Middling migrants, neoliberalism and racism

Abstract

ABSTRACT The literature on migration and racism usually focuses on Western, highly skilled migrants working in global cities who reproduce racial postcolonial hierarchies or on less-privileged, low-skilled migrants and refugees, whose situation is analysed in terms of experienced racial prejudices. Our article aims to fill the gap related to the in-between category of middling migrants and to analyse their relations with neoliberalism and racism. By drawing on qualitative research, the paper examines racial neoliberalism and the question of how racism operates in the everyday life of middling migrants. In contrast to the nascent literature on middling migrants, we focus less on their experiences of racism as how migrants’ neoliberal subjectivity contributes to the strengthening of racism. Our analysis demonstrates that middling migrants not only evoke the neoliberal hierarchy of desirable and undesirable migrants but also, through neoliberal subjectivity, reproduce the neoliberal logic of silencing and marginalising racism as a social problem. We argue that, paradoxically, although middling migrants are not openly racist and often become victims of racism themselves, they nevertheless contribute to maintaining the conditions for racism to exist.