizing 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, I take into account scholarship on extractivism in migration governmentality and interrogate modes of value extraction beyond profit-making. Mobilizing the concept of “wageless life” (Denning, 2010), it contends that it is crucial to rethink exploitation in light of the obstructions to migrants’ autonomous social reproduction activities. Focusing on the Greek refugee context, it shows that migrants’ exploitation takes place also through the obstruction of their social reproduction activities. It 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.