Scholars of Excellence Workshop – The “integration business”: A radical critique on migration, development and reception services

In recent years there has been significant discussion of the “migration infrastructure”, notably the networks, institutions and organizations that mediate migration trajectories. There has also been critical analysis of the economies of migration control that have emerged around borders, both territorial and digital ones, and the private interests behind them. Less attention has been paid though to the sector that has emerged around migrant reception. This workshop takes a radical critical approach on to examining these concerns, looking at how provision of local migrant services, whether in border areas, or locations of settlement, give rise to a migrant “integration business”. This business becomes part of local economies, while resting on structures of inequality, displacement, dispossession and unequal capital accumulation, and deepening these processes.

The workshop is organized into two panels. The first focuses on the local aspects of this migration industry in both border areas and settlement locations, critically analyzing the ways locals, settled migrants and recently arrived asylum seekers, refugees or migrants become entangled in forms of service provision that extract capital and constitute multi-scalar processes of governance. The second panel expands this critical perspective by engaging with the broader policy and political discourses on migration and development. Contributors to both panels seek to unmask the processes of capital accumulation that underlie the regulation of mobility, territory, social life and political subjectivities.