Border Struggles in the Migrant Metropolis

Abstract

The transnational conjunctures of migration and urban space radically destabilise and contradict the spatial premises and conceits of nationalism, and require us to examine the proliferation of sites of border enforcement far removed from physical borders at the territorial margins of states. The spatial practices of migrants and their struggles therefore provide crucial standpoints of critique from which to interrogate what we may call the ‘borderological’ fetishism of much border and migration studies. The migrant metropolis becomes the premier exemplar, simultaneously, of the extension of borders deep into the putative ‘interior’ of nation-state space through immigration law enforcement that increasingly saturates the spaces of everyday life, and of the disruptive and incorrigible force of migrant struggles that dislocate borders and instigate a re-scaling of border struggles as urban struggles.