Michael Samers

An Emerging Geopolitics of 'Illegal' Immigration in the European Union

There is now a wide and ample literature which has explored the relationship between a racialised, ethnicised and xenophobic construction of European identity, an emphasis on security, the absence of proactive human rights legislation, and the development of restrictive immigration policies in Europe (e.g. Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991; Cholewinski, 2003; Huysmans, 2000; Karyotis, 2003; Kostakopoulou, 2000; Tesfahuny, 1998). While these critical analyses are absolutely essential as an antidote to current EU policies, few academic studies have explored comprehensively European policy developments with respect to ‘illegal’ immigration since the Treaty of Amsterdam (exceptions are Cholewinski, 2000, 2003; and Mitsilegas, 2002). This paper seeks to redress this lacuna and outlines a new geopolitics of (‘illegal’) immigration that concerns both a re-scaling of decision-making (often referred to as ‘communautarisation’) and a little explored re-scaling of control to third countries. In both cases, the evidence of ‘securitarianism’ is strong. As Cholewinski (2003) points out, overall, the bulk of legally-binding measures and ‘soft law’ that has emerged since 1999 has neglected human rights and is mainly concerned with preventing migrants without the necessary documents from entering the EU or facilitating their return or expulsion if they do. Drawing on some familiar concepts within the migration literature, and a theory of political economy from economic anthropology, I present a new conceptual frame for situating this securitarianism. Specifically, I deploy a set of processes that I shall call the ‘three Vs’: ‘virtualism’, ‘venue-

Invisible capitalism: political economy and the regulation of undocumented ­immigration in France

What explains the French government’s unwillingness to accept more legal immigrants or at least ignore those who enter or over-stay clandestinely? This paper answers this question by exploring the political economy and regulation of undocumented immigration in France during the 1990s. In light of a broad liberal and Marxist literature on the political economy of immigration, I argue that three ‘proximate determinants’ shape the regulation of undocumented immigration in France (a ‘Europeanized’ security agenda, ‘self-limited sovereignty’ and control of the labour market, especially informal employment). However, these proximate determinants do not necessarily excavate the social relations of power (that is political economy) which constitute the basis for policy making. I argue then that a return to the importance of the labour market (and thus the class and racial constitution of French society) is essential, but without a simple return to Marxist political economy. Instead, I suggest the value of ‘virtualism’ for carving out a new post-structuralist/‘postmodern’ political economy of immigration.

Conceptualizing Islamic banking and finance: a comparison of its development and governance in Malaysia and Singapore

ABSTRACT In response to the limited engagement with critical social science concerning the governance of Islamic banking and finance (IBF), this paper compares and conceptualizes the development and governance of IBF in Malaysia and Singapore. We argue that IBF governance in Malaysia and Singapore can be distinguished on the basis of ethnic politics, moral suasion, product demand, product innovation, and the character of state practices. Concerning the latter, we contend that the political economy of both countries can be characterized as broadly involving a ‘neoliberal-developmentalism’, but we nuance this by positing a transition in Malaysia from a ‘semi-developmentalism’ in the 1980s to what we call an ‘Islamic and internationalising ordoliberalism’ beginning in the 2000s. In turn, the governance of IBF in Singapore involves a combination of neoliberal developmentalism, which nonetheless also entails some form of Islamic ordoliberalism.

New Guest Worker Regimes

This chapter asks whether guest-worker policies in the twenty-first century can be considered as regimes. In doing so, it assesses the state of guest-worker policies (or temporary migrant worker programmes – TMWPs) at the level of the European Union, and in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Resting loosely on a social transformation perspective, it argues that there is evidence of neo-gastarbeiter policies that can be distinguished from the gasterbeiter policies of Fordist years on several grounds: first, there is the wide range of skills required, including the recruitment of ‘medium-skilled’ migrants such as nurses into European health systems; second, and relatedly, the diversity of skills produced and called for by changing political economies, are refracted through complex forms of administration that we might associate with ‘migration management’, which are vastly different from the laissez faire and poorly administered guest worker policies of the post-war period. Third, they may be distinguished through the effects of EU institutional programme design. In other words, the Blue Card and the seasonal migrant worker directive (SMWD) suggest that TWMPs are slowly shaping member state TWMPs both at the ‘low end’ and the ‘high end’ of the skill spectrum. In this respect, the Blue Card and the SMWD might even represent a nascent guest worker regime in the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, we could hardly refer to national TMWPs or guest worker policies as regimes, but rather must regard them as a set of ever-shifting policies and programmes in response to changing political economies.

A Marriage of Convenience? Islamic Banking and Finance Meet Neoliberalization

This chapter explores the relationship between Islamic banking and finance (IBF) on one hand, and what can be considered a nuanced and tentative understanding of “neoliberalization” in the context of the United Kingdom and the United States on the other. I show that while the UK government has feverishly promoted London and the UK as a center for IBF in the EU, if not the world, the U.S. has more tacitly accepted IBF as a niche form of finance that must be embraced as just another form of banking for its diverse citizenry, whatever the shadow of 9/11. I maintain that rather than seeing IBF and neoliberalization as opposed, it is necessary to see them as intertwined with what practitioners call “conventional banking” or “conventional finance.” In fact, many scholars argue, including Muslims, that there are too many similarities between the two. For some Muslims and those looking for an alternative to the “global financial architecture,” IBF is not different enough, for others, including devout secularists, it is sufficiently different and religious to garner suspicion. I suggest that shari’a-compliant banking ought to be analyzed closely for the ways in which it is entangled and practiced and not simply for its doctrinal qualities or formal contracts. In doing so, it might avoid anxious dismissals.

Stirrings in the attic On the distinction between historical geographical materialism and critical realism

Kevin Cox’s (2013) analysis of the distinction between historical geographical materialism (HGM) and critical realism (CR) offers a sharp and remarkably timely discussion, despite that the debate between HGM and CR appears to be buried to one degree or another in geography’s philosophical archives. Its timeliness stems from a relative exhaustion with post-structuralism in the 21st century, a continually explicit, or more likely implicit use of CR, and a return to Marxism in especially political ecology. Cox’s (2013) rehearsal of this debate impels us once more to think carefully, for example, about how we “abstract” in our research. While my commentary broadly concurs with Cox’s (2013) analysis of the distinction between HGM and CR and the significance of this debate, I suggest that his analysis would have benefitted from a dialogue with work in human geography over the last decade, which has addressed some thorny ontological and epistemological issues with respect to, let us say, dialectics and the notion of totality. By the same token, his apparent calls for a simple recovery of certain philosophical or methodological elements of HGM warrants further reflection. Nonetheless, I argue in my concluding section that for economic geography, at least, his excavation of the debate is vital insofar as a decade ago, economic geography began to embrace “relationality” as if the whole history of dialectics did not exist. In a similar way, practice-based economic geographies risk marginalizing theory and the problem of abstraction in the social sciences.

A Postcapitalist Politics. By J. K. Gibson-Graham

As a quasi sequel to their End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), the duo of J. K. GibsonGraham (the pen name of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham) have carved out a less pathbreaking, but no less stimulating, work in A Postcapitalist Politics. Emerging out of a series of participatory action projects across the globe and equipped with a feminist poststructuralism, their new book ardently calls for a politics of envisioning and enacting new kinds of economic worlds. The preface and introduction reiterate their long-term political project, but they also articulate a certain defense of it against the “traditional Left” (and other detractors) who (for them) display attitudes of “melancholy,” “nostalgia,” and “paranoia”—who long for the traditional revolutionary struggle against a capitalist economy—already prefigured— “out there.” In Chapter 1, writing contra capitalo-centrism, they seek to develop a new kind of affect and subjectivity that can initiate a “politics of becoming.” To illustrate this point, they then contrast two cinematographic representations of workers who are experiencing the processes of deindustrialization: Brassed Off and The Full Monty. Although they do not dismiss the productivity of anger in Brassed Off, their preference, it seems, is for the often-humorous hopefulness of The Full Monty, in which the characters construct, if only momentarily, a new kind of “community economy” against the backdrop of deindustrialization and joblessness. In many ways, the events of that film represent the kinds of openings and possibilities that Gibson-Graham’s postcapitalist politics wants to promulgate. Chapter 2 offers a critical reading of the growth and decline of the Latrobe Valley in Victoria, Australia. In what they call a “spatial genealogy,” the authors show how the state of Victoria produced a particular “regional narrative” that was based on a “calculated” separation of “the Economy” from “community” (or the “social whole”), which “economically subjected” the residents of the valley to a paternalistic governmentality during the phase of growth and an individualism in the context of decline. They seek then to “denaturalize” “the Economy”—to show how “the region” could have been performed differently. In sum, they stress that beyond a pervasive despair are residents who want to create and are capable of creating other more diverse and community-oriented economies. Chapter 3 has two aims. The first is to build a new language of economic diversity, but one that does not view noncapitalist economic activity as an aberration. As they write,