The economy of migration. Knowledge, accounting, and debt

Abstract

What we propose in this paper is to elaborate on what it means to consider ‘migration’ as part of an oikonomia. This is not an ‘economic perspective on migration’ but a genealogy of migration as a way of managing people in light of both colonial divides and questions of labor and race. First, we argue that ‘migration’ is constituted as an effect of accounting, of the registration of comings and goings and of belonging within a reference space of governed territories. We illustrate how migration is born out of the specific accounting inventions made by Ernst Ravenstein. Second, we argue that the accounting of a singular thing called migration only starts to take off when nineteenth-century empire reaches its tipping point. Third, we illustrate how this accounting constitutes a form of double bookkeeping. To record or register migration is to make a record of what the nation would be if the people marked as migrants were not present, and it is to simultaneously record what it costs the nation now that they are. In this oikonomia, migration is enacted as a form of debt.