Who is Disposable? The Making and Re-Making of the “Bad” Migrant at Europe’s Borders

Gemma, Bird and Schmid, Davide ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6931-505X (2025) Who is Disposable? The Making and Re-Making of the “Bad” Migrant at Europe’s Borders. Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. pp. 1-22. ISSN 2056-6085

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Abstract

In this article, we address the role that European bordering and migration policy play in the broader construction of the European project by defining who does and does not belong in Europe. This question, and the policy answers to it, are shaped by a variety of different political and economic interests and factors, such as racialized narratives of border protection, labor market needs, and the securitization of borders. We tackle this question by examining the role that categories and figures of migration—such as the “genuine” and “bogus” asylum seeker, the refugee, and the economic migrant—play in European border policy and how they are changing in the present conjuncture. We argue that a redefinition is taking place of who counts as a “good” and “bad” migrant, which responds to the changing political economy of contemporary European capitalism and is reflected in the growing prominence of the dichotomy of “legal” and “illegal” migration. This, we argue, reconfigures the existing categories of economic migrant and asylum seeker and speaks to the emergence of new forms of racialized disposability at Europe’s borders. We do this by developing a critical political economy perspective that builds on our previous work and draws on the literature on racial capitalism and the concept of disposability.