Race, Gender, and Reproduction in the Migrant Metropolis: From “Illegal” Migrants to “Criminal” Citizens

Contemporary struggles around migration are central for and constitutive of the very meanings attributed to citizenship and affiliated notions of national identity.  Similarly, and for related reasons, migration is likewise literally re-making cities, and this is no mere fact of changing population demographics.  Transnational migration is a central and constitutive dynamic in the social production (and transformation) of space, simultaneously on urban, “national,” and global scales.  Even as these transnational urban conjunctures are very much generated within the territorial boundaries and jurisdictions of nation-states, and in relation to the very palpable enforcement of nation-state space through immigration law and border policing, however, they radically destabilize and contradict the spatial premises and conceits of nationalism.  The spatial and socio-political practices of migrants and their experiences therefore provide crucial standpoints of critique from which to interrogate the methodological nationalism that has commonly plagued much of the social scientific research on cities as well as political theories of citizenship.

Contemporary migration thus situates the metropolis as a dynamic spatial intersection where the contradictions of state power, sovereignty, and the production and regulation of space are articulated with the global regime of capital accumulation. With recourse to a global figure of human life, as manifested through the freedom of movement of living labor, migrant mobilities provide a key vantage from which to comprehend both the state and capital together as part of a global human geography in which the autonomy, subjectivity, and sheer vitality of human life are primary. This elemental human freedom is ever increasingly confronted with the juridical illegalization of mobility and border enforcement regimes that make migrant labor exceptionally disposable by systematically rendering migrant life deportable.  Yet, the migrant metropolis has proliferated and flourished.  Indeed, it is in these transnational conjunctural spaces that we may best discern and critically analyze the active processes of inclusion through exclusion that are central to producing new social orders of class, race, and citizenship.  For, it is precisely within the differential space of the migrant metropolis that migrant illegalization may be seen as pivotal in the nexus conjoining criminalization and citizenship.  This is particularly pertinent as the gendered (procreative) labor at stake in the reproduction of migrant labor-power comes to be equated with the production of burgeoning populations of racially subordinate “minority groups” comprised of “delinquent” or abject citizens, despised as a “ghetto”-dwelling “underclass” and disparaged as a repository of social “pathology” and “criminality.”