Reorganization of borders, migrant workers, and the coloniality of power

Abstract

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries introduced measures to restrict mobility, both cross-border and internal. Nevertheless, people employed in certain sectors and designated as ‘essential workers’ were allowed to bypass these mobility restrictions. In this article, I take essential workers’ seemingly paradoxical assemblage of rights and value as a fruitful entry point to scrutinize both the tensions present in citizenship arrangements governing mobility and people and the contradictions of today’s labor and migration politics. Expanding on these contradictions, I argue that what appear to be ambiguities of citizenship–ambiguities which became more visible during the COVID pandemic–can actually be seen as contradictions inherent to citizenship itself. These ambiguities and contradictions reveal the coloniality in today’s nation states and their citizenship regimes. In short, we can relate them to colonial forms of power producing governable subjects and regulating mobility closely connected to processes of accumulation.